Category Archives: Life

December 21, 1934.  Montana families continue their struggle against the one-two punch of prolonged drought and the Great Depression.  The headlines of the Helena Independent capture the concerns of the day: “BUSINESS RECOVERY PROGRAM ATTACKED“; “RELIEF BOSS OPPOSED TO DOLE PLANS“; and “NEEDY PULL PARADE IN NEW YORK IN BARRELS“.

Also, “VIGILANTES ARE TO CURB MOBS IN SHELBYVILLE.”

The Shelbyville of this headline is not in Montana but Tennessee.  The county courthouse in Shelbyville had been destroyed by a fire, set by members of a 500-person lynch mob, and local businessmen formed an armed vigilante group to help the national guardsmen maintain order.  There had been “three unsuccessful attempts to take [Ernest] K. Harris, young negro, on trial for attacking a 14-year-old white girl, from the courthouse,” the AP reported.  The judge halted the trial as the guardsmen resorted to riot guns and bayonets to fend off the mob, and the defendant — dressed in “trooper attire” — was rushed away to Nashville.  The mob set fire to the courthouse hours later.

• • • 

That same day, in the basement of the Masonic Temple at Jackson and Broadway, just a short walk from the South Main Street offices of the Helena Independent, a book of poetry is published by The State Publishing Company.  Its title is Corral Dust and its author is 49-year-old Montana surveyor, highway engineer and poet Robert “Bob” Fletcher.

Corral Dust consists of 38 western-themed poems with titles such as “Across the Divide” and “Open Range”, the latter of which closes with this verse:

Just give me country big and wide
With benchland, hills and breaks,
With coulees, cactus, buttes and range,
With creeks, and mountain lakes,
Until I cross the Great Divide,
Then, God, forgive each sin
And turn me loose on my cayuse
But please don’t fence me in.

Film producer Lou Brock obtains an advance copy of this poem and decides that a song called “Don’t Fence Me In” would be aces for Adiós, Argentina, his next Fox musical.  Brock contacts Fletcher and asks him to compose a cowboy song based on “Open Range.”  Fletcher knocks out a song and sends his effort to Brock, who shares it with Cole Porter,  the Broadway songwriter he has signed for the musical.  Brock urges Porter to buy the rights to “Don’t Fence Me In” from Fletcher.  A deal is struck faster than a scalded cat.

• • • 

Monday, January 7, 1935.  Cole Porter writes Bob Fletcher to thank him for his gift (a copy of Corral Dust) and to share with Fletcher his reworked version of “Don’t Fence Me In.”  Porter spruced up Fletcher’s original lyrics and set them to new music.  The two versions are shown below — placeholder symbols are used to align similar phrases.

 

A cayuse is a range-bred horse and hobbles are leg restraints for horses, mules and cattle.  The line Can’t look at hobbles may make for good meter but is an odd way to express the singer’s disdain for them.  Perhaps Porter meant to say Slip off the hobbles / Let me jump the fences but was in a hurry to finish the song before his upcoming world cruise.

• • • 

Earlier Monday, the New York Times was delivered to Cole Porter’s 41st-floor suite in the Waldorf Astoria.  A story on the back page (“COSTIGAN DEMANDS ANTI-LYNCHING LAW“) described an 800-person rally held Sunday afternoon at the Broadway Tabernacle Church, a twenty-minute walk from the Waldorf.  At the rally, Colorado Sen. Edward Costigan and five other speakers urged Congress to pass the Costigan-Wagner Act, which would make lynching a Federal offense.

The tabernacle’s pastor, Dr. Allan Knight Chalmers, read the text of a telegram to be sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt, soon to enter the third year of his presidency.  The telegram said, in part, “We sincerely trust that your omission of specific reference to lynching in your opening address to the Congress … does not mean any lessening of interest on your part.”

The “many Negroes” at the rally had likely read Saturday’s New York Age, the influential African-American news weekly, especially the article “NAACP REPORTS ONLY 16 LYNCHINGS FOR ’34“.  Though a decrease from the 28 lynchings in 1933, this number was still double the figure for 1932, the year Roosevelt was elected.

