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A nerd walks into a 2,000-year-old bar
Sometimes I really can’t believe I was here. A couple thousand years ago, if you wanted to meet up with a friend in Ostia, you could say, “I’ll meet you at that bar, you know, the one on Diana Street...
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Howl at the moon, shoot out the light
Had another wonderful evening at Gruene Hall last night. Stepped out on the street just to get the view my crazy talented friend Bill Harrison captured here. (Well I was a bit more vertical maybe.) The...
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This is not a rebel song. This is a rebel song
Here is U2 launching into the song they believed might actually spark violence if it were misunderstood: And here is a John Wayne movie’s anachronistic but stirring delivery of an actual rebel song:...
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Lady Bird Johnson’s recipe for King Ranch Chicken
If it is good enough for the Bird, it is good enough for me. This is also kind of a classic example of the mid-20th-century “open four cans of Campbell’s” school of cooking. (Bonus: Queen Elizabeth...
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Whorehouse music, Texas style. No kidding
Piano scholar and player James Goodwin has a number of videos up on YouTube. This, he says, “is an improvisation in the piano blues style that developed in the barrelhouses and whorehouses of Texas in...
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Don’t get Shakespeare? Not your fault. But the dude is funny
This week was the first Shakespeare Week in the UK, a nationwide deal where they try to bring the big guy’s works to life for elementary kids, a terrific idea and a tricky thing to do. Hell, it’s hard...
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Norteño “Honky-Tonk Angels,” a tune that keeps making hits
Heard on the radio yesterday: An old norteño version of the old, old Hank Thompson hit “Wild Side of Life.” “Mi Nueva Casa,” I learn from musica.com, was a 1982 hit for Los Invasores de Nuevo León,...
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Climb inside the workhorse that helped win World War II
Got a chance to crawl around inside the type of bomber my grandfather flew, a B-24 Liberator, today as several Collings Foundation aircraft visited our town. America’s most-produced plane of World War...
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Eyes: blue. Occupation: singer. Crime: seduction!
This is a few months before he starts singing for the Harry James orchestra; he’s 22. The charge of sleeping with a woman is revised to adultery when she turns out to be married, and eventually...
View ArticleLivetweets: The fall of the Alamo
Here in Feb. 23-March 6, 2021, we are again in the midst of the Alamo's “13 Days to Glory.” I've "livetweeted" the Alamo siege twice, in 2011 and 2020. This year, I thought I would collect the text of...
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