“My Beer Is Rheingold, The Dry Beer” jingle [c1952]

My topic for my research and writing course for this semester has been given initial approval by my professor. Inspired more than anything by an internal report on the marketing of the innovative new Rheingold “Chug-a-Mug” beer bottle in 1961 (meant for exactly what it says), I will be writing a paper on the “crisis” of beer bottling in the 1950s and 1960s. Faced with increasing competition from aluminum cans and with the shift from returnable bottles (to get one’s deposit back) to no-return (“one-way”) glass bottles, the beverage bottling industry needed innovative designs and marketing to prove that bottles were still the superior form from which to consume beer. I will be digging through industry literature from the period to write a short history. To celebrate having a topic, above is posted Rheingold’s famous jingle and a period advertisement (1953). If you’re age 50+ and grew up in New York City, you’ll probably know it by heart.

8 1/2” x 11”, full page ad. New York: Paillard Products, Inc. (1953). (via)

(via)

Chug-a-Mug… somehow did not become a staple on college campuses.

“Green Valentine Blues” by Allen Ginsberg [1954]

Ginsberg composed “Green Valentine Blues in Mexico in 1954 (around Valentine’s Day?) and recorded it at . From The Allen Ginsberg Project (who posted about this song this morning):

Allen: “In Mexico, I’d lived on a cacao plantation for three months in Chiapas rain forest, solitary wondering where I’d ever find love, amid insect-eating blossoms and giant palms, caoba (mahogany) trees and one plant with a huge heart-shaped leaf. “Green Valentine” echoes some old Tin Pan Alley, music hall barbershop, almost vaudeville number, sentimental like “My Yiddishe Mama”, the kind of thing you sing to yourself in bed..”

An early recording (chez Cassady’s) can be found on Holy Soul, Jelly Roll [Music. History.’s source for the music] and also on this 2010 curiosity, The Beat Generation Music and Poetry.

“Lilac Wine (Dance with Me)” by Eartha Kitt [1953]

To many listeners “Lilac Wine” is only a song on Jeff Buckley’s sublime 1994 album Grace (his version). The song, however, had been written 44 years earlier for an obscure musical revue. In 1953 Eartha Kitt became the first major pop artist to record and release the song. It was included that year on her first 12” LP, That Bad Eartha, the album that cemented her sex kitten persona. (“Santa Baby” had been recorded at the same sessions and became her biggest hit when it was released in December.)

“Shuckin’ the Corn” by Flatt & Scruggs With The Foggy Mountain Boys [1957]

It’s been just about that long since Camp Randall hosted such a huge game. Badgers, it’s just about time to start shuckin’ the corn!

“Faces in the Jazzamatazz” by Ken Nordine [1959]

An Exploration of Music and Poetry, Day 9: Poetry and Jazz

To describe to another person the experience of listening to a certain song or genre is rather difficult. Most of us simply lack the vocabulary to convey well an idea as abstract as music. Instead of using creative similes and metaphors that express the web of associations we experience while listening, we rely on flimsy comparisons to other genres, other musicians, or other songs.

In other words, saying Ken Nordine is “poetry meets jazz as spoken by the guy who narrates movie trailers” might be perfectly accurate, but it fails altogether to communicate the way the spoken word artist annunciates, the way his pace changes, his many uses of onomatopoeia, or his wide cultural references. I, for one, can’t do it (which is why I run a blog where you can hear the examples). One can only listen to Ken Nordine for a short time because his phrases are so thick with both imagery and linguistic flourishes.

Though not in any way tied to the beat poets, outsiders grouped Nordine’s Word Jazz albums with the beats’ own poetry and jazz output (for example, Kerouac’s “American Haikus”). For our purposes, Nordine and the beats were simply two avenues through which the same artistic impulse found an outlet in the late 1950s.

A final note: The following lines from “Faces in the Jazzamatazz made it a perfect post for last Saturday (the day of the supposed rapture), but I have been too busy to post until tonight.

Have another drink baby! Live it up!
Lets have a ball …. before the great big all,
goes up in fire and brimstone…

Doomsday boys and girls of dust,
come blow your horn for Mr. Must.
Full circles roll in spiral down,
into the fright of the thinnest town.