• • • 

“Don’t Fence Me In” may sing like a lazy trail-ride ballad, but its folksy style belies the songwriting skill behind it.  The Fletcher/Porter rhyme scheme is playful yet elegant:

(AA)BC (DD)BC EEEC
K(LL)M K(NN)M OOOC

where (XX) denotes internal (same-line) rhymes and C is the refrain Don’t fence me in.  Arguably, the internal rhymes (e.g., saddle/straddle, wander/yonder) are what gives this song its character and makes it fun to sing.  That, and cayuse, of course.

While Porter’s melody is cowhand-friendly, his chords are more show-tune than saloon.  For starters, the song is written in F, one of the less popular keys for guitar-based music. (One doubts he wrote it for ukulele.)  And Porter bedecks it with a panoply of chords:

Porter was assuredly not your “three chords and the truth” kind of composer.  He grew up with money, education and social standing, and he ran with the elites throughout his life.  His songs were far more likely to revel in the adventures of the heart (“Let’s Misbehave”, “Let’s Do It”, “Anything Goes”) than heartland themes.

So, we may conclude that “Don’t Fence Me In” gave scant expression to the passions and personal circumstances of the urbane Cole Porter… or did it?

• • • 

Adiós, Argentina was never finished.  By the spring of 1936, Lou Brock had signed on with Universal, and his ailing project hobbled from Fox to Paramount, where it eventually died. The last mention of Argentina in the trade press was a March 24, 1936 item in Film Daily, which noted that Waldorf Astoria’s house orchestra, led by Xavier Cugat, was invited to Hollywood to appear in the film.

This meant that “Don’t Fence Me In” would be not be recorded for commercial release for nearly ten years, when Warner Brothers (who now owned the rights) featured the song in its 1944 musical revue, Hollywood Canteen.  Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were the first to record it, but six other artists — The Three Suns, Kate Smith, Hal McIntyre, Sammy Kaye, Gene Autry, and Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights — would scramble to release their own renditions before year-end.  (Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy who famously performed the song in the film, did not record his version until 1948.)

The swoony Bing Crosby/Andrews Sisters recording would be the biggest hit — it reached #1 on the singles chart on December 23, bumping “I’m Making Believe” by Ella Fitzgerald and The Ink Spots from the top spot.  It remained the best-selling record in the U.S. well into February 1945.

• • • 

November 21, 1934.  As Bob Fletcher prepares to send his song to Cole Porter in New York, 17-year-old Ella Fitzgerald takes her spot on the Apollo Theater stage and gazes toward the restless audience.  It is “Amateur Night in Harlem” and Fitzgerald, by the luck of her draw and by dint of her talent, has earned her first opportunity to perform on stage — and for a live radio broadcast no less.  She sings two numbers in the style of well-known jazz vocalist Connee Boswell, and Ella wins the contest by audience acclaim.  [Boswell, who was white, was in turn inspired by blues singer Mamie Smith, who was black.]

By February 1935, Fitzgerald would score her first week-long engagement as a vocalist.  Soon, with the help of other band members, she would manage to move off the streets, give up dancing for spare change, start to bathe regularly, and buy new clothes.  By June, she would cut her first record with the Chick Webb Orchestra.

• • • 

February 7, 1956.  Ella Fitzgerald walks into the Capitol Records studio in Los Angeles to begin work on her Cole Porter Song Book project.  She is the first black artist to record “Don’t Fence Me In”, eleven years after the song made its debut.  Her rendition favors cabaret and cabernet over cowhide and trail rides.

That same day, the headline “NEGRO CO-ED IS SUSPENDED TO CURB ALABAMA CLASHES” appears on the front page of the New York Times.  Readers learn that “the University of Alabama’s first Negro student”, 26-year-old Autherine Lucy, was barred from campus “after showers of eggs, rocks and mud had marked her third day of classes.”  Lucy was “spirited off campus” by Tuscaloosa police in mid-afternoon and she returned home to Birmingham.  Violence continued into the night, as the mob smashed windows, burned trash, stoned the house of the university president, and pelted the police chief with eggs.

• • • 

The Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill was blocked by filibusters and died in the Senate.  As the NAACP noted, “Roosevelt refused to speak out in favor of the bill.  He argued that the white voters in the South would never forgive him … and he would therefore lose the next election.”  In the 21 years from the 1934 rescue of Ernest K. Harris to the 1956 rescue of Autherine J. Lucy, 78 blacks were lynched in the U.S. — the 78th being 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till — and federal law was silent on all.

