Neal Pomea

I just hope I can open the door to my house, that I am not shut in! I woke up and looked outside and indeed it looks to me like about 2 feet of snow on my patio. We're going to be hobbled by this for days. You know what JFK said about DC. Something like, it has all the charm of a northern city and all the efficiency of a southern one!

Got it here! From the Columbia 78. Shootin the Pistol

I think I have heard this Socarras thing in Joe Bussard's basement. Clarence Williams' Jazz Kings. Unfortunately the song itself is not available at Red Hot Jazz: http://www.redhotjazz.com/cwjazzkings.html

Django Reinhardt, or, as my wife called him the other day, Ringo Jinehart. Bill Evans. Jelly Roll Morton.

I can speak up for Harry Choates, Devil in the Bayou. Not only is the music so enjoyable, the cd producers Andrew Brown and David Sax did the best notes we have on this important figure in Cajun music. Now if only Choate(s) had recorded some of his great swing guitar playing. Supposedly that was his best stuff of all! On another note, Joe Bussard swears that Jimmy Murphy was the last great country music artist. Plays Murphy's music on his radio broadcasts just about every week.

The same thing happened in Washington DC with the station that played more bluegrass weekly than any other station in the country, WAMU. Demand was for more talk shows, the stuff you could get anywhere, while they relegated the unique stuff to HD radio. Strangely, one of the only music shows they kept was Hot Jazz Saturday Night (more of a big band era pop music show than a hot jazz thing anyway). Music is getting squeezed out everywhere.

On Bended Knee Great belly rubbing slow song!

Bobby Charles Guidry, composer of Walking to New Orleans and other swamp pop hits, has died at age 71. He had been in poor health the past few years. He will be missed. Obit here Yeah Yeah One Eyed Jack But I do

Just loved Tom Boswell's post in live chat at today's Washington Post, about Ken Griffey Jr. versus other players of his era: Tom Boswell: Junior is the perfect example of why we shouldn't throw open the doors of Cooperstown to all the cheaters. "Oh, everybody did it, so I don't want to keep anybody out, so I'll vote like there was no Steroid Age." What kind of Amoral Dumber-Than-A-Rock logic is that. The world is complicated. Deal with it. If you have a HOF vote, do your best to figure out who cheated __beyond a reasonable doubt__ and don't vote for 'em. But vote for the others. It's not perfect. But it's better than "I give up."

I remember George Carlin once had a routine where he named a whole bunch of sitcoms in some bizarre tense, one of which was "Had Gun, Would Have Traveled." I guess the western was something like what zombie and vampire movies and tv shows are to today's kids, the mythology we saw everywhere we looked!

I wondered about her weight too. She played a good part in Girl, Interrupted, which wasn't too bad a film.

Didn't I hear that he did it on purpose to get arrested, because he missed his daddy who was in jail. If he got arrested then they would be together?

Conversely, would the depressed people in these states where many people report they are happy feel even more isolated and apart? It might actually be worse to be depressed in a happy state!

Rankings Findings published in Science magazine "Their results come from a comparison of two data sets of happiness levels in each state, one that relied on participants' self-reported well-being and the other an objective measure that took into account a state's weather, home prices and other factors that are known reasons to frown (or smile). The self-reported information came from 1.3 million U.S. citizens who took part in a survey between 2005 and 2008. "We wanted to study whether people's feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality — of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, etc — in their own state," Oswald said. The results showed the two measures matched up. "We were stunned when it first came up on our screens, because no one has ever managed to produce a clear validation before of subjective well-being, or happiness, data," [Andrew] Oswald [of the University of Warwick in England] said." Interesting results.

Enjoy it!

Look to the lower right of the screen and you will see a green plus sign and a red subtract sign. You can vote a post UP (you liked it) or DOWN (you didn't like it), as on Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Sometimes called Karma. That appears to be a feature that hasn't been activated yet, I'm guessing. I clicked it and it said I'd reached my quota (of zero I guess) for the day. If Jim is reading this, I move to suppress this voting function. I don't really see its use here.

Look to the lower right of the screen and you will see a green plus sign and a red subtract sign. You can vote a post UP (you liked it) or DOWN (you didn't like it), as on Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Sometimes called Karma.

I had the same problem earlier today using IE7. Not having that problem in IE8 or in Firefox 3.5. Earlier I had lines that would go from left to right for only a few characters before a line break. That doesn't seem to be an issue with IE8.

In the past they have always been previously released but obscure material. I guess copyright issues have prevented Oxford from being able to release the more usual suspects.

Look for bands led by Clarence Williams and Richard M. Jones http://www.redhotjazz.com/williams.html (Love the tuba of Cyrus St. Clair) http://www.redhotjazz.com/jones.html

Strange but I don't know of minstrelsy influencing Cajun and Creole music. Much of the foundation was laid on recordings by a black Creole (Amede Ardoin) on accordion with heavy syncopation and a white Creole of Irish and French origin, Dennis McGee on fiddle. (Neither were descended from the Nova Scotians who made their way to Louisiana after the Grand Derangement, the Acadians, who mixed with the French people already there (Creoles) etc. to become a new ethnic group, the Cajuns.) You can't say that the white players who picked up Ardoin and McGee tunes were mocking blacks or even imitating them. Strange dynamic. Iry LeJeune recorded quite a few tunes in the late 40s and early 50s that have become Cajun standards. Ardoin was a forgotten entity among the blacks in Louisiana when the first generation of Zydeco players started recording in the 1950s (Clifton Chenier, BooZoo Chavis, Good Rockin' Dopsie, etc.), but his reputation was rehabilitated by the time Ardoin's nephews (sons of Bois Sec Ardoin, the great black Creole accordionist) and others started playing a new kind of Zydeco in the 1980s. Today he is counted as a source of Zydeco music, which would have surprised him a lot in the 50s and 60s.

JSP found their own sources for the stuff on Cajun: Rare and Authentic (4 cd set) and had Chris King do the remastering. The source was mainly 78s in the collection of Ron Brown of Athens, Tennessee.

Breaking Out of New Orleans (JSP) http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Out-New-Orl...9/dp/B0002LPYVC Anybody have recommendations for the New Orleans Owls?

Joe's Record Paradise on Gude Drive in Rockville, though it is not Metro accessible.

Bookmarked! Well met, and quite a worthy subject! Great good luck to you.