Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

Music Throwback: the Royal Guardsmen

John McCullough was also the Royal Guardsmen’s road manager on their first tour ,

You probably know the Royal Guardsmen for their string of hits featuring Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s dog in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz, versus the Red Baron, the real German flying ace of World War I.

My blogger buddy Chuck Miller wrote a blog post on adjustments in pop songs. Specifically, Snoopy v the Red Baron became Squeaky vs. the Black Knight in Canada over copyright concerns.

This inspired me to play my Royal Guardsmen’s Greatest Hits album that someone gave me, a collection from Australia. But reading the liner notes, I noticed that six of the 20 songs were listed with Unknown by the composer citation.

I decided to write my old buddy John Francis Burdett, the drummer of the group, who I met online when I had blogged some years ago about a single, the much darker Snoopy v. Osama. (Post is below the links.)

He wrote:

Any Wednesday – Written by: B. Masona. Real Name: Charlie Souza, a bassist, singer songwriter and producer affiliated with worldsoundproductions.com. In Groups: Cactus, Fortress, The New Rascals, The Tropics, White Witch

I Say Love – Written By: Barry Winslow, Billy Taylor

Leaving Me – Written by: Barry Winslow

Shot Down – Written by: John McCullough, Dick Holler. “John McCullough was also our road manager on our first tour and worked w/ Dick on Phil G.’s writing team.”

Mother, Where’s Your Daughter – Written by: D. Holler

But he wasn’t certain about Searching for the Good Times, so I asked my favorite musical expert Dustbury, who ascertained that it was a guy named Bob Stone. John said that Bob Stone had written Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves for Cher.

Any Wednesday, a/k/a, Wednesday, is one of my favorite of their songs. I hear a little of As Tears Go By in it. The Royal Guardsmen covered that Rolling Stones tune, not incidentally.

Listen to:

Any Wednesday, #97 in 1967, here or here
I Say Love, #72 in 1968, here or here
Leaving Me here or here

Shot Down here
Searching for the Good Times here or here
Mother, Where’s Your Daughter, #112 in 1969, here

The Silent Parade against lynching in America

‘America has lynched without trial 2,867 Negroes in 31 years and not a single murderer has suffered.

“10,000 black men, women, and children wordlessly paraded down NYC’s Fifth Avenue in 1917. Their tactic was silence, but their message resounded: anti-black violence is unjust and un-American.”

From Bowery Boys History

“The Silent Parade of July 28, 1917, was unlike anything ever seen in New York City. Today it is considered New York’s (and most likely America’s) first African-American civil rights march…

“This extraordinary procession was organized by the burgeoning National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a group of concerned black and white activists and intellectuals which had formed less than a decade earlier in New York.

“The march was organized in direct response to a horrible plague of violence against black Americans in the 1910s, culminating in the East St. Louis Riots, a massacre involving white mobs storming black neighborhoods in sheer racial animus. Two sets of riots in May and July 1917 left almost 200 people dead. Rioters burned black neighborhoods, cutting off water hoses and watched as families fled the burning buildings — to be picked off by gunmen.”

Google is financially supporting, and highlighting on its page, the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching in America presentation, which you should spend time listening to.

From Heavy.com:

“‘The children will lead the parade followed by the Women in white, while the Men will bring up the rear. The laborer, the professional man – all classes of the Race – will march on foot to the beating of muffled drums…’

“The flyer also contained a list of mottos that were to be used on posters during the Silent Parade. Among them:

“‘Make America safe for Democracy.’
‘Thou shalt not kill.’
‘America has lynched without trial 2,867 Negroes in 31 years and not a single murderer has suffered.’
‘200,000 Black men fought for your liberty in the Civil War.’
‘The first blood for American Independence was shed by a Negro- Crispus Attucks.”
‘12,000 of us fought with Jackson at New Orleans.'”

Justice, compassion and the common good

“Poverty is a matter of cash, not character.”

There’s a delineation in my mind about how one should do Christianity – and I think the faith is action, not just being – versus how certain elements of the faith have manifest themselves.

The theological divide is clear in these two titles: Advancing faith as a powerful force for justice, compassion and the common good versus Has Evangelical Christianity Become Sociopathic?

It causes one to wonder Is Your God Dead? “Building walls, banning refugees and ignoring the poor are the social expressions of bankrupt theologies…” ‘Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol,’ Heschel writes.”

On a secular basis, I believe those same values of “justice, compassion and the common good” should be pursued by the state. I’ve become really fascinated that Finnish citizens were given universal basic income, without any reporting on how it would be spent. Not surprisingly, the recipients reported lower stress levels. Perhaps not intuitively, it provided them greater incentive to work.

In this TEDx talk, historian Rutger Bregman long believed, as many people do, that poverty was the result of a lack of character. But now he’s come to believe “Poverty is a matter of cash, not character.” In fact, he recommends that those folks doling out checks to the poor could be eliminated, with the money going to those in need.

