BatesLine

It's fair to say that the period between Elvis Presley's arrival at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, in 1958 and the day the Beatles touched down at Idlewild in 1964 was the zenith of instrumental pop. This is not Big Band or Western Swing from the '30s and '40s, nor is it classical.

Some of my favorite wordless tunes come from that era, and Charles G. Hill has an entry that speaks of two of the most evocative songs of that period and the mental images they evoke: Mr. Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" and Bert Kaempfert's "Wonderland by Night". Charles links to blogger MaryB, who explains why the former is the "saddest song of all" for her. The latter song conjures this scene for Charles:

It's a Friday night, somewhere between ten and midnight, and a convertible is crossing the bridge into downtown; reflections of the streetlights play on the pavement, on the hood, on us. Her little black dress has a row of sequins, and as we pass under the lights, they glow ever so slightly, but it's nothing compared to the glow on her face as she smiles. "Now, you know we have to be back by...." She lets the sentence trail off.

(Read the whole thing to know how it ends.)

Charles mentioned in the comments that he's done three compilation CDs of instrumentals. They're on his non-distributed Wendex label. You can't buy them, but you can see the playlists: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3. He notes that the "median year seems to be 1962." It's a great collection (although for my Dave "Baby" Cortez song, I'd substitute "Rinky Dink" for "The Happy Organ").

For me, the late '50s, early '60s instrumentals -- including songs like "Sleepwalk" and the "Route 66 Theme" -- evoke pre-interstate travel on two-lane U. S. Highways. Although the songs were all released before I learned to talk, they still got airplay on the kind of Middle-of-the-Road (MOR) stations my family listened to. (E.g., KRMG, back when they played music.) These instrumental pop hits provided the soundtrack to our travels.

And there's something about Santo (or was it Johnny?) Farina's sultry steel guitar in "Sleepwalk" that just says beachfront Florida motel.

As I've mentioned briefly, last month I visited Britain with my son, who was part of the Tulsa Boy Singers' first international tour in many years. The boys performed at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, at York Minster, and at St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, in London ("the Actors' Church"), and they also sang a couple of anthems in Durham Cathedral, near the tomb of English church historian St. Bede. The tour also took us to Stirling and Oxford.

The photos I took of the Tulsa Boy Singers' tour are up on Flickr. I used Flickr's very cool map feature to pin down the locations of each photo as best I could. You can click "Map" on an individual photo page, and it will show you where it was taken.

I also took video of at least one anthem at each performance, and these have been posted at Google Video. I was using the Canon S3 IS to shoot both stills and videos, and it's not the easiest thing to hold still for long periods. Someday, when I find a decent video editing package, I'll edit a slide show of still images over the shaky and jerky parts of the video.

Here's video of two of my favorite anthems -- Thomas Tallis's "O Nata Lux and Richard Farrant's "Lord, for Thy Tender Mercies' Sake" -- in the north transept of York Minster, the largest Gothic church north of the Alps.

TBS is always looking for new singers. If you have a son eight years or older who loves to sing, learn more at tulsaboysingers.org. You'll find phone and e-mail contact information on the website.

I got to attend last night's Tulsa Boy Singers' spring concert, and it was wonderful. I have never heard a finer sounding choral group in Tulsa. Director Casey Cantwell told KOTV that the choir is at its peak musically, and I believe he's right.

The concert consistent entirely of sacred music, from Palestrina (Sicut cervus) to 16th century England (Byrd, Tallis, Farrant), to modern composers like John Taverner and Franz Biebl. The first part of the concert was a mass by Haydn, accompanied by a trio from the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to the media outlets who promoted it, both nights drew good crowds, though there was room for more.

Watch this space: I hope to have some video of the concert uploaded later tonight.

Although the spring concerts are over, there are still four chances to hear the Tulsa Boy Singers this season. Here's a list of upcoming dates:

• Friday, June 8, 7:30 p.m., Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh. Free.
• Sunday, June 10, 2:00 p.m., York Minster. Free.
• Tuesday, June 12, 1:00 p.m., St. Paul's Covent Garden, London. Free.
• Friday, June 15, 3:00 p.m., Oklahoma Wesleyan University chapel, 2201 Silver Lake Rd, Bartlesville, Okla., part of OK Mozart. Adults $5, children $3.

So you've got one more chance to hear the boys in Oklahoma, but if you happen to be in the UK, you've got three shots at it. Don't miss your chance.

Here is a sample from their concert last Saturday night: From the 16th century, Palestrina's Sicut cervus. That's Psalm 42: "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." I fumble-fingered and missed a couple of seconds of the start, but I think you'll enjoy it anyway.

Here's another clip from the concert: Maurice Duruflé's setting of Ubi caritas: "Where charity and love are, God is there."

Don't forget -- the Tulsa Boy Singers concert is tonight and Saturday night, 7:30 p.m., at Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th & Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. Admission is free (but donations would be welcomed) and there will be a reception following. Come hear some beautiful music.

The Tulsa Boy Singers will be on KOTV channel 6 tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 7:50 a.m. to perform some music from their upcoming spring concert.

This coming Friday, June 1, and Saturday, June 2, at 7:30 p.m., the Tulsa Boy Singers will present their spring concert of sacred choral music at Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th and Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. The concert is entitled "Journey through the Ages." The concert will feature many different styles of music including English Choral Music, spirituals, and contemporary hymn settings. Admission is free, and there will be refreshments following the concert. (Donations would be gratefully received and will help defray the costs of the choir's upcoming performance tour of Great Britain, TBS's first international tour in many years.)

Tulsa Boy Singers will also be performing at OK Mozart in Bartlesville on June 15.

TBS has a long and illustrious 59-year history and hundreds of Tulsans have benefited from the education they received in both music and character.

If you are an alumnus, TBS would like to keep in touch with you, to keep you aware of TBS's upcoming concerts and activities. If you're the parent of a boy age 8 and up with an interest in singing, TBS is always looking for new singers, and there will be an opportunity to go through a brief audition following this week's concerts. To contact TBS, e-mail gejack7@msn.com.

UPDATE: Click here to watch the video of the Tulsa Boy Singers on KOTV. Leanne Taylor interviews director Casey Cantwell about the group, and the boys sing an arrangement of "Nearer My God to Thee."

Download.

Mark your calendars. There are a couple of wonderful opportunities to hear beautiful music performed by some very talented young Tulsans.

This coming Thursday, May 24, at 6 p.m., is the spring concert for the Barthelmes Conservatory Music School. Students are admitted to the music school based on musical aptitude, and they receive twice-weekly one-on-one lessons on an instrument and attend twice-weekly classes in music theory. It is a very rigorous program, and this Thursday night is an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the students' hard work, as selected students each play a short classical piece. The concert is in the Great Hall on the fourth floor of the Bernsen Center, northwest of 8th and Boston in downtown Tulsa.

Then next week, on Friday, June 1, and Saturday, June 2, at 7:30 p.m., the Tulsa Boy Singers will present their spring concert of sacred choral music at Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th and Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. The concert is entitled "Journey through the Ages." The concert will feature many different styles of music including English Choral Music, spirituals, and contemporary hymn settings. Admission is free, and there will be refreshments following the concert. (Donations would be gratefully received and will help defray the costs of the choir's upcoming performance tour of Great Britain, TBS's first international tour in many years.)

Tulsa Boy Singers and some musicians from Barthelmes will also be performing at OK Mozart in Bartlesville on June 15.

Continuing the choral music theme of the previous entry, Tulsa fans of choral music are in for a treat tomorrow night, Tuesday, May 8, at 7 p.m. The American Boychoir will perform at Boston Avenue Methodist Church, 13th and Boston in downtown Tulsa. Tickets are $5 for adults, no charge for 18 and under.

The American Boychoir School, a boarding school for grades 5 through 8, located in Princeton, N. J., was founded in 1937 to bring the centuries-old tradition of boys' choir schools to America. The Tulsa stop is the midpoint of a three-week tour of Texas and Oklahoma. The group has recorded and toured internationally in recent years, and their voices have provided the soundtracks for commercials for Apple Computer, CNN, M&M, others, and for Kodak's Clio-winning "True Colors" ad.

The Tulsa Boy Singers will also be performing, giving a preview of their upcoming Spring Concerts, which are scheduled for June 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m.

Month after month, the Google searches that consistently bring visitors to this site have nothing to do with Tulsa or Oklahoma or Republican politics. This BatesLine entry is currently the number one result for any combination of two of the following four terms: "Master Singers," "Highway Code," "Weather Forecast," "Anglican chant."

The entry is about two delightful novelty tunes recorded by a group called the Mastersingers in the '60s, setting Britain's rules of the road and a typical BBC weather to the beautiful a capella four-part harmonies of Anglican chant.

What I wrote recently attracted the attention of Helen Keating, the wife of Geoffrey Keating, one of the Mastersingers, and she was kind enough to send me what I think should be considered the definitive history of the Mastersingers, the Highway Code, and the Weather Forecast:

'The Highway Code' set to psalm chants was devised by a schoolmaster at Abingdon School, John Horrex, in the late 1950s. It was sung at numerous church socials etc as entertainment, using whatever singers were available (including me!)

In 1963, to celebrate the school's Quatercentenary a record was made which contained a lot of the Highway Code set in different styles - a pub song, Gilbert and Sullivan style and a jazzy version etc. The singers were John Horrex, George Pratt, Geoff Keating and Barry Montague.
A copy of this record was sent to Fritz Spiegl who gave it to the BBC, who used it on a lunchtime programme introduced by Winston Churchill (jnr) and was played at its last edition as ' our most requested piece.'

George Martin then recorded it, the group calling itself the Mastersingers, on a single, with the pub song on the B side. This actually got to no 22 in the charts (then the top 20) and the group was on standby for 'Top of the Pops'!

Cliff Richard then invited the group (called for the purposes of the disc ''The Carol Singers') to back an EP of Christmas carols, which were arranged by George Pratt and Geoff Keating. One number done by Geoff was 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' but it was never used as it was too short for a whole side but too long to put another carol with it.

The tape of this number was played to the Kings Singers and they immediately asked Geoff to rearrange it for them, which they subsequently recorded and sang everywhere. Geoff also arranged 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen' for them, both of which appear on their LP 'Christmas with the Kings Singers'. (The latter number, in 5/8 like Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five', inspired George Shearing for his his version on a Christmas disc.)

All the four schoolmasters moved on from Abingdon, John Horrex to Glasgow, George Pratt to Keele University, Geoff Keating to Cheadle Hulme School, and Barry Montague to Australia. The latter's place in the group was taken by Mike Warrington from Cheadle Hulme and that began a series of performances of both the original 'Highway Code' and the new 'Weather Forecast', (also recorded by George Martin) together with lots of local television performances of things like 'Rules of Wrestling' and other silly things. George Martin also recorded 'The London Telephone Directory' (started at 'A', speeded up then slowed down as they got to 'Z's) which the group didn't think was funny and thankfully was withdrawn when the directory was deemed copyright.

We understood that Princess Margaret (a fan of the group which she had met at the Abingdon Quatercentenary celebrations) was given a copy of the disc but the group never got one.
The group did the backing for George Martin's record of Peter Sellers' 'A Hard Day's Night' (as a Richard III type soliloquy), music arranged by George Pratt, and 'Help' (as a sermon), music arranged by Geoff Keating.

The Mastersingers were invited to do the Highway Code on the Ken Dodd show (live) on BBC TV and then the enthusiasm (caused by over-exposure and problems of distances apart) rather dried up.

The Kings Singers, by now good friends with the group, were often told that 'The Highway Code was the best thing they ever did' (!) and they are always incredibly generous in their acknowledgment that they weren't responsible (mind you, hearing the four amateur singers on the original it's not surprising they say that!)

Hope that clears up all the misapprehensions!

I wrote Mrs. Keating back to ask what her husband Geoff and the other Mastersingers are doing nowadays. She replied:

Having retired after 17 years with Geoff as Director of Music at Millfield School in Somerset (and me as Director of Music at Millfield Prep School) we had three years at Sherborne School for Girls where I was Housemistress (and Geoff was half time teaching photography and sailing!) then we retired - well, you might call it that but we're as busy as ever! - to SW Scotland. If I tell you we have seven concerts between March 25th of this year and this next June 10th, that shows you. Geoff conducts the Solway Sinfonia plays jazz with his group 'Gentle Jazz' (piano and saxophone), sails, fishes and sells landscape photographs. Not bad for a man who's 70 in a fortnight! Not that he looks it, or acts it, as you will see from the photo on the above website.

John Horrex, the 'founder' of the Mastersingers is now retired in Canterbury, where he ended up teaching, Professor George Pratt, retired from Huddersfield University, is down in Exeter when he's not broadcasting or doing talks on cruise ships, while Mike Warrington is a retired headmaster in Oldham.

From Geoff Keating's page on the Solway Sinfonia site, I found this link to a week-long music holiday he'll be leading next February at a hotel in England's Lake District. Looks like great fun.

A happy 70th birthday to Geoff Keating and many thanks to Helen Keating for setting the record straight about these beloved pieces of music.

(UPDATE: A hearty endorsement of Shaun Groves from Michelle of GetRightOK in the comments: "I took my three daughters to the Shaun Groves concert the last time he was in Tulsa. The concert was wonderful. He's a funny guy, and his music is great. He has a song called Twilight that is a favorite of my kids (it's my favorite SG song too).")

About a week ago, I received an e-mail from Shaun Groves. He said he was a Christian recording artist and KXOJ was bringing him to Broken Arrow for a show this weekend. He was looking for ways to get the word out about the concert and came across this blog.

I wrote back:

Thanks for writing. To tell the truth, I'm not a big fan of CCM [Contemporary Christian Music], mainly because so much of it is theologically shallow and musically dull. But I will have a look at your site, and if I like what I see and hear, I'll give you a plug. How's that?

In his reply, Shaun said, "You and I share that beef with CCM in general," and he pointed me to a recent post on his music blog about profaning the name of God. He points to Ezekiel 36, which talks of how God's people dishonored His name with their actions.

Shaun goes on to talk about how some CCM profanes God's name, drawing from his experience as a suicidally depressed Christian teen. He describes listening, with friend who was also depressed, to a program of Christian music that his church youth leader had recommended:

I turned to it wanting to feel better. I remember feeling angry instead. What I heard was music I couldn’t relate to at all, what sounded out of touch with reality, written by happy people who’d never been where I was, who’d never felt hopeless before. No words I could put my heart behind and sing to God. The messages in the broadcast, to me, were clear: God doesn’t care and good Christians don’t have problems.