“American Haikus (Excerpt)” by Jack Karouac [1958]

An Exploration of Music and Poetry, Day 8: The Beats

By the 1950s, jazz had taken on different societal roles than the Harlem bands of the late ’20s and ’30s. Bebop and cool jazz explored completely different aesthetics, but each offered a more intellectual aural experience than earlier jazz dance bands. Moreover, the advent of the LP liberated these sound experiments from the short time constraints of previous commercial records (best exemplified by Norman Granz’s Jam Sessions). After some 40 years, jazz had grown from humble origins to a respected high art. It should not come as a surprise that artists from other “high-brow” fields, including poetry, took an interest in modern jazz.

Which brings us to the beat writers. As we will see in the coming week, the beats took a strong interest in both popular and underground music. In a single month in 1958, jack Kerouac recorded two albums of jazz and poetry. The second paired him with his friends saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. In an ingenious match, their cool jazz licks danced around Kerouac haikus on track one of Blues and Haikus.

“Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.” 

-Jack Kerouac in his introduction to “American Haiku”

Replace “Haiku” with “cool jazz” and the meaning still applies. Both forms drove to be economic yet expressive. In “American Haikus” each syllable and each note overflows with nuance and implication. Besides reacting to Kerouac’s phrases and tempos, the music separates each of his poetic vignettes, allowing the listener to flesh out each scene in his or her own imagination.

A note on the poetry: Unlike a number of other poets who tried English language haiku, Kerouac was particularly perceptive to maintaining the Japanese use of kigo, or season words. In the example above you’ll notice that most contain a word or phrase that projects a season (“snow,” “football field”) or a time of day (“moon”) or both.

A reminder on originality: That a few beats performed poetry with jazz is not as revolutionary as some have made it out to be. Though unique and creative, they were not the first. Even early in his career Langston Hughes sometimes recited poems backed by jazz music. 

“I’m Packing Up” by Earl King [1955]

Tonight I’ve begun packing up my things in preparation for a move down the road for a summer of of life planning with my fiancee. :) When New Orleans R&B legend Earl King sang about packing up, he was ditching his unfaithful sweetheart. I’m confident I won’t ever have to re-post this song with that meaning. 

“Silent George” by Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra with Myra Johnson [1950]

It’s always good to remind people that dirty music did not begin with hip-hop. It’s been around as long as music (of any kinds). In this case, we get a raunchy rhythm and blues tune from 1950 about a woman who slowly falls for a creep named Silent George who she catches “peeping through a keyhole” and “blowing his top” at 4:30AM. That’s what women like, isn’t it?

“In the Garden” by Tennessee Ernie Ford [1956]

My grandfather passed away Christmas Eve. My grandmother (his wife) had been diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer just the day before. She declined rapidly from both grief and illness.

Last weekend my father and I got Grandma out of the nursing home so she could witness some of the estate auction we had organized. She loved garage sales and we figure that the three-plus hours she spent watching her own stuff sell in a massive sale brought her some finality as she faced death. This past week, just a few days before Easter, she passed away. (No, holidays have not gone as planned…)

Both of them requested that the old hymn “In the Garden” be sung during their funerals. Moreover, while we planned my grandfather’s funeral on Christmas day we put my grandmother’s CD of Tennessee Ernie Ford hymns. They brought her such joy and comfort that she asked that we somehow incorporate the music into her own funeral. For the hour-long viewing before her funeral service Saturday, Ford’s Amazing Grace: 40 Treasured Hymns played quietly in the church. It was actually really touching.

One of the hymns included on the CD was indeed “In the Garden.” So to (I hope) bring a bit of closure to my writings about the deaths of my grandparents, I thought I would post Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1956 recording of “In the Garden,” which initially appeared on his first gospel album (Hymns). Though it sounds quite antiquated compared even to some of the rock and roll that year, Hymns was the second best selling record of 1957.

“Ticket Agent” by Lightnin’ Hopkins [1954]

Lightnin’ Hopkins was at his peak in the early 1950s. Stellar songwriting, superb guitar picking, and classic blues singing feature on nearly every Hopkins track from the period. “Ticket Master”—about a man watching his love leave for good on an outbound train— is simply a great blues scene sung in typical 12-bar blues format (A-A-B) for double emphasis on the singer’s plight. Moreover, the song highlights the transition from rural acoustic blues to the northern (Chicago) electric form. On “Ticket Master,” Hopkins sings and plays in a rural solo style, but with a loud electric guitar. 

This 1999 compilation Jake Head Boogie from whence this track comes is even better because most of the recordings lack the excessive reverb found on the original singles. What you hear is just Lightin’ Hopkins in a small recording room.