To that end, I oppose drug testing or screening for public assistance applicants or recipients. “Such laws demonize the poor, violate constitutional rights, and are a waste of government money.” Fiscal conservatives should be drawn to that third point, the clear cost-ineffectiveness of these actions.

However, “maybe there is a difference between ‘handouts’ and subsidies designed to induce specific behavior. OK, I’ll bite, but that means that all of Wall Street — and shareholders too — should have been subjected to drug testing after receiving bailouts in 2008 and 2009.”

The Lydster: Planning for fatherhood

Chris wants to know:

Did you always want to be a dad?

I’d have to say no. Fatherhood was never anything I ever gave more than a passing thought until I was about 40 and I was with someone who wanted to have kids.

Before that, I went out with a couple women who had already had children and weren’t going to have more, and that was fine by me.

I didn’t dislike children. I was/am very fond of my nieces, Rebecca and Alex, and my wife’s brothers’ girls too. In the family photos, it’s me carrying Rebecca when we were in NYC. I’d be coloring with her at my maternal grandmother’s funeral in Binghamton. I still marvel that I picked out a nice reversible outfit that Alex wore for a couple years.

And I’m actually pretty good with other people’s rugrats. My daughter is amazed and more than slightly embarrassed by my willingness to distract crying babies on the bus, often successfully.

BTW, dating women with young kids can be very complicated. Usually, she doesn’t want you to be too seriously involved in her children’s lives until she is sure the romantic couple seems secure. Yet she can’t get TOO involved with you unless she thinks you’ll like her kids and vice versa.

Of course, NOW I am happy about fatherhood.

What are some things that you’ve learned through life that you hope to pass on to your daughter?

It’s always this tightrope. I don’t want her to be filled with my opinions about religion or race, for example, and want her to discover for herself. Yet I have learned a few things on these and other topics, and need to pass along some of that foundational structure, without her being a philosophical clone of me.

I’ve done a good job introducing her to the Beatles and Motown, but there’s plenty more to share.

And the truth is that we do think alike a lot, even in relationship with my wife/her daughter. The two of us literally hear things the same way quite often.

C is for cultural appropriation

“Sometimes it’s annoying and disrespectful, but relatively harmless (like Anglos who have no idea what Cinqo de Mayo commemorates ‘celebrating’ by drinking too much tequila).”

If there’s something I DON’T want to write about, it’s cultural appropriation. It’s a no-win topic. So why tackle it? Because it keeps bubbling up in my circle of friends and acquaintances.

In response to a New York Times article, an NPR piece stated Commentary: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible. And it’s from there that I’ll describe the phenomenon:

“Writer Maisha Z. Johnson offers an excellent starting point by describing it not only as the act of an individual, but an individual working within a “‘power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.’

“That’s why appropriation and exchange are two different things, Johnson says — there’s no power imbalance involved in an exchange. And when artists appropriate, they can profit from what they take, while the oppressed group gets nothing.”

This distinction is important, and I believe addresses Frank S. Robinson’s post about “the newest gambit of politically correct grievance agitprop.”

The phenomenon is not new, actually. According to the Washington Post, the term goes back to the 1970s or ’80s. Bo Derek’s cornrow hairstyle in the 1979 movie 10 was a REAL issue to some folks, but I’ll admit I didn’t get it.

Weekly Sift had this:

“Cultural appropriation is when somebody from a dominant culture tries to acquire fame and fortune (or just look cool) by using stuff created by a dominated culture…. Sometimes it’s done with respect and a share-the-wealth attitude. (Paul Simon didn’t just steal the South African sound, he toured with and helped popularize authentic South African bands.)” [There are some who would disagree.]

“Sometimes it’s annoying and disrespectful, but relatively harmless (like Anglos who have no idea what Cinqo de Mayo commemorates ‘celebrating’ by drinking too much tequila).

“And sometimes it results in a significant injustice, like Elvis becoming a musical icon while the black pioneers he imitated couldn’t get radio time.” Presley became a source of conflict in my own household growing up.

My father HATED Elvis, but I thought he was bringing his own rockabilly sensibilities to the mix. (Now, if you want cultural appropriation, look at Pat Boone, whose vapid Tutti Fruiti squeezed Little Richard’s version out of the marketplace.) I had none of Elvis’ music until I went to college.

I saw this article about a Portland, OR “burrito eatery being shut down after the two white women who ran it were criticized for making food from a culture that wasn’t theirs.” I believe one or both of them jokingly suggested they “stole” the recipe, which helped generate outrage. I find that was a most unfortunate outcome.

I would suggest that the denigration of a culture, especially knowingly, such as Ted Nugent’s headdress in this context could also be seen as cultural appropriation.

So I believe cultural appropriation, different from cultural exchange, exists, and it’s undesirable. But I accept I don’t always know where the line is drawn.

For ABC Wednesday

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