That anger became a driving force in his songwriting:

That night made me mad enough to write about it. It was the first poem I ever wrote in fact and so, I guess, that anger I felt at Christian music that night is partially to credit for me becoming the song writer I am today. That poem even won some contest back in Texas. But it did more than that. Not only did that poem begin for me the habit of funneling my emotions through a pencil onto a page, but it also gave my creativity a purpose.

That purpose is why I moved to Nashville - to write music that supports the spiritual health of Christians, that encourages through honest discourse, acknowledges the good and bad in life, that reminds us all that a life spent knowing God and not also making Him known is only half a life, a life without meaning and prone to depression and anxiety. I moved here to write songs that hometown station of mine wouldn’t broadcast when I needed them to all those years ago....

My career... has always been about saving listeners from the misery I languished in for so long - desperate to hear a sermon, read a book, or tune to a song that touched even a little of the pain I dealt with daily. The goal is to meet people where they are by being honest about where I am and where I’ve been, and from there, walk with them out of the despair and into a life full of purpose and hope.

All victorious music all the time sends the wrong message:

You see, when God is ignoring your hurts - which is what I felt when listening to sermons, Sunday school lessons and songs as a teen - we begin to suspect that God either doesn’t exist or He’s some sick twist who gleefully ignores our woe. And the Enemy wins. We believe his lie: God isn’t good. That’s where always happy gets us....

The best weapon I’ve found in the battle against this powerful lie is honesty. Honesty about the greatness, the laughter inducing, the breathtakingly miraculous, the sweetness of life. Honesty about the tears and fears and hurries and worries we all have in common.

That’s human. That’s Christian. That says God is good, He knows you hurt, He hears you, He’s sent this song, this book, these words to tell you you’re not alone. We’ve been there too. And we and our God want to meet you where you are and help you from there. There’s so much good stuff about life and God you might have forgotten about and we want to remind you of all that. Trust us. We’re just like you. If I’d heard that kind of music when I was sixteen I wouldn’t have been cured, not with one listen, but I may have tuned in again, I may have bought that CD, gone to that concert, gotten out of bed, opened up to someone sooner, felt a lot less dysfunctional and strange and unChristian.

Instead, he turned to music that spoke about the pain he was feeling -- nihilistic music like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails -- but which offered no hope, only commiseration. In the end, he was brought back to faith by a girl (who came to be his wife), her father (a pastor) and family. They were willing to be honest about their struggles, about their mistakes, about their sins.

My wife’s honesty, and her family’s, brought me back to life. I found in them a safe place to be myself, to ask questions, to beg for prayer. A place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. By sharing their wounds mine were healed.

Shaun goes on to issue a challenge to Christian radio stations, to be willing to play music that's good, that's listenable, but which may not be "all happy all the time."

Even if his music weren't good (but it is), writing that essay alone is worthy of a plug and a link here.

Shaun Groves's Broken Arrow concert is Friday night at 7 p.m. at the Church at Battle Creek. (That's just north of the Broken Arrow Expressway -- OK 51 -- on 145th East Ave, aka Aspen.) Proceeds go to the poverty relief program Compassion International.

Here is some advice on how to get a jangly, power-poppy sound out of your electric guitar:

Best guitars for getting a good jangly sound are Rickenbacker 6 and 12 strings (used by the Byrds, Beatles, Tom Petty, and REM's Peter Buck, the Godfather of Jangle). Also consider Fender Stratocasters, and Fender Telecasters (Bridge pickup, tone up, boost the brightness on the amp or processor). Success is also reported with other Semi-hollow body guitars such as the Gretsch Country Gentleman. Les Pauls, Ibanez's, Jacksons and other guitars with high powered humbuckers = no jangle. The Line 6 Variax, made by the folks who brought you the Pod amp simulators, have a setting called "spank" that produces a nice jangle.

(Would Eldon Shamblin's playing be considered jangly? He played a Telecaster and, later, one of the prototype Stratocasters. Tiny Moore's electric five-string mandolin was pretty jangly, too, I think.)

Yes, I'm supposed to be writing my column, and I'm procrastinating. I just got the latest edition of Hz So Good, Rich Appel's e-newsletter on pop music, which isn't helping my concentration. He had a link to this video of Badfinger performing "Baby Blue", which opens with an intro by a young Kenny Rogers, who looks just as unkempt as the Will Sasso parody of Kenny Rogers on Mad TV.

Badfinger's "Day after Day" (here's a video) was probably the first pop song to grab my attention. It was a hit in 1971, and I heard it many mornings carpooling from 11th and Garnett to Holland Hall in Mr. Ivers's VW wagon. (He was a KAKC listener. My family was strictly KRMG and KRMG-FM.) Maybe it stuck with me because I was a lonely kid, in my first year at Holland Hall, with a foot in two worlds but not fully at home in either one.

Just skimming the latest Hz So Good, I see a bit about Dolly Parton's early career (and an album cover of her and Porter Wagoner) and about when "Western" was dropped from title of the Country and Western charts. (I wrote about Porter and Dolly and detergent here.) And Rich asks if the "Western" in "C & W" was there "to refer to western swing, a la Bob Wills." (I write about Bob Wills incessantly.)

Hz So Good is always an interesting read -- e-mail Rich Appel at audiot.savant at verizon dot net to request a subscription.

I've been reading San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills by Charles R. Townsend, published in 1976. It's an excellent biography, which Townsend began researching in the late '60s, interviewing Bob Wills, his wife Betty, and many of the musicians who played in his band. The book is out of print, but the Tulsa library system has several circulating copies.

In a chapter about Wills's 1968 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Townsend asks whether his music really belongs in the country category, and on p. 285 he includes this prescient aside:

Mainstream country music has remained relatively close to its rural and folk origins -- and if this ever ceases to be the case, the term country music will become a meaningless commercial hybrid.

I'm at Shades of Brown tonight, drinking coffee and working on a column, and I'm listening to Rod Saunders playing guitar. Rod is the director of the Tulsa Guitar Society, which is dedicated to fingerstyle and classical guitar. His repertoire tonight has ranged from calypso ("Jamaica Farewell") to the Beatles ("Here, There, and Everywhere") to classical ("España") to sacred ("Morning Has Broken"). It's the perfect music for a coffee shop -- you can listen intently or let it serve as background to writing or conversation.

Unrelated to that, but at one point, a group of young women sitting near me broke out into a spontaneous and beautifully harmonized rendition of "Down In The River To Pray" (from the baptism scene in "O Brother, Where Art Thou"), but they got embarrassed and lowered their volume when they realized that people were listening in. (Turns out they're sisters -- two from Chicago, one from here, and the one from here, Joy, performs at Lola's on Tuesday nights. After the guitarists finished playing, they were prevailed upon to sing so we all could hear them.)

Sorry, by the way, for the silence of late, but in addition to the usual column, I've been doing research for an upcoming cover story in UTW, digging through some fascinating documents and newspaper clippings. I think you'll find it fascinating, too.

Today I attended the funeral of Doris Oler, in the Rose Chapel at Boston Avenue Methodist Church. Doris passed away on Tuesday at the age of 76. Doris was an alto and a charter member of Coventry Chorale, and my wife and I sang with her in that group for many years. She always had a smile and a friendly word for us. Doris also sang in Boston Avenue's choir, taught vocal music in the Tulsa Public Schools, and was very active in Sigma Alpha Iota music fraternity. (Here's a link to the obituary that appeared in the Tulsa World yesterday.)

The presiding minister, Bill Tankersley, shared a funny anecdote. Doris grew up in Inola in the '30s and '40s. She learned to play piano at an early age and was good enough that she wound up playing at a few of the churches in town. The churches staggered their service times so that she could play the opening hymns at one church, slip out the door, walk to the next church, play their opening hymns, and so on, until it was time to play the closing hymn at the first church and start over with the rotation.

As part of the service, we read the 23rd Psalm responsively, but sitting there with nine other members of Coventry Chorale, there to honor a departed member of the Chorale, it seemed wrong not to be singing Thomas Matthews' setting of the psalm. (To hear a lo-fi version of it, scroll down to the bottom of that page and click the link with the text "The Lord Is My Shepherd.") I'm sure the others felt the pull, too.

This is beside the point, but... the first hymn we sang was "Praise My Soul the King of Heaven." We sang out of the current edition of the Methodist Hymnal, and it was hard not to laugh out loud at the lengths to which the editors went to avoid any use of the masculine pronoun in this version of the hymn. Most of the time it was a simple substitution of "God" for "him" and "God's" for "his." But "to his feet thy tribute bring" becomes "to the throne thy tribute bring." "In his hand he gently bears us," becomes "Motherlike, God gently bears us," to balance out the word "Fatherlike" at the beginning of the third verse. (Here are Henry Lyte's original lyrics, and here is the inclusified version.) There was nothing on the page to indicate an alteration. I don't like it any better when the Trinity Hymnal editors monkey with the lyrics to eliminate a suspected Arminian overtone, and I will stubbornly sing the original lyrics anyway*, but at least they note when a verse was altered by the editors.

I tried to stick to the lyrics as printed, but I found myself singing the familiar original lyrics instead. Knowing Doris, I think she would have understood, and probably even approved.

* I don't do this when I'm leading singing, however.

Tonight, December 16, at 7:30, the Tulsa Boy Singers will be performing a Christmas concert at Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th & Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. (Because of construction at the church, it's easiest to use the western entrance on Cincinnati.)

This is their second performance. I attended last night, and it was a beautiful performance, a mix of sacred and secular classics of the season. Here's the program (the links will take you to lyrics):

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, Elizabeth Poston
Resonemus Laudibus, arranged by David Willcocks
Confirma hoc Deus, Jacob Handl
Ave Maria, Franz Biebl
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in C, Charles V. Stanford
Torches, John Joubert
Carols, arranged by David Willcocks (O Come, All Ye Faithful, The First Nowell, Hark, the Herald Angels Sing)

Masters in This Hall, arranged by David Willcocks
Ave Maria, Franz Schubert
What Sweeter Music, Michael Fink
Carol of the Bells, Mykola Leontovich
Midwinter, Bob Chilcott
Winter Wonderland, arranged by Roger Emerson
Twelve Days of Christmas, arranged by John Rutter
Sleigh Ride, arranged by Hawley Ades

"Jesus Christ the Apple Tree," is a beautiful, simple a capella folk tune that opens the concert as the boys process from the back of Trinity's Gothic Revival sanctuary.

The older boys -- altos, tenors, and basses -- beautifully rendered the lush harmonies of Biebl's "Ave Maria." (Here's an excerpt performed by the Western Illinois University Singers.)

My favorite piece may have been "Midwinter," a pretty new setting of Christina Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter":

Our God, heaven cannot hold him
nor earth sustain;
heaven and earth shall flee away
when he comes to reign:
in the bleak midwinter
a stable place sufficed
the Lord God incarnate,
Jesus Christ.

What can I give him,
poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb;
if I were a wise man,
I would do my part;
yet what I can I give him
give my heart.

The audience is invited to sing along on three carols at the end of the first part of the program, and again in the second half on "Winter Wonderland."

Admission is free, but donations are gratefully accepted and will help fund their planned Summer 2007 performance tour of Britain. A reception with savory and sweet treats follows the concert.

Tyson Wynn linked to this video of Asleep at the Wheel performing Cindy Walker's "Cherokee Maiden" from the "Ride with Bob" album. The video has glimpses of each of the guest artists who perform other songs on the album. (I didn't spot Don Walser -- the Pavarotti of the Plains -- but he must have been in there.)

Tyson pointed out that the drummer (Dave Sanger) is wearing a KVOO Radio Ranch t-shirt, KVOO ("The Voice of Oklahoma") being the radio station that was the first home base for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. (KVOO is still around as an FM station at 98.5, but the old frequency of 1170 kc belongs to KFAQ, just across the hallway, whose airwaves I modulate every Tuesday morning at 6 a.m.)

I just received a CD called Radio Days by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. The CD was issued in 2005 by Tomato Records. I was excited when I first spotted this online because this appeared to be a radio broadcast of the Texas Playboys, complete with the opening and closing themes. While the CD is not exactly what I expected, it's still well worth having for any fan of the Texas Playboys. Here's the review I just posted to amazon.com:

Like the Tiffany Transcriptions series, these tracks, recorded for or from radio, capture Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys at their loosest and swingingest, the way you might have heard them at a dance hall.

While this disc is set up to flow as if it were a single broadcast, in fact it's a combination of a transcription done around 1945 (tracks 1-15, 28-29) and a broadcast from 1953 (tracks 16-27). It's almost seamless, but Wills scholars will notice differences in the names that Bob calls out for solos.

The 1945 section features Tommy Duncan on vocals, Bob Wills, Louis Tierney, and Joe Holley on fiddle, Alex Brashear on trumpet, Millard Kelso on piano, and Junior Barnard on standard guitar, with announcer Ross Franklin. You'll get to hear Tommy Duncan sing the opening Playboys theme, as well as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Empty Chair at the Table," "Take Me Back to Tulsa," and a duet with Bob on the blues call-and-response "I'm Talkin' about You." Les Anderson provides vocals on "Stardust." Nearly everyone takes a solo on instrumentals "Lone Star Rag" and "Liberty," including a couple of Junior Barnard's proto-rock'n'roll guitar solos. Junior is also featured on "I'm Talkin' about You" and "Take Me Back to Tulsa."

The 1953 tracks seem to have the same tracklist as an LP called "Rare 1953 California Radio Broadcasts Volume 2." Jack Lloyd and Bill Choate take the vocal duties, and you'll hear Skeeter Elkin on piano, Keith Coleman on fiddle, Billy Bowman on steel guitar, and Eldon Shamblin on standard guitar, with announcer Lou Stevens. There's mention between songs of the band playing dances at Harmony Park Ballroom in Anaheim and Bob doing a transcription for Armed Forces Radio with Carolina Cotton. "Tuxedo Junction" features some fine solos from Skeeter Elkin and Billy Bowman. Louise Rowe and Keith Coleman sing a duet on "Got You on My Mind."

Beyond the great music, the between-songs banter makes this a disc worth having just to get the sense of what it was like to tune in to the daily broadcasts.

It's that banter that sets this recording apart from the Tiffany Transcriptions. (Presumably, the original Tiffany Transcription discs included introductions and banter, but that hasn't been included on the compilations that Rhino issued.)

I still dream of hearing a radio broadcast from the band's heyday at KVOO in Tulsa, but I suspect those shows are only extant in the Celestial Archive.

Previously mentioned, but here's some shaky video of Mick Jagger, last month in Austin, singing "Bob Wills Is Still the King" by Waylon Jennings.

That's the Rolling Stones' Ron Wood on pedal steel guitar.