Dwight Eisenhower was as disinclined as Franklin Roosevelt to get involved in civil rights. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, sent the following telegram to the president the day Till’s mutilated body was returned to his mother in Chicago:

THE PRESIDENT
THE WHITE HOUSE

I THE MOTHER OF EMMETT LOUIS TILL AM PLEADING THAT YOU PERSONALLY SEE
THAT JUSTICE IS METED OUT TO ALL PERSONS INVOLVED IN THE BEASTLY LYNCHING
OF MY SON IN MONEY MISS.  AWAITING A DIRECT REPLY FROM YOU.

MAMIE E BRADLEY

Bradley would wait in vain, on both counts.  Eisenhower never replied, and the defendants were acquitted at trial less than a month later.

• • •

“Don’t Fence Me In” was a very white song from a very white place.  Of the 546,000 people living in Montana in 1934, just 1,200 were black.  In rural parts of the state (i.e., almost all of it), the chances of meeting a black person were less than one in a thousand.  Only 0.9% of the land — not quite lots of land — was tended by “colored” farmers, a census category that included “Indians, Japanese, Chinese and all other nonwhite races” as well as blacks.  Fences, then, were mainly a white rancher’s concern.

The Fletcher/Porter composition would become a white standard — Mitch Miller recorded it in 1956, Patti Page and Perry Como in 1959, Ray Conniff Singers in 1961, Steve Lawrence in 1963 — and it remained popular well into my childhood.  I grew up with Miller’s album. My all-white classmates and I sang “Don’t Fence Me In” alongside “traditional” songs like “Oh! Susanna” and “Dixie.”  Nebraska author Lisa Knopp remembers tap-dancing to it.  Minnesota-born climber/entrepreneur Majka Burhardt recalls singing it, when she was 8, at her father’s second wedding.

Eventually, like most cherished items of popular culture, Don’t Fence Me In would become metaphorical.  Holocaust and internment camp survivors included it in the titles of their memoirs.  Libertarians adopted it as a rallying cry.  BMW retooled it to sell Mini Coopers.  TravelNevada appropriated it for a promotional campaign.  LGBT activists painted it on protest signs.  (That, Cole Porter would have appreciated.)

Schoolchildren may still sing it, but “Don’t Fence Me In” isn’t Roy Rogers’ song anymore. 

• • •

This is a map of North Carolina’s 10th and 11th US Congressional Districts, whose present boundaries date to 2013.  That year, the Republican-controlled state legislature carved the heavily-Democratic city of Asheville into two slices — the eastern slice (in red) was tacked onto a newly-extended tongue of the 10th District, while the western fragments (in blue) remained in the 11th.  This had the predictable effect of diluting the city vote and assuring that both districts would elect Republican congressmen.

Many people moved here because Asheville is a liberal oasis in a warm state.  They didn’t count on giving up their political voices in the bargain.  The boundaries of these districts were drawn explicitly to deny urban voters a fair say, and that isn’t fair play.

• • •

May 3, 2019.  Autherine Lucy Foster, now 89 years old, is assisted onto the stage of the Coleman Coliseum at the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa.  Before a cheering crowd of students and faculty, she is awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.  Foster’s suspension from the university had been reversed in 1988 and she returned there to earn a master’s degree in elementary education in 1991.  “When I walked in this room,” Foster recounts at the ceremony, “people were joyful and looking at me peaceful-like — and that’s much better than seeing someone frowning as if they don’t want you here.”

That same day, in People Magazine: “BLACK MISSISSIPPI STUDENT CLAIMS A WHITE MALE WAS NAMED SALUTATORIAN DESPITE HER HIGHER GPA.”  Olecia James, 18, filed a lawsuit in federal court vs. the Cleveland (Mississippi) School District, alleging that school officials adjusted her grade-point-average downward because she attended the “black” high school. If her “quality points” had not been discounted, James would have been class salutatorian (student with the second-highest GPA) and would have qualified for a $6,000 scholarship at the University of Mississippi.