I used iTunes to mix a CD for our recent trip to west Texas. It's a combination of songs about Texas, songs about cotton farming, favorite Western Swing instrumentals (including arguably the first rock'n'roll song ever recorded -- Junior Barnard's Fat Boy Rag, recorded in 1946), and a few other songs that I just plain love. Of course, I had to start it with "The Texas Playboys are on the air!"

Here it is -- all tunes by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys unless otherwise noted.

1. Playboy Theme
2. Three Guitar Special (Tiffany Transcriptions Vol. 5)
3. Big Ball's In Cowtown, Asleep At The Wheel (George Strait vocal)
4. Dipsy Doodle, Billy Jack Wills And His Western Swing Band
5. Miles and Miles of Texas, Asleep at the Wheel
6. Panhandle Rag, Leon McAuliffe
7. You're From Texas, Asleep At The Wheel, Ride With Bob
8. Caravan, Billy Jack Wills And His Western Swing Band
9. Way Down Texas Way, Asleep At The Wheel
10. Playboy Chimes
11. Yearning (Just For You), Asleep At The Wheel (Vince Gill vocal)
12. Texas Blues
13. Fat Boy Rag (Tiffany Transcriptions Vol. 5)
14. Bottle Baby Boogie (my daughter's favorite -- she loves the way Billy Bowman makes the steel guitar say "Mama")
15. Roly Poly
16. Little Cowboy Lament, (sometimes called Little Cowboy Lullaby)
17. Cadillac in Model 'A' (Billy Jack Wills sings about a small-town Saturday night)
18. Texas Drummer Boy (featuring a Johnny Cuviello drum solo and a very catchy steel guitar melody by Herb Remington)
19. Boot Heel Drag
20. 'Tater Pie
21. Mr. Cotton Picker, Billy Jack Wills And His Western Swing Band
22. Texas Plains (Patsy Montana vocal)
23. Cotton Patch Blues
24. Smoke On The Water
25. Hubbin' It
26. Tulsa Straight Ahead, Asleep at the Wheel

Tonight in Tulsa you have the chance to hear some excellent chamber music.

The concert, which starts at 6 pm, will feature works by 19th & 20th century composers (such as Dvorak, Bartok, Saint-Saens) and flamenco music. It's at Christ Presbyterian Church, on 51st St between Lewis and Harvard. The concert is to benefit an upcoming mission trip to Uganda.

Found this item, in praise of Bend Studio, "Dallas' gem of a listening venue", via Technorati:

[J. Paul] Slavens own comedy troupe, the Texclectic Unsemble, won The Dallas Observer Best of Award for best comedy troupe 1999. More recently, Mr Slavens has garnered a loyal follwing for his radio program 90.1 @ Night on KERA-FM 90.1 in Dallas, one of the top five Public Radio stations in the US. Heard Sunday nights from 7 to 10 pm, Slavens plays an eclectic mix to say the least, a typical night will find Bob Wills next to Devo next to Nina Simone and on and on.

Bob Wills next to Devo? Sounds like my kind of show!

The current schedule has "90.1 at Night with Paul Slavens" from 8 to 10 on Sunday evenings. There's no podcast for the show, but you can listen live to KERA over the web.

Looking for trenchant political analysis or deep thoughts? Then scroll past this entry.

My favorite band in high school and college was Devo -- nerd music par excellence. I was thinking about Devo tonight and went looking for Devo videos on YouTube. I wasn't disappointed.

Weird Al Yankovic's song "Dare to Be Stupid" is the ultimate parody of Devo's music. It isn't a parody of a specific song, but it captures the Devo sound and amps up the trademark weirdness of their lyrics by stringing together in random order twisted versions of proverbs and slogans. The video "Dare to Be Stupid" borrows from a dozen or so Devo music videos from their heyday. If you're a Devo fan, you'll laugh with recognition.

OK, one more favorite Weird Al video -- "I Lost on Jeopardy" -- complete with Art Fleming, Don Pardo, the original Jeopardy set, and a cameo by Dr. Demento.

This draft was started a couple of days after Father's Day, but I never got around to finishing it. In lieu of something more substantive tonight, here it is:

We celebrated Father's Day by taking my dad and mom to lunch at Mexicali Border Café at Main and Brady downtown. It's one of our favorite Mexican places; Mom and Dad had never been there. Great salsa (sort of halfway in texture and heat between Chimi's salsa fresca and salsa picante) and some delicious non-traditional Mexican dishes.

My wife and I had the Stuffed Carne Asada. At $13.95, it's one of the most expensive things on the menu, and we always consider getting something else (the Shrimp Acapulco is very tasty too), but we can't stand not to have this: "Fajita Steak stuffed with Melted Jack Cheese, Mushrooms, and Onions. Topped with Sautéed Pico de Gallo, Bacon and Mushrooms. Served with Rice, Borracho Beans and Saut�ed Vegetables." It's big enough and rich enough we always have enough to bring home for another meal. The sautéed vegetables (carrots, yellow squash, and zucchini) were nicely spicy and just crisp enough.

The waitress, Heather, deserves special praise. She managed to be both attentive and inobtrusive. Instead of interrupting conversation every five minutes to ask, "Everything OK?" she passed by regularly, noticed if anything needed refilling, and just took care of it. When she noticed one of us dabbing at a bit of salsa that had landed on a shirt, she brought out some club soda and some extra napkins.

I gave my dad a new sports shirt and a Johnny Cash CD. My Mother's Hymnbook is a collection of traditional hymns and gospel songs, sung with only a guitar for accompaniment. Cash recorded it in the few months between his wife's death and his own. I had come across it in the CD return shelf in the library, checked it out, and loved it. These are songs that we sang in the little Southern Baptist church I grew up in, but don't hear much in our PCA congregation: I'm Bound For The Promised Land, Softly and Tenderly, Just As I Am, When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.

(I've found all sorts of gems on the library's CD return shelf, things I probably wouldn't have sought out on purpose: Spike Jones' Greatest Hits; Sam Cooke: The Man Who Invented Soul, a four-disc set; a two-disc set of everything Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters recorded together.)

The kids gave me a Louis Armstrong CD, a Patsy Cline CD, and the original version of Asleep at the Wheel's first Bob Wills tribute CD, along with a new clock radio that synchronizes itself to the atomic clock via shortwave.

I already had a version of this disc -- the "dance remix", which has a black cover. I bought it as motivation/reward when I refinished the kids' wood floors last summer, and I liked it, but some of the tracks (five of them, to be precise) seemed unnecessarily tarted up -- as if some producer didn't think classic Western Swing was good enough to get people out on the dance floor. On "Big Ball's in Cowtown," the dance version is almost double the length of the original, padded out with backup singers singing "Cowtown, Cowtown, we're all goin' to Cowtown" over and over and over again. Then there's the bizarre addition of the same two measures of "Yearning," digitally transposed into three different keys for the intro to the song -- somehow that made it a dance version. Similar weirdness is inflicted upon "Hubbin' It," "Corrine, Corrina," and "Old Fashioned Love." At least they left 13 of the songs alone.

I had heard the unadulterated versions of a couple of the tracks from the white-covered original edition, and put it on my wish list, a wish my wife and kids were kind enough to fulfill.

The album features famous modern country artists (e.g., George Strait, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks -- Huey Lewis, too) singing or playing Bob Wills tunes alongside Asleep at the Wheel and some of the original Texas Playboys -- Eldon Shamblin, Johnny Gimble, and Herb Remington.

"Yearning," sung on this album by Vince Gill, has become a favorite of mine. It was a Tin Pan Alley tune, published in 1925 by Benny Davis and Joe Burke. (Davis and Burke also wrote "Carolina Moon." Burke also wrote "Tiptoe through the Tulips" and "Rambling Rose." Davis also wrote "Baby Face.") Somehow this sweet little tune found its way into both the standards and Western Swing repertoires -- Nat King Cole, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Sinatra, Spade Cooley and Bob Wills all recorded it. Merle Haggard sang it on the final album with Bob Wills (For the Last Time), but I like Gill's version a little better, if only because it includes both verses.

The songbird yearns to sing a love song.
The roses yearn just for the dew.
The whole world's yearning for the sunshine.
I have a yearning too.

Yearning just for you,
That's all I do, my dear.
Learning why I'm blue,
I wish that you were here.
Smiles have turned to tears,
Days have turned to years.
Yearning just for you,
I hope that you yearn, too.

When shadows fall and stars are beaming,
'Tis then I miss you most of all.
I fall asleep and start a-dreaming.
It seems I hear you call:

Yearning just for you,
That's all I do, my dear.
Learning why I'm blue,
I wish that you were here.
Smiles have turned to tears,
Days have turned to years.
Yearning just for you,
I hope that you yearn, too.

I've enjoyed the gifts from my children, but the greatest Father's Day gifts of all are the children themselves.

This Friday and Saturday, June 2 and 3, the Tulsa Boy Singers will perform their spring concert. The program includes classical selections, such as Mozart's Laudate Dominum, and more modern pieces, including several songs from the musical Camelot.

The concert on both nights begins at 7:30, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 501 S. Cincinnati, in downtown Tulsa. Admission is FREE, but donations are gratefully accepted, and CDs of the Tulsa Boy Singers will be on sale.

My son started singing with the group in the fall, and he has enjoyed it completely. It has been a great learning experience for him, not only for vocal skill and musical knowledge, but for self-discipline.

TBS always puts on a great concert -- it's well worth your time this Friday and Saturday evening.

Our church sponsors a chapter of Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Tulsa, and as a result we've had an influx of college age, young singles, and young married couples into our congregation. (RUF is the collegiate ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative evangelical denomination.)

Along with the new people, the RUF connection has brought new songs into our worship service, or, more accurately, new tunes to old hymns by writers like Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, John Newton, and Augustus Toplady.

The tunes can be found in the RUF Hymnbook. The RUF Hymnbook Online Hymn Resource provides PDF lead sheets, guitar chord sheets, lyric-only sheets (for overhead projectors), and brief demos (usually a verse and a chorus) in MP3 format.

Kevin Twit is the composer of many of the new tunes, and the RUF Hymnbook Online Hymn Resource is a part of his website, Indelible Grace Music. Twit has a blog on the site as well, and one of his recent entries is "Thoughts on writing a new tune for a hymn text."

This has nothing to do with a Grove, Oklahoma, legislator's plan to get $30 million in state tax credits to redo Shangri-La resort on Grand Lake.

Mary Weiss, lead singer with the '60s girl group group that just coincidentally happened to be entirely staffed by the distaff (don't say "girl group" around Mary) the Shangri-Las, has signed with Norton Records for her first solo album.

Norton's website has a lengthy and fascinating interview with Mary Weiss, who talks about their hits (e.g, Leader of the Pack), recording sessions, the rigors of touring, their fellow musicians (like James Brown and the Zombies), going from obscurity to sudden fame, and how it all dissolved in a mess of lawsuits. Start with that link and follow the links at the bottom of each page to read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Dustbury's 3WC linkblog.)

I am definitely not talking about Tulsa's sales tax vote.

This Tuesday, Merle Haggard's 1971 album, A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (Or, My Salute to Bob Wills), is being re-released on CD, in tandem with his 1976 release It's All in the Movies.

Haggard's tribute to Wills is credited with a revival of interest in Western Swing music, and it marked the first reunion of Wills sidemen from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, a chance to hear these virtuosi on modern recording equipment. This album includes Johnnie Lee Wills on banjo, Eldon Shamblin on electric guitar, Johnny Gimble and Joe Holley on fiddle, Alex Brashear on trumpet, and Tiny Moore on the "biggest little instrument in the world" (mandolin -- amplified, of course). The success of this album paved the way for the recording of the legendary For the Last Time album two years later.

Last week, I checked out the library's copy of the earlier CD release, and if you'd been in our house late Friday night, you would have heard me singing along (a bit too loudly), as I worked on finishing the transfer of BatesLine to a new server.

One thing sadly missing from the library's copy were the liner notes by country music historian Rich Kienzle. Kienzle's notes are always interesting reading -- another good reason to pick up a copy of the upcoming re-release.

I don't often do these, but I found this on the Happy Homemaker's blog and thought it would be fun to try.

Answer the following questions using only the song titles from a chosen musician/band.

Band I chose: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

Are you male or female? I'm a Ding-Dong Daddy from Dumas. (You oughta see me do my stuff!)

Describe yourself. I'm Human, Same As You

How do some people feel about you? Nothing But Trouble

How do you feel about yourself? Too Busy

Describe your ex: Roly Poly; Thorn in My Heart; I Laugh When I Think How I Cried over You

Describe your current significant other: I Married the Rose of San Antone

Describe where you want to be: Across the Alley from the Alamo

Describe how you live: Hubbin' It

Describe how you love: All Night Long

What would you ask for if you had just one wish? Tater Pie

Share a few words of wisdom: Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age

Now say goodbye: When You Leave Amarillo, Turn Out the Lights

Here's my contribution to the meme: Ask and answer your own question with song titles.

Q: Will There Be Any Yodeling in Heaven?

A: There'll Be No Disappointment in Heaven.

I'm not tagging anyone as such, but it would be fun to see what someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music could do with this.

UPDATE: Ol' Blue Eyes answers the questions for Mr. Hill.

'60s pop singer and songwriter Gene Pitney died early Wednesday of a heart attack in Cardiff, Wales, where he had performed the night before. In 1993, Dawn Eden interviewed Pitney for Goldmine magazine; today National Review Online has her reflections on his life and career:

When the hits stopped coming, Pitney knew when to ditch the record-biz merry-go-round in favor of his always-supportive live audiences. He wed his high-school sweetheart, stayed married, raised three sons, invested well, and never wrote a kiss-and-tell tome.

The author of Ricky Nelson's unassuming hit "Hello Mary Lou" never tried to be an Artist with a capital A. He avoided the clichés of 1960s rock stardom at every turn — which is why he's so much more interesting, and in many ways more artful, than so many of the performers who replaced him on the charts.

The article includes several anecdotes from her interview with Pitney -- there's a funny one about the sound effects his record label used to create a fake live album. Eden and Pitney agreed that his voice had matured, lost that "high-pitched nasal sound," which made me wonder if he had re-recorded any of his hits later in his career. (He had.) It would be interesting to hear the difference.

In looking for the answer to that question, I was intrigued to discover that Pitney had done two albums with country music legend George Jones, backed by the Jordanaires.

Pitney is one of three songwriters of note that we've lost in the last couple of weeks. Buck Owens was another. The third? You Don't Know her (probably), but you know her songs. Expect a tribute here late tonight. (UPDATE: Come back tomorrow night.)

The unlikeliest people come together and amazing things happen, as you'll see in this article on music history:

Bob Wills recounted that first meeting with the twenty-one year old Lennon in a 1972 interview with Life magazine. "He was the scrawniest thing I ever saw. Looked like he hadn't eaten in a week. He'd been following us from town to town, hanging out at the shows with his guitar, always sitting right at the edge of the dance floor. Staring like he was studying up on us or something. The only reason I noticed him was that long hair of his. That was before it caught on, of course. He was crazy as a loon for going around wearing long hair and a leather jacket in the type of bars we was playing. But he didn't know no better....

Capital Records Press Release, September 29, 1962

Straight from the Heart of Texas comes the debut LP from The Quarrymen, the hopping new band led by Western Swing legend Bob Wills. Building on the success of their hit single, "Love Me Do," the Meet The Quarrymen LP features the future chart topper, "Please Please Me," and a revitalized take on Bob's country classic, "Faded Love."

The definitive book on the Quarrymen, we are told, is titled, Can't Buy Me Faded Love.

I think I want to live in that alternate universe.

(Truth is, though, as a guitarist, Lennon couldn't hold a candle to Eldon Shamblin or Junior Barnard. And the idea isn't that far-fetched -- Wills and Lennon were both synthesizers and syncretizers, drawing from a variety of musical genres to create a new sound. What country fiddle, cotton-patch blues and dixieland jazz were to Wills, British music hall tunes, Motown, and rockabilly were to the Beatles.)

And so are Leon Rausch and J. D. Walters and Mike Bennett and Curly Lewis and the rest of the Playboys that performed last night at Cain's Ballroom for the Bob Wills birthday bash.

I was there with my wife, our first night out since the baby. The Round-Up Boys, a good fiddle band, led off. Eddie McAlvain and the Mavericks were up next, adding some real swing to the western -- some great saxophone and fiddle solos. The Round-Up Boys and the Mavericks each played Corinne, Corinna, and the tune showcased the difference in their styles. Along with Bob Wills tunes, the Mavericks mixed in Spade Cooley's big hit, Shame on You, Wasted Days and Wasted Nights (a wasted choice of song, in my book), and Please Release Me.

District 2 Republican candidate Rick Westcott was in attendance tonight, too. Tulsa ought to have at least one city councilor with a genuine love for Western Swing music, don't you think?

Unfortunately, my wife wasn't up to making it through the whole show, -- the smoke and the volume were getting to her, I think -- so I drove her home and came back for Allsup and Rausch and the Playboys.

Tommy Allsup played some brilliant guitar solos tonight. He played lead guitar for Buddy Holly back in 1958-59 (until that night he lost the coin toss with Ritchie Valens). Tonight he played and sang Raining in My Heart.

This ensemble reminded me of Bob Wills' Playboys at their jazziest and most untamed -- the quality you hear on the Tiffany Transcriptions. If you wondered how it is that Bob is in both the Country Music and Rock'n'Roll Halls of Fame, tonight would have explained it all.

You can tell the difference between competent players who reproduce great improvisations from the past, and those who really are creating in the moment. Their playing tonight was inspired, drawing energy from the music, from the audience, and from each other. Every member of the band took some terrific solos, but Mike Bennett's trumpet work was particularly fantastic.

The other thing that made this band stand out was the fiddle section -- not just a lone fiddle, but a trio. You should've heard them on In the Mood and Maiden's Prayer.

Leon Rausch was in fine voice -- that smoky barroom voice of his.

I enjoyed hearing some favorite lesser-known tunes like Trouble in Mind and Tater Pie.

It was a thrill to get to hear the Playboys. If you ever have the chance to hear Tommy and Leon and the boys, walk, don't run.

You'll find a lot of patriotic and conservative sentiments expressed in country and western music. As a rebuttal to a metroconservative who bemoans conservative celebration of the culture of the common man (think NASCAR, Wal-Mart, and Blue Collar Comedy), Clinton W. Taylor presents, on the American Spectator's website, a selection of 15 "great country songs with great conservative ideas."

As his number one selection, Taylor, once a DJ at KMAD, the "Greatest Little Station in the Chickasaw Nation," picks the song Smoke on the Water. This isn't the Deep Purple song of the same name. This one was recorded in 1945 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and a year before that it was a hit for Red Foley. It was written by Zeke Clements and Earl Nunn.

Of this politically incorrect song, with its references to "heathen gods," Taylor writes:

If you ever set out to find out just what it would take to get yourself excommunicated from the Unitarians, I bet playing this song while you did it would help.

Here's a link to the original lyrics for Smoke on the Water, including the fierce second verse that Taylor mentions was dropped from the Bob Wills version.

(If you come back here in a day or two, you may be able to hear a bit of the song. UPDATE: As promised, for a limited time, a very low-quality 350 KB MP3.)

(If this is correct, the twin lead guitarists on that song are Jimmy Wyble and Cameron Hill.)

Country and Western is music for grownups. It's about the only current genre where you'll find songs about responsibility, fidelity, love of country, parenthood, old age, and the consequences of folly.

Taylor's description of his number 15 song reminded me of another song that deals with fidelity. A little over a year ago I first heard a Randy Travis song called On the Other Hand. The song's point of view is that of a married man who is very tempted to stray, but he musters the strength to stop and leave before he goes too far. Here's the chorus:

On the other hand, There's a golden band
To remind me of someone who would not understand
On the one hand I could stay and be your loving man
But the reason I must go is on the other hand

When I first heard that song, I was struck by the contrast with a pop song that dealt with a similar temptation -- the Beatles' Chains, by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. In Chains, the singer's love for his girlfriend binds him from going after the desirable girl to whom the song is addressed.

But in On the Other Hand, there's no hint of chains of love binding the singer to his wife -- he sings of passion that has died. Instead of being bound by emotion, he's bound by the objective fact of his vows before God and man, symbolized by that golden band on the other hand. Instead of passion being trumped by stronger passion, as in the Beatles' song, here you have passion being subjected to duty by an act of the will. And that is very much a conservative idea.

This is going to be a departure from BatesLine's usual content, the sort of thing that Mister Snitch calls a long-tail post. Google seems to treat this blog pretty favorably, so I'm hopeful that this entry will be found by Cowsills fans as they search the net.

In the linkblog a few days ago, I made mention of the woes that have recently befallen The Cowsills, a the late '60s pop band that also happened to be a family. The band consisted of four brothers, their mom, and their little sister Susan.

(Hollywood saw the TV potential of the group, but after the fashion of the time that potential was translated into a situation comedy based on their story, featuring professional actors miming to music. Nowadays, the Cowsills would have been made the stars of their own reality series.)

The Cowsill family has lost a lot in the last few months, starting with Hurricane Katrina. Barry Cowsill, in New Orleans when the storm hit, was missing until January, when his body was identified.

Susan Cowsill and her husband made it out of New Orleans in time, but with nothing but their pets and the clothes on their back. Their priceless family archives were lost to the storm.

Then, a week ago, as family and friends gathered in the family's hometown of Newport, R.I., to remember Barry, they learned that oldest brother Billy had died at his home in Calgary.

Susan Cowsill has a connection to Tulsa. Susan sang backup and harmony vocals with Dwight Twilley's band, going back to the '80s, and she lived in Tulsa for a time. She was here last August performing with Twilley, not long before Katrina hit.

(YouTube has a music video, "Some Good Years," a song the regrouped Cowsills recorded in the early '90s. The video was part of a tribute to Barry, and it features clips from the Cowsills' American Dairy Association commercial, a 1967 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, and TV appearances with Dean Martin, Johnny Cash, Buddy Ebsen, and Mike Douglas. Even if you aren't a fan, if you fondly remember variety shows of the era, you'll enjoy the trip down Memory Lane. Hat tip to the Dawn Patrol.)

Susan Cowsill could use your help in a couple of ways. She and her husband lost everything to Katrina. Back in September Dwight and Jan Twilley began collecting funds to help with basic needs, and in an e-mail a couple of days ago, Jan Twilley confirmed to me that there is still a need and they are still accepting donations. You can send donations to:

Susan Cowsill
c/o Jan Twilley
4306 S. Peoria Suite 642
Tulsa, OK. 74105-3924

The Cowsill family also hopes to replace some of the memorabilia that was lost to the storm. Through the Cowsills Archive Project, the family is asking for fans to share their Cowsills memorabilia by uploading photos and scans. They would also welcome any memorabilia you can bear to part with to help rebuild the family's collection.

I only learned about The Cowsills in the last year or so, so I can't claim to be a longtime fan, but I was touched by this story of loss upon loss -- and its contrast to the happy innocence you'll see in that video -- and I wanted to let people know how they can help. I'm hopeful that Cowsills fans will come across this entry, spread the word, and help in any way they can.

I was checking Technorati for references to Tulsa and found what purports to be the online journal of Isaac Hanson, and that led me to the online journal of his brother Zac, and the online journal of his other brother Taylor. They have a band.

It is entirely possible that none of these sites are authentic, although they don't have the marks of a parody site. For one thing, Isaac and Taylor have only made one entry each; Zac hasn't posted anything. If these are authentic, they're awfully revealing.

My son performed in his first Tulsa Boy Singers concert this evening, and it was a wonderful performance. They'll be performing again Saturday evening.

If you enjoy sacred choral music of the Christmas season, if you'd like to imagine for an hour or so that you are in an ancient Gothic chapel in England listening to a sung service, come to Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th and Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa, tomorrow night to hear TBS. The performance begins at 8 p.m., lasts about 90 minutes with an intermission, and there's a reception afterwards in the Great Hall.

There were some scrapbooks of years past on display during the reception, so if you're an alumnus of the group, come by and relive tours and concerts past.

Admission is free, but tax-deductible donations are gratefully received. TBS's first-ever CD will be available for purchase, too.

Took a couple of hours off work today and went with my wife and five-year-old daughter to a special hour-long program at the Performing Arts Center about the life and music of Bob Wills, featuring John Wooley, a writer and music historian, and Ray Benson and Jason Roberts of Asleep at the Wheel.

Wooley gave a brief historical sketch of Bob Wills' life and career and of the origins of Western Swing music. He gave his working definition of Western Swing, which he said he's still refining: Jazz improvisation, on top of a dance beat, done with instruments associated with cowboy or hillbilly music. I think that about captures it.

Then Ray Benson and Jason Roberts came up, acoustic guitar and fiddle in hand, respectively, and Benson talked about how the musical drama "A Ride with Bob" came to be, and recognized playwright Anne Rapp, who was in the audience. Benson asked rhetorically why the emphasis on Bob Wills -- there were a lot of great Western Swing bands and musicians back in the '30s and '40s. The answer is the spark, ambition, and charisma that Wills brought to the music, and "A Ride with Bob" attempts to give the audience a sense of the man as a performer. At one time, the Texas Playboys was the number one dance band in the country. Benson said that Grammy producer Pierre Cossette said that Wills had more charisma than anybody else he ever worked with.

In the play, Jason Roberts, who has been playing fiddle with Asleep at the Wheel for about 10 years, plays Bob Wills in his prime. Benson and Roberts talked about and played four songs: a fiddle breakdown, "Ida Red," "Faded Love," and "San Antonio Rose." We got to hear the close family resemblance between the old fiddle tune "Nellie Grey" and "Faded Love." You could hear folks in the audience softly singing along on "Faded Love."

They took questions at the end. I asked where we could hear live Western Swing music between visits from Asleep at the Wheel. Someone mentioned that Tommy Allsup and Leon Rausch would be performing in Muskogee on December 30. I'll have to miss it -- we expect to be performing "Bottle Baby Boogie" around our house about then -- but it should be great. Rausch sang with Wills and played bass fiddle in the latter part of Wills' career, and Allsup produced and played bass on the album "For the Last Time." Benson mentioned that there was a Western Swing newsletter -- he probably meant this one. (Afterwards I met a couple with the band Cow Jazz -- they're based and do their performing in the DFW area.) Wooley reminded us that he has a show every Saturday night at 7 p.m. on KWGS 89.5, called "Swing on This."

My daughter got to shake hands with Jason Roberts, who said he had a little girl about her age, and she got her picture taken with Jason and with Ray Benson. (UPDATE: I've added photos, after the jump.)

As we emerged from the PAC, schoolkids were beginning to line the street for the Veterans' Day parade. I wish a lot of them had been inside to hear the music and learn about part of Oklahoma's musical heritage, the music that helped their great-grandparents keep smiling through hard times.

Benson was on KFAQ with DelGiorno this morning, broadcasting over the "sacred frequency" that carried Bob and Johnnie Lee Wills for many years. They talked about the lack of a Western Swing Hall of Fame, something that belongs in Tulsa. (For reasons I don't understand, no Western Swing artist has ever been inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame.) The presence of such a facility would be a draw for a niche tourist market -- attractive to a small but intense fan base. There would be good synergy between Western Swing tourism and Route 66 tourism -- transplanted Okies provided a fan base for the music in 1940s California. And a Western Swing museum would be a resource to get the music into the schools, where it could be introduced in the context of Oklahoma history and modern musical history.

I'm glad the PAC set the program up, but I wish more people had gotten the word. There was plenty of space for more, but because they mentioned limited seating and the need to call ahead to reserve a seat, I had the impression it was a much smaller room and would fill up quickly, an impression reinforced when I called Thursday to reserve seats and was told that there were only a few left. I would have spread the word if I'd known the room was so big.

It was a nice start to a day that ended with family, a cake, candles, ice cream, and two CDs: "For the Last Time" and "Tiffany Transcriptions No. 2."

From Rich Kienzle's liner notes to "Boot Heel Drag: The MGM Years" -- a great 2-disc collection:

Bob [Wills], hip enough to conceive an unconventional salute to the older set, asked Cindy Walker to write a song with this title. "I thought he meant one of those (sentimental) things like 'Darling, when your hair has turned to silver... don't be ashamed," Walker recalled. "So when I said, is this what you mean? Bob said, 'No I don't mean anything like that. I mean DON'T be ASHAMED of your AGE! I'm talkin' about people late in life that have done everything, so don't be ashamed -- you've had it all.' I thought about it a little and I finally got the idea." Wills's reaction to the finished tune was succinct. "Yeah," he replied, "that's exactly what I mean."

Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age

(By Bob Wills and Cindy Walker. Recorded 10/30/47. Features Tommy Duncan on vocals, Eldon Shamblin on rhythm guitar, Tiny Moore on mandolin, Joe Holley on fiddle.)

Don't be ashamed of your age.
Don't let the years get you down.
That old gang you knew
They still think of you
As a rounder¹ in your old hometown.

Don't mind the grey in your hair.
Just think of all the fun² you've had
Puttin' it there.
As for that old book of time
You've never skipped a page³
So don't be ashamed of your age, brother.
Don't be ashamed of your age.