Cleveland, a small town halfway between Jackson and Memphis, did not desegregate its high schools until 2017.  James is now attending Alcorn State University, a historically black institution whose African-American demographic (92.2%) approaches that of her former high school (99.7%) prior to its closing.

• • •

Causing injury to a person based on his race became a federal crime, unconditionally, on October 28, 2009, when Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law.  Shepard was a white, openly-gay Wyoming student who was robbed, tied to a fence, and beaten to death by two assailants on October 8, 1998.  Byrd was a 49-year-old black resident of Jasper, Texas, who was chained to a pickup truck by his ankles and then dragged along the road for miles, by a group of white supremacists on June 7, 1998.

The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2019, introduced by Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Tim Scott, would expand the scope of existing hate crime law to include conspiracy to commit such acts.  It passed the Senate by voice vote on February 14 and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it awaits further action.

Regrettably, federal law will continue to treat crimes based on a victim’s gender identity, sexual orientation or disability less harshly than those related to race.  One will still be able to harm a gay person because he is gay without committing a federal crime, as long as one does not cross state lines, or transport the victim across state lines, or use a weapon that crossed state lines, or otherwise interfere with interstate commerce.  The reason such limitations exist is because some lawmakers — as they did in 1935 — want them to exist.

• • •

Americans have variously been fence builders, fence cutters, fence sitters, fence climbers and fenced in.  But Bob Fletcher was right: we can’t stand fences.  Fences deny freedom, the ultimate good we want.  Though western skies and cottonwood trees are certainly worthy of song, less fear and less hate are what freedom-loving folks could use right now.

≡¦≡¦≡¦≡¦≡

My spouse is one of those enviable persons who falls asleep minutes after her head hits the pillow.  And I would be her prime envier, as it is much harder for me to disengage at night.  Things to do, trips to take, ideas to pursue, problems to fix… so much food for thought but so little time to clean the mental plate.

Many people play soft music to help them sleep, but I tend to listen to music analytically, so that usually doesn’t help.  One technique I do use to induce sleep is listening to long, dull podcasts — voices droning on about topics I don’t care about or barely comprehend are effective soporifics for me.

I have bookmarked several such podcasts, which I decided to share here for the benefit of my fellow nerd-insomniacs.  To make this list, a podcast must be at least 30 minutes long and have no ads or jarring theme music.  Speech must be clear and understandable so that one’s brain does not need to work to decipher it.  And extra credit for low-vocal-intonation British or Australian presenters — Americans try too hard not to sound dull.

I give each podcast a Z score, where more Zs correspond to greater monotony.  But I must warn you: repeated listening may lower your ability to remain disinterested.  Naturally, this means the podcast will lose effectiveness as a sleep aid, and you will run the risk of being entertained or learning something.

• The Science of Everything   Z Z Z 

A podcast that befits its name, S.O.E. is a series of 98 (to date) 45-to-60-minute monologs by Australian researcher/secularist/philosopher James Fodor.  His podcasts cover topics as wide-ranging as Political Ideologies, Minerals and Rocks, Cell Division, Magnetism and Disturbing Social Psychology Experiments.  Fodor’s comprehensive overviews of his topics resemble long-form Cliff’s Notes.  I do admire the breadth of his interests and the quirky, if not quixotic, nature of his endeavor.  But for insomniacs, many Zs are available here.

• Philosophy Now Radio Show   Z Z Z Z Z 

This is a series of 41 radio shows produced between 2011 and 2014 by the London-based magazine Philosophy Now.  Most of them were hosted by the magazine’s editor, the genial and pleasant-voiced Grant Bartley.  He and his guests discussed philosophy basics such as  right and wrong, tragedy in life, free will, and all the usual philosopher-suspects: Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Hume and Hegel.  Thankfully, for a show about philosophy, there are no annoying arguments about the meaning of trivial words.  However, Grant would often include a musical interlude halfway into the show — best to fall asleep before then.

• In Our Time   Z Z Z Z 

In Our Time is a long-running show on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, touching on philosophy, culture, religion, history and science.  Each 40-minute-long show features Melvyn Bragg and two or three guests engaging in a rather orchestrated discussion of topics as diverse as Papal Infallibility, The Muses, Circadian Rhythms, Cicero, and Pauli’s Exclusion Principle.  With over 800 podcasts at your fingertips, it is easy to find something uninteresting.