Listen, Mr. Smith, Mr. Brown,
Don't let your age get you down.
Life ain't begun
Until you're 40, son.
That's when you really start to go to town.⁴

Don't wish that you were a lad.
Why, boy, you've lost more gals⁵
than they've ever had
And, listen, you've graduated
From that ol' sucker stage⁶,
So don't be ashamed of your age, brother.
Don't be ashamed of your age.

Notes:
¹I used to be rounder than I am now, but otherwise, no.
²That was fun?
³I was prematurely responsible and went through my first mid-life crisis at age 29. Now I'm hoping for a headstart on my Second Childhood.
⁴Boy, I sure hope so.
⁵Only if you count the ones I never had in the first place. Only ever had the one, and I haven't lost her yet.
⁶Boy, I sure hope so.

Surely they wouldn't bring a stage show about Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys all the way from Texas to Tulsa and stop short of the Mother Church of Western Swing, would they?

Of course not. Here's today's e-mail from the fine folks at Cain's:

There will be an after party / show with the Red Dirt Rangers, members of the Stragglers and a few members of Asleep at the Wheel at the Home of Bob Wills, the Cain's Ballroom... For more information on this, please visit www.reddirtrangers.com or www.cainsballroom.com. Tickets will be available at the door that evening.

According to the Cain's Ballroom website, tickets will be $10 at the door, doors open at 7:00. Now, the performance at the PAC starts at 8, so I don't imagine the afterparty will start until... after that.

I first became aware of Bear Family Records a year or so ago, as I looked at the list of Texas Playboys albums for sale on Amazon. At the top of the list in terms of price and quantity was a box set called "San Antonio Rose" featuring 11 CDs, one DVD, and a hardbound book, retailing for about $300, and containing just about everything Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys recorded from the beginning until 1947, when the band left Columbia Records. Browsing the catalog at Barnes and Noble, I noticed that earlier this year Bear Family issued a second box set, "Faded Love," covering the rest of 1947 through Bob Wills' last recording in 1973 -- 13 CDs and one DVD. It also runs about $300 retail.

Bear Family has a reputation for scouring the archives for hidden treasures, including alternate takes and unreleased music, to produce the most comprehensive collections imaginable. Their latest releases include a 7-CD set of the Everly Brothers from 1960-1965, a collection of 200 versions of the German song Lili Marleen, and the latest in a series of DVDs from the 1950s Los Angeles-based country music TV show, "Town Hall Party."

Another new release from this fall is "Greetings from Oklahoma," one in a series of discs of songs that mention the state or places in the state in the title. So far they've also covered Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Hawaii, and Alabama. A writer for Bear Family Records (based in Germany) explains the rationale behind the series:

States have separate identities that help Americans distinguish themselves from one another. When 'Tonight Show' host Jay Leno happens to mention the name of a state during his nightly monologue, it's usually followed by scattered but wild cheering from the audience. Everyone understands. That noisy response is telling millions of people, "I'm from there! I'm so proud of being from Tennessee or Alabama or Virginia that I'm sitting here shouting and applauding like a fool." Being proud of where you come from is a passionate business and sometimes that pride just can't be contained by national borders. This series is all about regional pride ("I'm an American, hell yes! But I'm also a Texan!").

(In light of that, I'm amazed that "You're from Texas" didn't make it into the Texas collection.)

The Oklahoma disc includes well-known songs like Bob Wills' "Take Me Back to Tulsa," Hank Thompson's "Oklahoma Hills," and Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." There's "The Everlasting Hills of Oklahoma," one of my favorite Sons of the Pioneers songs -- I think I first heard it on a late '70s Oklahoma tourism commercial. (The tourism department also used an instrumental version of "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" around the same time -- a pretty tune, but you don't want potential visitors to think of lunar landscapes when they think of your state.) And the collection includes Leon McAuliffe's version of "Tulsa Straight Ahead." Tulsa has those two songs on the album, but Oklahoma City only gets one mention, tied with Muskogee, Henryetta, and Moffet. The collection has both kinds of music -- country AND western -- no Gene Pitney, Eric Clapton, or Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Today I came across this heartwarming, bittersweet account by western swing fiddler and vocalist Jody Nix of the 1973 recording of the album "Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys: For the Last Time," an album that Joel of On the Other Foot has rightly judged "duff-free."

Here are some useful reviews of various Bob Wills compilations.

Junior Barnard was an amazing guitarist. (Bio and video at this link.) Junior takes a chorus on "Sweet Georgia Brown" (300 KB MP3). Here's Junior taking the final chorus of "Fat Boy Rag" (300 KB MP3). Junior's "coal mine chorus, low-down and dirty" on "Blackout Blues" (300 KB MP3). Rock and roll? These were all recorded about 1946.

Track by track guide to the "Take Me Back to Tulsa" box set -- when and where recorded, who's singing and playing.

Was getting a tire fixed this afternoon, leafing through the September 2005 issue of Spin magazine. Every posed shot featured sullen glares, hideous grimaces. Are modern popular musicians not allowed to smile? Is it against the rules to look like you're having fun? They used to be allowed to smile:

A groanworthy music theory joke, which starts like this:

A 'C,' an E-flat, and a 'G' go into a bar. The bartender says: "Sorry,but we don't serve minors." So the E-flat leaves, and the C and the G have an open fifth between them....

It gets worse, thankfully.

How I found the above joke: I noticed I had a couple of visits from a Technorati search for "Bob Wills", so I went to see who else was blogging about the Man from Turkey, Texas, and found this entry, which includes this bit of wisdom:

Anyone who doesn't want to dance (however badly) while listening to western swing has a heart made of stone.

Indeed.

The blogger responsible for that sententia sapiens is a clarinet teacher from Fort Worth who reads Latin for fun, has a crush on George Will, loves puns, chicken fried steak, modern art, chips and salsa, grand opera, Dr. Pepper, and Whittaker Chambers' Witness, which book is the topic of her most recent entry. Only in the blogosphere....

Dang it, Bobby! I've got some serious political blogging to do and you go and distract me.

Bobby at Tulsa Topics took advantage of a sleepless night to go searching through Google Print -- Google's attempt at making dead-tree knowledge searchable.

He finds this: San Antonio Rose, a biography of Bob Wills by Charles Townsend.

I searched the text for KVOO* and found an interesting story about the sponsorship of the Texas Playboys' daily half-hour broadcast in 1935. Wills bought the time from the station ($12,000 for the year), then worked out a deal with a flour company:

Wills did not actually sell the show to the Red Star Milling Company. He wanted them to develop a new flour, to be labelled, appropriately, Play Boy flour, and advertise it only on his radio program. With such a procedure, they could determine just what results the show got. The company was to pay Wills a royalty for each barrel of flour sold. The contract was signed, and Play Boy flour was marketed for the first time in November 1935. In twenty-four months, Play Boy flour was selling as well as brands that had been on the market for forty years.

That's just a taste -- there was Play Boy Bread, performances at grocery store openings and bakers' conventions, and, in sacks of Play Boy flour, a picture of one of the Playboys and his favorite recipe. And there's even a song written by a fan in tribute to Play Boy flour.

(*That KVOO, 1170 on your AM dial, changed call letters and formats three years ago, and is now KFAQ, on which you can hear me Monday mornings at 6:10. One of KFAQ's FM sister stations kept the KVOO call letters. I wish the AM blowtorch had kept KVOO, too. Given what the letters stand for, KVOO seems appropriate for a news/talk station.)

MORE on Google Print: Eldon Shamblin remembers his early days with Bob Wills in The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History. And there was a sort of Texas Playboys farm system, which you'll read about in Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz.

Roemerman on Record will be quiet for a while, as Steve Roemerman is off to Gretna, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi from New Orleans, with a group from his church to help Convoy of Hope. We'll keep Steve in our prayers and look forward to his report when he returns.

Our Tulsa World has added more video clips from Mayor Bill LaFortune's September 6 third-penny meeting at the Zarrow Library. This is a great service that Mr. Schuttler is doing by filming, converting, and posting these video clips. Too often the claims and promises made in this sort of meeting are lost to history. His summary of the meeting puts the clips in context. In another entry he has the response from Mayor LaFortune and Fire Chief Allen LaCroix to the question, "Are we prepared if Keystone Dam breaks?"

MeeCiteeWurkor has a special comments thread just for registering your opinion of the Tulsa Whirled. He's asking for submissions in a contest -- things you can do with a Tulsa Whirled. And he's about to add a new contributor to the blog.

City Councilor Chris Medlock has a recent entry on his proposal regarding the sales tax money currently going to Tulsa County for "4 to Fix the County." He says that the county is fixed now, and between the Vision 2025 sales tax and rising property taxes, the county is well fixed for funds. By denying a renewal of the 2/12ths cent "4 to Fix" sales tax, City of Tulsa voters could opt to pass the same size sales tax at the city level and earmark it for public safety.

Another noteworthy item on MedBlogged cites two Tulsa Whirled City Hall stories, one from 2002, one from last week. The March 2002 story has Mayor-elect Bill LaFortune saying he plans to have a direct, face-to-face relationship with the City Council, which lines up with my recollection of my first meeting with LaFortune as he started his run for office. The September 2005 story has councilors, including recently-elected Bill Martinson, complaining that LaFortune won't deal directly with the Council on issues like the new third-penny proposal.

Tulsa Downtown reports that new clubs are opening in the Blue Dome district.

Tulsa newcomer Joe Kelley has been trying the immersion approach to understanding his new hometown, and he's posted a list of some of the people he's met with so far, and would like suggestions for others he ought to talk to. About a week and a half ago, I introduced him to the tawook at La Roma Pizza (a Lebanese restaurant disguised as a pizzeria), and we had a very enjoyable conversation. He seems to be a very astute observer and a quick study.

Tulsa Topics has an audio tribute to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, including their radio theme song, "Okie Boogie," "Cadillac in my Model A," and tributes by The Tractors and Asleep at the Wheel. One thing I love about Bob Wills songs -- you don't need liner notes, because Bob tells you who's playing as the song proceeds.

As always, you'll find the latest and greatest entries from blogs about Tulsa news on the Tulsa Bloggers aggregation page.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attack on America. As a way of remembering those whose lives were lost on that day, and those who, on behalf of our freedom and security, have paid the ultimate price since then, Tulsa will mark the date with a service of remembrance, featuring the performance of Mozart's Requiem. This solemn and moving setting of prayers for the dead, Mozart's last composition, will be performed at Trinity Episcopal Church, 501 S. Cincinnati, downtown Tulsa, tomorrow morning, Sunday, September 11, 2005, beginning at 8:46 a.m., the time when the attacks began.

This continues a tradition that began in 2002, when Tulsa was part of the Rolling Requiem -- performances of Mozart's Requiem in every time zone around the world, each beginning at 8:46 a.m. local time. In 2003 and 2004, Tulsa continued the observance on its own with Faure's beautiful Requiem.

Admission is free, and while you may miss Sunday school at your own church, the performance will be over in time for you to make your 10:30 service. It's important to remember, and I hope you'll be in attendance.

We're coming up on the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attack on America. As a way of remembering those whose lives were lost on that day, and those who, on behalf of our freedom and security, have paid the ultimate price since then, Tulsa will mark the date with a service of remembrance, featuring the performance of Mozart's Requiem. This solemn and moving setting of prayers for the dead, Mozart's last composition, will be performed at Trinity Episcopal Church, 501 S. Cincinnati, downtown Tulsa, on Sunday, September 11, 2005, beginning at 8:46 a.m., the time when the attacks began.

This continues a tradition that began in 2002, when Tulsa was part of the Rolling Requiem -- performances of Mozart's Requiem in every time zone around the world, each beginning at 8:46 a.m. local time. In 2003 and 2004, Tulsa continued the observance on its own with Faure's beautiful Requiem.

Admission is free, and while you may miss Sunday school at your own church, the performance will be over in time for you to make your 10:30 service. It's important to remember, and I hope you'll be in attendance.

This is happening awfully close to my next birthday and my dad's next birthday. Hint, hint.

(More here.)

Did you know "Steel Guitar Rag" has lyrics? And in German, no less.

(When I get around to renovating this blog, I'm adding a linkblog sidebar for just this sort of find.)

UPDATE: This is Leon, if you didn't know. And if you didn't know, I hope you don't claim to be an Okie!

I've been playing around with the Live365 online music service. In exchange for free registration, you get access to hundreds of individually programmed stations. There are some stations available only to paying premium customers. I've sampled traditional country, '80s New Wave (the soundtrack of my high school and college years), '60s oldies, among others.

Live365 now offers a weekly podcast, spotlighting an independent music label. This week's "SPOTcast" consists of three tracks from artists on Digital Musicworks International. The first single is "Better Watch Out," lead track from Tulsa power-pop artist Dwight Twilley's new album, 47 Moons. I wrote last week about Twilley's two free concerts in Tulsa, this coming Friday and Saturday. If you want to get a sense of the Twilley sound, you can download this "rockabilly-fueled romp," plus songs by DMI artists Redlightmusic and Headrush, via this link (15MB MP3 file).

There's a bit on the podcast, about 10 minutes in, about what makes DMI special: They don't manufacture and ship CDs. All their sales are through online music stores. The customer saves money -- an album costs $10 instead of $16 or more -- and the artist gets paid more than in a normal record deal.

Thanks to reader Don Hellwege for sending along a link to a interview with Bob Moog on NPR's Fresh Air, recorded in 2000. The program includes a medley of music using the synthesizer and a demonstration by Bob Moog of how various modulations and transformations are applied to a tone to produce the sound of a plucked string. Moog talks about how he got started working with electronics and about working with dad in the basement workshop. Moog also plays the theremin and describes how it's played. I enjoyed listening to it.

Bob Moog, inventor of the synthesizer, died on Sunday at the age of 71.
Charles G. Hill marks his passing with a couple of comments from those who recorded with the instrument in the 1960s.

At some point in my late pre-adolescence, I talked my parents into doing a Columbia Record Club 12-albums-for-a-penny deal. Two of the selections I chose were Switched-On Bach by Walter (as she then was) Carlos and Everything You Always Wanted to Hear on the Moog. ("Semi-conducted by Andrew Kazdin and Thomas Z. Shepherd.") The latter album included three Spanish-themed pieces by French composers ("España" by Chabrier, "Malagueña" by Lecuona, and "March of the Toreadors," from Carmen by Bizet) on one side, and Ravel's "Bolero" on the flip side, complete with synthesized applause at the end. For a good part of one school year, I drove my parents nuts by playing "España" -- every morning, all six glorious minutes of it -- as my wake-up music on my little JCPenney turntable. Scoff if you will, but it was my introduction to classical music. (This page has links to MP3s of "España" and "Malagueña".)

The instrument was still in its infancy when that album was recorded, in 1973. Every note had to be laid down separately and none of the instruments sounded quite like the analog instruments they sought to imitate. But that was part of the charm.

In the four decades since the first synthesizer made its debut, synthesizers have gone from analog to digital and come ever closer to perfectly imitating the sounds of vibrating brass and catgut. Families who would never have the space or room for a piano can buy an inexpensive keyboard that produces excellent sound. Bob Moog, who started out building theremins, returned in his later years to designing analog electronic instruments, including a new theremin and a new version of his Minimoog. The strange new sounds that were produced in pursuit of reproducing old sounds have proven to be interesting in their own right, and no doubt you can buy a digital synthesizer capable of almost perfectly imitating a Moog analog synth.

I was looking at a listing of music acts performing in Tulsa in the next few months and discovered that the legendary Leon Russell is performing at this weekend's Full Moon Biker Rally at Eagle's Nest near Keystone Lake.

As I mentioned earlier, another Tulsan and legend of '70s rock, Dwight Twilley, is performing two free concerts in Tulsa this weekend. Twilley's first album was recorded for Russell's Shelter Records and Russell produced and played on several of Twilley's singles. The event poster mentions "special guests." You don't suppose Mr. Russell might drop in, since he's in the neighborhood?

I have a bit of strange serendipity to report. This is going to seem like a pointless ramble, but it's going somewhere.

I was having a look yesterday at this amazing multimedia blog called Bedazzled, which features rarities from '60s and '70s pop music and pop culture -- outtakes, demo discs, and an early form of music video called Scopitones. The latest entry has four MP3s of the Bacharach/David tune "The Look of Love" -- an instrumental by Burt Bacharach, and vocal performances by Dusty Springfield, Isaac Hayes, and the Zombies. Be warned that you'll come across vulgar language -- particularly in the blog entries about the TV reality show "Big Brother" -- but there are some amazing finds, like this Rice Krispies commercial from 40 years or so ago. And how can you not like a blog that calls attention to its email link with a photo of Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils?

So anyway, I'm scrolling through Bedazzled and find an entry with a demo by the Dwight Twilley Band, which was "[r]ecorded on 4 Track above Bill Pitcock's dad's Electrical shop."

I read this and wondered why the reference, without introduction or explanation, to Bill Pitcock, news co-anchor, with Clayton Vaughn, for Tulsa's KOTV Channel 6 in the '70s. (Tulsa TV Memories has a couple of photos of him here.) After some further web research I determined that Bill Pitcock IV played lead guitar with the Dwight Twilley Band and that the electrical shop where they recorded the demo belonged to his granddad, Bill Pitcock II. I concluded that TV anchor Bill Pitcock must have been III. The Bedazzled entry was evidently referring to Bill IV.

I remembered some years ago coming across Pitcock Electric, on Evanston Ave. just north of 15th Street, marvelling to see a commercial building in the midst of single-family homes and wondering about if there were any connection to the news anchor. So between appointments and events, I drove by to see if the building was still there. The shop appears to be gone, although there is still a large two-story garage/shop standing at the back of the lot. The sign is still there, but painted over, although you can still make out some of the letters through the white paint.

I drove a couple of blocks west to the Pie Hole Pizzeria to buy a slice of pepperoni and check my e-mail (they have free Wi-Fi). As I entered I saw a poster advertising a couple of free concerts later this month by... Dwight Twilley.

Now, I should admit at this point that until a few months ago, I had no idea who Dwight Twilley was. An aficionado of the power pop genre who was coming to visit Tulsa asked me if Dwight Twilley still lived here. My first thought was, I wonder if he's related to Howard Twilley, the all-star receiver for the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane and the Miami Dolphins. I am and have been woefully ignorant of the local pop music scene, both past and present. Once in college, when I booked a round trip ticket back to Tulsa, the travel agent enthused about guitarist and songwriter J. J. Cale; I returned a blank look.

You can get caught up, as I did, on Dwight Twilley's career with this detailed bio on his website. The band (Twilley, Phil Seymour, and Bill Pitcock IV) had a top 40 hit with their first single, "I'm on Fire," released in 1975.

Dwight Twilley will be performing in Tulsa on August 26th and 27th at The Venue, 18th Street and Boston Avenue -- doors open at 9 p.m. The concert is free but donations to the Children's Rights Council will be gratefully received. The poster bills the concert as "a Filmed and Recorded Retrospective Event," with "All the Hits" and "Special Guests." For fans of Twilley, power pop, or the Tulsa music scene of the '70s, it sounds like it will be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event.

It's fun sometimes to try out the searches that lead people here and see where else they lead. A search for "Bob Wills music clips" led me to a Google directory page for the King of Western Swing, and that led me to:

• The Country Music Hall of Fame's bio of Bob Wills.
• A biographical sketch by NPR's John Burnett in honor of Bob's centenary. (I know NPR is a haven of the left, but they do the best extended feature stories in all of American radio.)
• A page devoted to the history of Western Swing, with a list of recommended recordings. Check out the multimedia page, with MP3s of a couple of rarities. ("Easy Ridin' Papas" bears a remarkable resemblance to the Light Crust Doughboys' theme song, to which in turn the Texas Playboys' theme song bears a remarkable resemblance.)
• WesternSwing.com, a "home page for Western Swing news and information", with a calendar of upcoming events and a list of WS bands and societies on the web.
• The All Music Guide bio of Bob Wills

You'll find more Bob Wills links in this entry from the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The page I linked at the end of the previous entry is part of a treasure trove of lyrics of old-timey songs, with MIDI files accompanying most of them. To give you a sense of the selection, I'll pick a title from (almost) each letter of the alphabet:

Across the Alley from the Alamo
Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms
Come Josephine in My Flying Machine
Don't Fence Me In
Embraceable You
Faded Love
Glow Worm
Hello My Baby
I Only Have Eyes for You
Jeepers Creepers
K-K-K-Katy
Lovesick Blues
Mairzy Doats
Night and Day
On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe
Pick Yourself Up
Red River Valley
Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette
Tenderly
Up a Lazy River
Violets for Your Furs
We'll Meet Again
Yes, We Have No Bananas
Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

Quite a variety -- blues, Western Swing, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, musical theatre, and Disney movies.

I asked for, but didn't receive, any Western Swing music on CD for Father's Day -- it's hard to find in the stores -- so when I was in Best Buy in Little Rock last week, I looked to see if they had anything interesting. The choice was between "Bob Wills: For the Last Time" and Asleep at the Wheel's "Ride with Bob". Hmm. The former seemed a little too sad to bear thinking about -- it was recorded in December 1973 just before (the very day) Bob Wills suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma, in which he lingered until his death in 1975. The latter -- well, the playlist includes some of the great Texas Playboys hits, and I love Asleep at the Wheel, but the use of big-name country stars (and some crossovers from other genres, like the Squirrel Nut Zippers -- which name makes me wince) seemed too gimmicky.

Nevertheless, I picked "Ride with Bob". A full review will have to wait, but I'm glad I did. It brightened the long drive home, and it's getting a lot of play since I got back. (My son has been thoroughly amused at dad wearing headphones and singing along to "Cherokee Maiden", which features some clever lyrics and catchy drumwork.) Most of the selections struck the right balance between faithfulness to the spirit of the original recordings and bringing something fresh to the music. It reflects the tremendous respect that the guest artists have for Bob Wills.

The surprise of the album was the final selection: Willie Nelson, backed by the Manhattan Transfer, singing "Goin' Away Party." The song was written by Cindy Walker, whose 70-year-and-counting songwriting career includes the aforementioned "Cherokee Maiden," "Dream Baby," and that classic of unconfessed, unrequited love, "You Don't Know Me." The song was written for the aforementioned "For the Last Time" album.

(Here's a touching account of a 2004 tribute to Cindy Walker -- at age 85, she sang and danced, too. Here are some photos of the event.)

The song opens with a bit of lush Santo-and-Johnny-esque guitar, a pair of melancholy fiddles, and then the ooohs of the Manhattan Transfer bring in Willie's lead vocal.

I don't always enjoy Willie Nelson as a vocalist, but it was his hit with Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and his "Stardust" album that introduced me to the Great American Songbook, and he brings the same sensibility to this piece. The cracks and trembles in his voice fit the heartbreaking lyrics:

I'm throwin'
A goin' away party,
A party for a dream of mine.
So put me somewhere off in a corner
With a glass and bottle of your party wine.

Don't worry --
It won't be a loud party
I feel too low to get too high.
It's just a sad goin' away party
For a dream that I'm tellin' goodbye.

I'm throwin'
A goin' away party,
A party for a dream of mine.
Nobody's comin' but a heartache
And some tears will drop in now most any time.

Don't worry --
It won't be a loud party.
Dreams don't make noise when they die.
It's just a sad goin' away party
For a dream that I'm tellin' goodbye.

Goodness! You can almost feel yourself choking back the sobs -- "Dreams don't make noise when they die." Which is true.

My kids are too blessedly, blissedly young to understand what this song is about. I wish I still were. The other day they saw a "Feats of Strength" demonstration at the library -- a secularized, motivational version of "The Power Team". The speaker bent an inch-thick bar of steel in his teeth, broke through some bricks with his fist, among other feats designed to illustrate concepts like perseverance and resisting peer pressure.

My son told me about one feat involving a tug-of-war: The point was to hold on to your dreams as other people try to snatch them away from you. I was afraid for a moment that my son might ask me what my dreams are, and I didn't want to have to tell him that I don't have any anymore. I have high hopes for him and his sister, of course, but I am at the point in my life where my course is pretty well locked in from here on out. Life at 41 is about fulfilling responsibilities, not dreaming of possibilities, and the few flights of fancy I've allowed myself have crashed and burned. It's safer not to dream, and eventually, mercifully, you forget how. A song like "Goin' Away Party" makes the disillusionment a little easier to take, knowing you're not the only one who's said farewell to your dreams.

It's about four minutes to hold your sweetie close and sway back and forth on the dance floor.

That's about all the significance a good slow-dance song really needs.

(In response to this bit of news here. You can find other speculations on the song's meaning here.)

Congratulations to Lawton, Oklahoma, pastor and blogger John Owen Butler for getting a mention in a Business Week article on religious podcasting. John's podcast can be found at psalmcast.blogspot.com, and it features recordings of the singing of the Psalms by choirs from around the world.

His latest entry is Psalm 98, set to the tune "Desert," a joyous tune I've also heard used for the hymn "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing." (The tune is Common Meter, so it could be used for a vast number of hymns.)

Joel Veitch, creator of the side-splitting Viking Kittens flash animation, has a band called 7 Seconds of Love, and the most recent two animations at his www.rathergood.com feature two of the band's songs -- "Winners" and "First Drink of the Day." It's great upbeat stuff, and it reminds me a lot of the '80s ska revival band Madness. He's got MP3s for download, too.

Just be aware that not everything on the site is exactly wholesome. Some of the animations are Tourette's Syndrome set to music. But the two I linked above are just fine.

If it makes you feel better, you can pretend that "First Drink of the Day" is about coffee.

This Sunday afternoon at 5 p.m., Coventry Chorale will be singing an evensong service for Palm Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th and Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. It's a worship service, so of course admission is free. If you've never been part of a sung service of Evening Prayer, you should attend.

The service will include two settings of Isaiah 53:4 -- "Surely he hath borne our griefs" -- one from Handel's Messiah and the other by Karl Heinrich Graun, a contemporary of Bach. According to the sheet music's editor, Graun's Tod Jesu (Death of Jesus) "became so popular that it caused Bach's monumental Passion According to Matthew to be forgotten for an entire century." It is a beautiful piece of music.

The service will also include "Save Us, O Lord," by Thomas Matthews the late choirmaster and organist of Trinity, and settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis by Charles Villiers Stanford. The rest of the standard Prayer Book service -- invitatory ("O Gracious Light"), Psalm, Apostles' Creed, prayers and collects -- will be sung or chanted.

(I'll be reuniting with the Chorale for this service and will be the cantor for the opening collect and responsory. David Rollo says he'll make an Episcopal priest of me yet. I love Anglican liturgy, which is saturated with Scripture and makes beautiful use of the English language. I only wish the whole ECUSA was as faithful to the truth as the old Prayer Book and the 39 Articles.)

A lyric from Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys that cheered me more than once back in college....

I laugh when I think how I cried over you,
Cried over dreams that weren't meant to come true.
I smile 'cause I know that it's better this way,
And I've found someone else to love,
So go on your lonely way.

The only price I had to pay
Was the few tears that I shed,
And I found out that I need you
Like I need a hole in my head.

When I found out you lied,
Something real inside me died,
And I laugh when I think how I cried over you.

Here is a minute-long clip of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys playing "Ida Red." (That's Bob playing fiddle -- anyone know who the guitarist and vocalist were?)

You can watch the trailer of the documentary film "Faded Love". The clip includes reminiscences by fans who saw him play and remember it as if it were yesterday and by musicians who worked with him.

UPDATE (4/29/2006): That "Ida Red" clip is one of a series that were filmed in 1951 for television filler. Some were issued as "Snader Transcriptions." There's a bunch of these shorts included with the 100th Birthday Special Edition of "Still Swingin'", a DVD documentary about Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. The band was Joe Holley on fiddle (left-handed!), Cotton Whittington on standard guitar (another lefty!), Bobby Koefer on steel guitar (he still plays the same way 55 years later!), Joe Frank Ferguson on bass, Skeeter Elkin on piano, Paul McGhee on drums, and Joe Andrews doing the vocal. On a couple of the shorts, yodeler Carolina Cotton sings with Bob, and on one (Blue Prelude) Joe Ferguson sings and Joe Andrews plays bass.

From the Sundries Shack:

Everyone here who has heard of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys raise your hands.

Good!

Now the rest of you go out and find one of Wills� CDs, listen to it, then come back here and tell the class just how cool Western Swing really is and how it�s physically impossible to feel bad when you�re listening to it.

From SFist, in response to Charles Barkley's complaint about country music in the NBA All-Star Game half-time program:

Now, we at SFist have always liked the Round Mound of Rebound, even when he balled all over the Warriors in the 1994 playoffs, but we were a little bummed out by his larger point: most popular country music sucks. It sucks because it's homogeneous. It's produced for an audience with geographic, racial and economic boundaries, and it (i.e. the music, but now that you mention it much of the audience, too) has little to no regard for what else goes on in music, culture, or really anything. And don't get us started on alt.country, which seems to abide by the following imperative more than anything else: As soon as you're famous or important, stop making records that are fun, or sound like they were fun to make.