• MCMP Philosophy of Physics   Z Z Z Z 

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, part of the five-centuries-old Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Germany, recorded various workshop lectures on cosmology, gravity, time and relativity, from 2013 to 2015.  Although these podcasts are not posted at the university’s website, 65 of them are still available at player.fm.  All are in English but they vary in understandability.  I listened to several lectures all the way through, including Leibniz, Mach and Barbour and On Causal Explanations of Quantum Correlations, which shows that some talks are more accessible than others.  But most listeners can easily Z out.

• Perimeter Institute Video Library    Z Z Z Z Z 

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, records all of its public lectures, classroom lectures, and student dissertations.  The public lectures, as the name suggests, are intended for anyone with a sense of curiosity and so are unsuitable for insomniacs.  But the other lectures and dissertations are inscrutable enough to make most people fall asleep — as I am sure many of the attendees do.  The background clack of chalk on chalkboard only enhances the monotony.  Hundreds of lectures are posted here — head for the ones with “field theory” or “condensed matter” in the title.

• Your Money & You   Z Z Z 

Your Money & You is a Sunday morning talk-radio show presented on KDKA-AM by the Pittsburgh financial advisory firm Hefren-Tillotson.  The show is hosted by 70-year-old Executive VP James Meredith, who tends to offer reasonable but often rambling advice to listeners and callers.  Meredith can get a little cranky at times and is quite evidently an Anti-Regulation Republican.  The show is fairly boring during the first half-hour when Meredith reviews the week’s financial news — but it reaches and maintains peak boredom for 90 minutes if there is a substitute host.  The firm’s website has the latest four shows.

• A Way with Words   Z Z 

This show would seem to have a lot going for it.  Billed as “a public radio program about language examined through history, culture, and family,” A Way with Words sounds like it should be an easy snooze any time of day.  Co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett field calls (Hi, this is Sophia, I’m calling from Naperville, Illinois, and I’m thirteen!) about the origins of various American idioms and funny-sounding names.  The hosts keep things light and bubbly and inconsequential.  The problem for insomniacs is not that the show is engaging but that it is so gosh-darn annoyingly bland, one can barely stand listening to it.

One federal agency that remained open during the ongoing government shutdown is the U.S. Bureau of Thumb Direction Assignment, or USBTDA.  For those unfamiliar with the USBTDA, these are the people who determine whether a given event represents good news (thumbs up) or bad news (thumbs down).  One can visit the USBTDA website and type in any item of personal news — within seconds, bureau experts will analyze your item and assign a Thumb Direction to it: Up or Down.  This service is free, fast and confidential.

I was able to access the USBTDA site a few hours ago and decided to submit a couple of items of my own, to see if the experts were still at work.  Indeed they were, and here are the results:

(1) I haven’t talked with my cardiologist yet, but I did read the report from my cardiac MRI last month, and all the tests were marked NORMAL.  I was happy and relieved when the USBTDA assigned Thumbs Up to this item.  Now I can sleep a little better, knowing that invasive procedures are not part of my immediate future.  Thank you, USBTDA.

(2) I received a response yesterday from the editor of the MDPI Games Journal about the 24-page article on The Price is Right showcase round that I submitted a few weeks ago.  The editor “encouraged” me to resubmit it after “extensive revisions” but mentioned that one of the reviewers thought my article should be rejected outright.  The reviewers made mostly constructive comments but I doubt I will be able to address all of their criticisms.  The experts at USBTDA assigned Thumbs Down to this news item (as expected).  I am not yet sure how I will respond to the editor but I don’t think I will mention the USBTDA.

• • • •

This story has a rather strange conclusion.  Not content to leave matters be, I decided to submit one more piece of news to the USBTDA, namely, that the USBTDA was a figment of my imagination.  When I clicked enter, the site seemed to freeze for a few seconds, then displayed an error message — something like RQ_TIMEOUT — and finally a blank page.  I think what happened is that the experts could not decide whether to say Thumbs Up (thus affirming their own fictional status) or Thumbs Down (viewing their non-existence as bad news).  Faced with this logical impasse, the USBTDA simply vanished.  Either that, or Trump shut them down.  We may never find out.