If you agree with Sir Charles, too, if you long for boundary-crossing or brio or fun in country-western music, if you are as annoyed by the whole thing as SFist (we annoy pretty easily, so we're skeptical of that last), git along to San Francisco State University the next three Tuesdays (March first, eighth and fifteenth) to celebrate Bob Wills at 100. The inventor of "Western Swing," Bob Wills combined country music with Nawlins jazz, blues, ragtime and traditional Mexican music. He and his Texas Playboys came up with a style that swung just as hard playing "Basin Street Blues" and "Take the 'A' Train" as it did playing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Hey, Good Lookin'." They came out of the small-groups jazz tradition that gave us Louis Armstrong's greatest work, with the Hot Fives and Sevens, and their bandstand improvisation foreshadowed groups like the JBs and the Meters.

Here's a link to that San Francisco State program on Bob Wills. Anything like that happening here in Tulsa?

The Hypothetical Wren wonders about the lyrics of "Roly Poly":

I was listening to this song on the iPod while I was walking home this morning, and thought, how many songs these days would include the phrase "Daddy's little fatty" in them? As a compliment? Of course, this kid was obviously walking and doing strenuous yard work, so the "bread and jelly 20 times a day" were probably a good idea: the kid was tired. He needed bread, not to mention "corn and taters."

And finally, here's a little something I wrote last November, which includes a little reminiscence from my grandfather. (Grandpa told me once that he didn't dance much at those performances -- he preferred cuddling in a dark corner.)

We miss you, Bob, more and more every day.

Found, in the midst of a short story, while looking for something else. This brings back memories of Saturday afternoons -- the show was one in a series of half-hour syndicated country music shows on KOTV every Saturday afternoon, a lineup that concluded with Hee Haw at 6 p.m.

Houston’s favorite TV program was a country and western music review called The Porter Wagoner Show, on Saturday evening. At the appointed hour Mark and I were expected to plop ourselves in front of the TV, lips buttoned. Houston didn’t like any noise during Porter Wagoner.

Porter, a Grand Old Opry star, sported a blonde pompadour and custom-designed white suits adorned with giant sequined wagon wheels, horseshoes, and cacti. His singing partner and sidekick, Dolly Parton, was then just a Tennessee mountain girl with a beautiful voice. I thought they looked good together during their duets because they both had bouffant hairdos. (Some time later I found out they actually made a point of dying their hair the same shade of white-blonde.)

Dolly did the Duz detergent commercials, the laundry soap with the free wash cloth in every box. She’d open a package, unfurl a towel, and exclaim, “Looky here, Porter!” This always sent Mark and me into fits of giggles, but Mom shot us dirty looks, so we covered our mouths with our hands.

Each week Dolly performed a spotlight solo, such as her song about being a poor country girl reduced to wearing a coat of many colors, a cloak of rags that her mother had stitched together from scraps. These selections made Houston sentimental. He’d sit there with Rand on his lap, wiping at his wet eyes.

There's some dispute over whether the towels were in boxes of Duz or in boxes of Breeze.

It was a lovely service. Some say that worship ought to engage all the senses, and tonight's Epiphany Procession managed three of five -- the sight of the candlelight procession, the smell of incense, and the glorious sounds of hymns, carols, and canticles.

The cantor (seen at right) performed his part adequately, despite having to juggle a music book, a pitch pipe, and a lit candle, while also beating time during the polyphonic parts, and wondering whether standing in the exhaust of the thurible would adversely affect his voice. (It didn't.)

My fellow wise men (James Lawrence, Gary Leff, and Brad Wilson) did a splendid job singing Palestrina's responsories, and the Trinity Choir was likewise splendid as they performed "The Noble Stem of Jesse" (another English paraphrase of the German carol better known as "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming"), "Eastern Monarchs, Sages Three", "Ab Oriente" by Jacob Handl.

It was a treat to hear Fred Graves, retired professor of theatre at the University of Tulsa, read the the third lesson (Matthew 2:1-9), with his beautiful diction and warm tone. I got to know Fred during his years of service as newsletter editor for the Florence Park neighborhood association and as their representative to the Midtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. (He retired from that a few years ago and is still hoping to see the younger folk in the neighborhood step forward to get the association going again.)

The hymns told the story of the wise men and their gifts: "The First Nowell", "We Three Kings" (which tells the spiritual significance of the three gifts), "As with Gladness Men of Old", "What Star Is This, with Beams So Bright." The recessional hymn, "Hail to the Lord's Anointed," shifts our focus from the babe in the manger to Christ, the conquering king:

Kings shall bow down before him,
and gold and incense bring
all nations shall adore him,
his praise all people sing;
to him shall prayer unceasing
and daily vows ascend;
his kingdom still increasing,
a kingdom without end.

O'er every foe victorious,
he on his throne shall rest;
from age to age more glorious,
all blessing and all blest:
the tide of time shall never
his covenant remove;
his Name shall stand for ever,
his changeless Name of Love.

Missing from the service was David Rollo, who is in the hospital. David is the musical director of the Coventry Chorale, a member of the Trinity Choir, and retired vocal music teacher at Holland Hall. David taught a lot of folks in this town to sing and to love singing (me included). As you read this, please take a minute to offer a prayer for his speedy and full recovery. Thanks.

Sunday evening, January 2, at 5:00 p.m., Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Tulsa with present the annual Epiphany Procession, based on York Minster's traditional service. The service begins with a candlelight procession. Two separate groups enter from the north and south ambulatories, proceed down the aisles to the back of the church, then join together and process to the choir stalls. The smaller of the two groups, a four-voice schola cantorum, represents the wise men, the larger, made up of Trinity's choir, represents Everyman.

I'll be part of that smaller group, singing two responsories by Palestrina, along with three other men from Coventry Chorale. The pieces alternate between plainsong intonations by a cantor (me, this year) and responses in four-part polyphonic harmony. We rehearsed a couple of nights ago, and it sounds wonderful in Trinity's beautiful Gothic Revival sanctuary.

Ours is a relatively small part of the service, which also includes anthems sung by Trinity's choir, hymns sung by the congregation, and readings from Scripture appropriate to the feast of the Epiphany, which marks the manifestation of God's glory in Christ, as seen in the presentation of Christ in the temple, the visit of the Magi, Christ's childhood visit to the temple, and Christ's baptism.

Although Trinity isn't my home church, it's where I've done a lot of singing over the years: Lessons and Carols as part of Holland Hall School's Concert Chorus and Madrigal Singers, weekly rehearsals and semi-annual performances for 15 years with Coventry Chorale. When Trinity started the Epiphany service, Coventry provided the singers in partial thanks for allowing us to rehearse and perform at the church. (By the way, I'm on an indefinite sabbatical from Coventry -- I miss it, but the busyness of politics and maintaining this blog made the weekly rehearsal commitment too much to keep.) There is no better setting in Tulsa for the performance of sacred choral music or the drama of the Anglican liturgy.

The Epiphany Procession is a beautiful service and a fitting close to Christmastide. If you're in Tulsa, I hope you can join us.

You need to take a break from the malls and the traffic and the holiday events that have been Santa-ized for your protection. You need to sit for an hour or so in a beautiful Gothic Revival church and listen to the words of Scripture and ancient prayers and hymns set to beautiful music.

This is what you need:

The Coventry Chorale under the direction of David Rollo will present a Christmas Concert on Monday, December 20, 2004 at 7:30 p.m. in Trinity Episcopal Church, 501 S. Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. Music to be performed on the concert includes Motets for the seasons of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. The featured work to be sung is the "Midnight Mass for Christmas" composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Tickets may be purchased at the door the night of the concert. Admission price is: Adults - $10.00; Students/Seniors - $5.00. For more information please call 663-8555 or contact srnotas at yahoo dot com

As the old carol says:

O ye, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low
Who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow
Look now for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing
O rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

The members of Coventry Chorale aren't angels -- they just sing like them.

Each month I receive Rich Appel's electronic 'zine Hz So Good, which is devoted to Top 40 music over the years. This month's edition features a chronological review of the songs that are a part of pop music's annual observance of Christmas.

Rich begins by remembering the outdoor mall, where such tunes could be heard in the weeks before Christmas:

In the ancient days before ‘holiday hits’ was a 6-week radio format, if you wanted to hear bells jingle, chestnuts roast and Chipmunks kvetch – not 24/7 but maybe 12-13/7 - there was one place you could go: shopping. And for full-frost fidelity, your best bet was something called the outdoor mall. Anyone remember these? It may seem strange, but I have fond childhood memories of buying presents while freezing my butt off. In the Massachusetts town of Braintree (a name which is odd unto itself), such an arctic shopper’s paradise, the South Shore Plaza, was located (it still is, but it’s all enclosed now). It was the late 1960s-early 1970s, before indoor mall-mania had begun and ground just been broken for those (or mall-ettes, really) in several towns around Braintree. The SSP was then two floors o’stores arranged rectangularly, with entrances from the inside of that rectangle. And while most of those stores – Jordan Marsh, Kennedy’s, Krey Disc, Singer, Anderson-Little, Tie Town, Fanny Farmer, Hickory Farms – are nothing but memories now, the real memory for me was the walk from store to store in below-32 temps to the tune of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” on the PA system speakers.

Sounds like Tulsa's Southland, long since enclosed and renamed Tulsa Promenade. Wasn't Santa's sleigh in the open area between the two rows of shops?

The musical chronology begins with "Deck the Halls" -- no one seems to know how ancient it is -- moves through the origin of traditional Christmas hymns and old familiar winter songs. A couple of tidbits of trivia from the newsletter:

1857…Even without Kiss-108 to push it, “Jingle Bells” - written in Medford, Massachusetts to commemmorate the Salem sleigh races - takes off. To quote one historian, “Jingle Bells” was not originally a holiday song, but rather “the 19th century equivalent of ‘Little Deuce Coupe.’”

(A tangential reminiscence: In the '80s, Kiss-108 was the Boston-area station for what we now call metrosexuals. Real men (all right, college boys, anyway) listened to 'BCN. Hello, Rangoon! The only place I heard Kiss-108 around the fraternity house was in the kitchen, where our chef Ron cooked while moving his substantial posterior around to the disco beat. UPDATE: Rich Appel writes to explain the significance of the Kiss-108 reference -- the station is licensed to operate out of the Boston suburb of Medford, "or Me-fa, as they call it there". He also mentions that he was a WBCN fan in those days, too.)

1929…In three years, Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians have already racked up a dozen hit songs. So when the band settles in New York, both major radio networks, CBS and NBC, make separate deals with Guy: CBS gets the band’s New Year’s Eve performance before midnight, and NBC picks up the broadcast after. To make the transition easier at 12, Guy plays “Auld Lang Syne,” a song he grew up with, having been raised in a part of Ontario heavily populated by Scots, and which to him just seemed right to end an old year and start a new one. As a result, not only does “Auld Lang Syne” become Lombardo’s theme song, it also becomes the official song of New Year’s Eve.

And one with some local interest:

1953... Oklahoma City-based child star Gayla Peevey records “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” as a fund-raiser to bring one to the OC Zoo. The zoo gets its hippo and Gayla gets a hit when Columbia (not Hip-O Records) releases the single nationally.

And on through "Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer" (25 years old this year!) and Adam Sandler's "Hanukah Song."

This month's issue also includes some thoughts on the diminishing connection between Rolling Stone magazine and popular music.

If you'd like Hz So Good to slide down your e-mail chimney each month, send an e-mail to Rich Appel at audiot.savant@verizon.net

Was looking at Asleep at the Wheel's tour schedule and found a link to the official Bob Wills website, bobwills.com. The site sells a documentary about the King of Western Swing, entitled "Faded Love," available in DVD or VHS formats, and you can watch a lengthy trailer for the DVD here. The trailer includes, toward the end, the theme song from the Texas Playboys radio show. There are some funny and touching comments from folks who remember seeing him and his Texas Playboys perform back in the day.

My grandfather told a story about seeing the Texas Playboys at a dance half way between Bartlesville and Nowata. This would have been back in the late '30s. A fight broke out on the dance floor, and Grandpa found a place to sit on the stage, where he figured he'd be clear of the brawl.

Nowadays there aren't too many folks left who performed with Bob his own self, although there are plenty of musicians who played with musicians who played with Bob.

I am within three degrees of Bob Wills. I've sung in public with my wife. My wife played fiddle on TV with guitarist Eldon Shamblin. Eldon not only played guitar with Bob, he served Bob as manager of the Texas Playboys.

(That TV appearance was in September 1989, on "Oklahoma's Swinging Country," a weekly half-hour show on the Rogers State College TV station. That half-hour show took six hours to get on tape. Debbie Campbell sang on the show, J. D. Walters played steel guitar, and Darrell Magee played piano and served as host.)

Back in December I posted an entry about the Master Singers' Anglican chant versions of "The Shipping Forecast," later enhanced with a link to their other big hit, "The Highway Code."

This week, reader Anne Kroehle sends me a link to another interesting text set to Anglican chant: The King's Singers presenting frequency changes for BBC radio in November 1978. (She also says there was a TV version of this, and wonders if it's out there on the web somewhere.)

The site that hosts this file, Vintage Broadcasting has a wonderful and extensive collection of sound clips of test signals, start and close of day announcements, station jingles, and other bits of British radio ephemera.

Here's the page about the 1978 frequency changes with links to the King's Singers' piece mentioned above, final broadcasts before the changes, and first broadcasts on the new stations.

Here's a page about the BBC Light Programme, with two stirring but very different arrangements of the "Oranges and Lemons" station theme from the '40s or '50s. I can imagine someone getting chills hearing these again, after all these years.

I still get a little thrill hearing "Lilliburlero". When I was in 5th or 6th grade, I asked for and got a shortwave receiver. I scanned the dial between sunset and bedtime, picking up Radio Nederlands English language programming, Radio Canada, Deutsche Welle, the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, Voice of America, and sometimes more exotic stations like Kol Israel. But the signal I religiously sought was that of the BBC World Service. The top of every hour began with the announcer saying, "This is London," followed immediately by "Lilliburlero", then several timing pips, and the announcer again, "Oh-four hours Greenwich Mean Time. BBC World Service. The news, read by...." In the days before cable news and the Internet, the BBC's shortwave broadcasts were a window on the wider world. Now, of course, you can listen to all the BBC's stations, including the domestic stations, over the Internet.

Tomorrow, on the third anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, Trinity Episcopal Church will host a citywide service of remembrance, featuring a performance of Gabriel Faure's Requiem. The Requiem will be performed by singers from Coventry Chorale, the Trinity Church Choir, and many other local choirs.

Trinity Episcopal Church is at 5th & Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. Parking is available on the street, and in the church's lot at 6th & Detroit. The performance will begin at 8:46 am.

On the first anniversary of the attacks, Tulsa was one of hundreds of cities around the world to participate in the Rolling Requiem, performances of Mozart's Requiem beginning at 8:46 am local time. The Rolling Requiem was a one-time event, but it has spawned annual remembrances in many cities.

Faure's Requiem is a favorite -- I wrote something about it, and about the spiritual benefits of pondering the words of the Requiem, last summer, which you can read here.

One of the lovely things about my room at the Hampton Inn in East Aurora is the Sony Dream Machine -- a twin-alarm clock radio and CD player. The alarms are easy to set. It has a "nap" function -- you can set an alarm for so many minutes from now, rather than having to do the math in your head.

Back home, my children listen to CDs as they go to sleep. Joseph sometimes listens to Love-A-Byes, a sweet collection of lullabyes filled with lyrics about parental love and God's watchful care. He's been listening to it since he was small. We managed to find a CD copy before our cassette wore out. Other times he wants to hear Riders in the Sky, or part of one of the Gospels (from a CD set of the NIV), or some soft classical strings. Katherine likes the Wiggles' "Go to Sleep, Jeff".

I don't do this at home -- maybe I should, but at the hotel each night I drift off to sleep and wake up to music of my choosing. It settles my brain and blocks out any stray noises from the hallway, the air conditioner, or the micro-fridge.

On this trip, that music is Sergei Rachmaninoff's Vespers, or All-Night Vigil, performed by the Robert Shaw Chorale. It is beautiful a cappella music for mixed chorus. Rachmaninoff's harmonies and embellishments are built around ancient Russian chants. The lyrics are from the Psalms and the Orthodox liturgy. Years ago, the Coventry Chorale performed several selections from the work, in Russian. As we worked on pronunciation, we had opportunity to read through the lyrics in English. The texts are filled with the glory of Christ, the Victor over Death. Here is a link to texts and audio files of another recording of this work. And here is a review of a performance of the work.

Here is an English translation of one of my favorite movements from the work, Voskreseniye Hristovo videvshe

10. Having Seen the Resurrection of the Lord

Having beheld the resurrection of Christ,
let us worship the holy Lord Jesus,
the only Sinless One.
We venerate Thy Cross, O Christ,
and we hymn and glorify Thy holy resurrection,
For Thou art our God, and we know no other than Thee;
we call on Thy name.
Come, all you faithful,
let us venerate Christ's holy resurrection.
For, behold, through the cross
joy has come into all the world.
Ever blessing the Lord,
let us praise His resurrection,
for by enduring the cross for us,
He has destroyed death by death.

A bit of Internet serendipity:

The news reached me that longtime BBC weatherman Michael Fish was being put out to pasture for the sin of being almost 60 and not at all telegenic. I remember watching his nightly forecasts during business trips to the UK.

The article was an op-ed piece by Conservative MP Boris Johnson, who referred to Fish's "sex maniac's moustache".

It may have been his permanently bashful air. It may have been his sex maniac's moustache. Perhaps it was something to do with the way he goggled at the camera in the manner of a rattled maths master asked at the last minute to give out the prizes. It may have been the colossal Britishness of Fish, not just evinced by his constant talk of weather, but his faint air of apology for the frost and the drizzle and the general damp. It may have been the unremitting politeness with which he broke the bad news about tomorrow's downpour, like a man in the Tube, reluctantly tugging your sleeve to announce that you are treading on his toe.

The piece goes on to present some interesting stats on weather forecasting -- you would attain a 76% accuracy rating if you always predicted that tomorrow will be just like today. (That may be true in England. I doubt it's true in Oklahoma.)

I only vaguely remembered what Michael Fish looked like, and couldn't imagine what kind of mustache fit that description (Daliesque? Fu Manchu? Toothbrush?), so I googled his name and found a photo here, along with a bio. (That link no longer works, but here is a gallery on Michael Fish's own website, showing the evolution of his facial hair over the decades.) Further googling led me to the lyrics to a song by Rowan Atkinson in praise of Mr. Fish.

[Rowan] Atkinson: Michael Fish, quite simply the most charismatic figure in the history... of entertainment.

[Angus] Deayton and Singers: He tells it straight... to the nation... every night... he's an inspiration... He tells the truth...

Atkinson: He does, he tells it to you, he tells it to you.

Deayton and Singers: Monday to Friday...

Atkinson: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and sometimes Saturday and Sunday.

Deayton and Singers: His moustache... is always tidy...

The site with the lyrics looked interesting -- a tribute to something called "Chart of the Flops", which appears to have been a radio program similar to Dr. Demento. Here is the list of songs that made the chart in its 10 year history, with lyrics for many of them. Included are Dr. Demento standards and classic American novelty tunes like "Fish Heads", "Monster Mash", "Hello Mudduh", "Der Fuehrer's Face", several selections each from Weird Al, They Might Be Giants, and Tom Lehrer, along with their counterparts from across the pond -- Monty Python, Peter Sellers, the Goons, the Goodies.

One of the songs on the list was "The Highway Code" by the Master Singers, which is apparently the British rules of the road set to music. I have not hear that, but years ago I heard another one of their songs on Dr. Demento -- "Weather Report", which was a weather forecast set in Anglican chant and sung to perfection. (It may not sound much to you, but it had me laughing.) I googled the Master Singers and found this blog entry, which contained a link to an MP3 file of "Weather Report".

Both "Highway Code" and "Weather Report" hit the British charts in 1966. The songs were produced by George Martin, who also was producer for the Beatles. One website (which has a good description of Anglican chant) says that the Master Singers later became the King's Singers (who have a new Christmas album), but I see nothing on the King's Singers website mentioning that, although the group unofficially began at Cambridge a year before the two singles reached the charts. But this page says the group consisted of four teachers from Abingdon School, and that they backed Peter Sellers on a cover of the Beatles' "Help!"

I had googled this before, but had always come up empty in the past. Which brings us back to the weather and Michael Fish, which is what started me down this path.

Go and have a listen to the weather report.

UPDATE: You can hear the current shipping forecast -- one is included in the Master Singers' version -- at the BBC weather website, which has a map explaining what Forties Cromarty Dogger Fisher German Bight means. Link courtesy Two Chaps Talking, who say: "Listening to the Shipping News on a short wave radio, or indeed via their website, is a rare delight and should be enjoyed regularly for its calming effect."

UPDATE again: Fixed a link above, which was to a blog category rather than the permanent link to the blog entry. Also, someone reported to me he clicked on the link for the MP3 file and was greeted with a very rude ad about body part enlargement. I double-checked and nothing like that happened to me -- I suspect the computer he's using has some spyware on it, or else the previous site he visited "respawned" and popped up a window as he left it. Anyway, please know that I will not deliberately link you to something rude, so if something like this happens to you, please e-mail me at blog at batesline dot com and let me know.

Yet another UPDATE: A thoughtful reader from the UK has sent a link to an MP3 of "The Highway Code" by the Master Singers. Be aware that these files may disappear at any time, and be considerate of the bandwidth of those who are hosting them. Another reader, with an e-mail address from the Royal College of Music, writes:

Actually, two of the Master Singers (including Geoffrey Keating) were teachers at Cheadle Hulme School, Cheshire. They were there by 1965. Geoffrey Keating moved on to Millfield in 1970. They may all have been at Abingdon before 1965, I suppose. Members of the Master Singers and the King Singers were friends (a Cambridge connection probably), and the Kings Singers came to sing at Cheadle Hulme, but I don't think that there was any overlap in membership. The Master Singers were a few years older than the first Kings Singers, as I recall.

One more UPDATE (1 October 2004): A reader points out, correctly, that this isn't plainsong at all, it's Anglican chant, which is harmonized, while plainsong is unison.

Another UPDATE (26 September 2006): On the anglican-music mailing list earlier this year, John Botari believes he has identified the three chants used for "Weather Forecast":

I once took the trouble to figure out which chants were used for The Weather Forecast; there are three of them (sung A-B-C-B-A).

Here's what I came up with:

A - George Mursell Garrett (1834-97)
The only place that I could find this one was
at #268 in the ECUSA Anglican Chant Psalter,
in Ab. (Certainly *not* where the Mastersingers
found it!)

B - W. Taylor
Found (in Db) at #232 in The Parish Psalter
with Chants (ed. Sydney Hugo Nicholson), or
(in D) at #129 and #335 in the Oxford Chant
Book No. 1.

c - Stephen Elvey (1805-60)
Found (in G) at #116 in The Parish Psalter,
or (in F) at #9 and #342 in the ECUSA Anglican
Chant Psalter.

Yet another UPDATE (7 May 2007): Helen Keating, wife of Geoff Keating, one of the Mastersingers (using her spelling), has written me with the definitive account of the Mastersingers, the Highway Code, and the Weather Report.

The Kiev (Ukraine) Symphony Chorus and Orchestra will perform this Friday night at 8 p.m. at Union Performing Arts Center, as part of their 2003 US tour. These talented musicians are a symbol of the resurgence of music, culture, and faith in the old Soviet Union.

The chorus was founded in 1992 by a visiting American musician, who organized the first Ukrainian performance of Handel's Messiah in over 70 years. The following year the chorus was expanded to 100 singers and an orchestra was added. Over time, a church of 600 members and ministries to widows and orphans emerged as part of a larger organization called Music Mission Kiev.

The link above will take you to their repertoire for this concert tour, which includes works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky. I am particularly looking forward to the selection of Slavic a capella pieces. As a member of Coventry Chorale, I had the privilege some years ago to sing selections from Rachmaninoff's Vespers, an a capella setting of ancient Orthodox chants. This music will give you goosebumps, and all the more when you know how the lyrics glorify Christ and exult in his incarnation and resurrection.

The link above will take you to the website of Christ Presbyterian Church (my home church), which is cosponsoring the concert with the TU music department and Reformed University Fellowship (a campus ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America). Tickets are $10, and most area Christian bookstores have them for sale.

Reflections in d minor, another Oklahoma-based weblog, with an emphasis on classical music, links to a biographical survey and analysis of the music French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), by Terry Teachout, in the June issue of Commentary.

Fauré's Requiem (text and translation here) is one of my favorite choral works. I particularly love the movement "In Paradisum", which beautifully weds text and music, and leads the listener to the gates of the New Jerusalem:

In paradisum deducant angeli:
In tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres,
Et perducant te in civitatem sanctem Jerusalem.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat,
Et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
Aeternam habeas requiem.

Into paradise may the angels lead you:
May your arrival be greeted by the martyrs,
And may they lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem.
Choirs of angels sing to you,
And with Lazarus, once a poor man,
May you have eternal rest.

Christian sages from Richard Baxter to C. S. Lewis follow the apostle Paul in exhorting us to set our minds on things above. The Requiem, with its dire warnings and its hope of eternal rest, can help us in that regard.

This year's September 11 memorial service at Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Tulsa will feature Fauré's Requiem, performed by the Coventry Chorale and members of other Tulsa choral groups. Details to be added to this entry later.

The most difficult part of heavenly contemplation is, to maintain a lively sense of heavenly things upon our hearts. It is easier merely to think of heaven a whole day, than to be lively and affectionate in those thoughts a quarter of an hour.

Faith is imperfect -- for we are renewed but in part -- and goes against a world of resistance; and, being supernatural, is prone to decline and languish, unless it be continually excited. Sense is strong according to the strength of the flesh; and, being natural, continues while nature continues. The objects of faith are far off; but those of sense are nigh. We must go as far as heaven for our joys. To rejoice in what we never saw, nor ever knew the man that did see, and this upon a mere promise of the Bible, is not so easy as to rejoice in what we see and possess.

It must, therefore, be a point of spiritual prudence, to call in sense to the assistance of faith. It will be a good work, if we can make friends of these usual enemies, and make them instruments for raising us to God, which are so often the means of drawing us from him. Why hath God given us either our senses or their common objects, if they might not be serviceable to his praise? Why doth the Holy Spirit describe the glory of the New Jerusalem in expressions that are even grateful to the flesh? Is it that we might think heaven to be made of gold and pearl? or that saints and angels eat and drink? No, but to help us to conceive of them as we are able, and to use these borrowed phrases as a glass, in which we must see the things themselves imperfectly represented, till we come to an immediate and perfect sight. Besides showing how heavenly contemplation may be assisted by sensible objects, this chapter will also show how it may be preserved from a wandering heart.

-- Richard Baxter, The Saints' Everlasting Rest, Chapter 15

Participants in this year's Tulsa course of the Royal School for Church Music will sing several Choral Evensong services around Tulsa this week. Here's the schedule:

Monday 14 July - Thursday 17 July 7:45 p.m. - University United Methodist Church 5th Street and South College Avenue

Friday 18 July
6:00 p.m. - First Presbyterian Church
7th and Boston Avenue

Sunday 20 July
4:00 p.m. - Trinity Episcopal Church
5th and Cincinnati

The course participants will also sing the morning liturgy at Trinity
Episcopal Church on Sunday 20 July at 11:15 a.m.

James Litton - Director; Jeremy Bruns - Organist

Music by Shephard, Archer, Bairstow, Sowerby, Sumsion, Smith, Bainton, Mundy and Howells

Choral evensong is a brief, traditional Anglican service that combines the reading of scripture, Psalms set to Anglican chant, and eloquent prayers that are as relevant today as when they were composed over 400 years ago. It is a world away from contemporary worship services that seem more focused on the worship leader than on God. Make it a point to attend at least one service this week.

This week, the week of the 4th Sunday after Trinity, each evening's service will include the following "collect" (prayer):

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal: Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ's sake our Lord.

We take a break from continuous coverage of "Forfeit 4 Greater Taxes" to bring you a musical interlude. This month's "bonus selections" on the Coventry Chorale website are three Robert Frost poems set to music by American composer Randall Thompson: "The Road Not Taken", "Choose Something Like a Star", and "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening". That last piece would be a good choice to cool you down at 4 o'clock on a July afternoon. The featured piece , in honor of Independence Day, is a medley of Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, arranged by Wilhousky.

I want to be sure that all our Tulsa readers are aware of Coventry Chorale's upcoming performance of masses by Schubert and Schumann, Monday, May 12th, 7:30 pm at Trinity Episcopal Church, 5th & Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa. We performed the Schubert piece at Grace Episcopal Church in Ponca City last week, and it sounded beautiful and was well received.

The Chorale's website features a couple of Eastertide selections from our CD of works by the late Thomas Matthews, organist and choirmaster of Trinity Episcopal Church -- "The Day of Resurrection" and an organ improvisation on the hymn tune "Nassau". Stop by and have a listen.