Tag Archives: Happy Birthday

Hank Snow ► Monday Musical Appreciation

Happy Birthday to Canadian Country singer Hank Snow, the man who discovered Elvis Presley. He would be blowing out 102 candles had he not died in 1999 at the age of 85.

Clarence Eugene Snow was born “in the sleepy fishing village of Brooklyn,

Queens County, on Nova Scotia’s

beautiful South Shore, just down the tracks from Liverpool“, according to his official web site, which continues:

As a boy, Hank faced many difficulties and shortcomings. He had to face

the trauma of his parents’ divorce at just eight years old and he was

forced to stay with his grandparents. He then had to deal with an abusive

grandmother who forbid him to see his mother. He regularly sneaked out

at night and walked the railroad tracks to Liverpool where his mother

was living. Not willing to return to his grandmother, who would often

beat him for visiting his mom, he would sometimes seek shelter in Liverpool’s

railway station, now home of the Hank Snow Country Music Centre.

He learned guitar from his mother. Running away from home at 12, he worked as a cabin boy on fishing schooners out of Lunenburg and bought his first guitar with his first wages: A T. Eaton Special which set him back $5.95. While onboard the ship he listened to the radio, later imitating the Country singers he heard, especially his hero Jimmie Rodgers.

Once he was back on land Snow continued to practice and improve. The WikiWackyWoo picks up the story:

Soon, Snow was invited to perform in a minstrel show in Bridgewater
to help raise money for charity. “Someone blackened my face with black
polish and put white rings around my eyes and lips,” Snow recalls. When
his turn came in the show, he played a song called “I Went to See My Gal
Last Night.” “My debut was a big success,” Snow writes. “I even got a
standing ovation.”[2]

In March 1933, Snow wrote to Halifax radio station CHNS
asking for an audition. The rejection letter he received only made him
more determined and later that year he visited the station, was given an
audition and hired to do a Saturday evening show that was advertised as
“Clarence Snow and his Guitar.” After a few months, he adopted the name
“The Cowboy Blue Yodeler” in homage to his idol Jimmie Rodgers known as
“America’s Blue Yodeler.” Since Snow’s Saturday show had no sponsor, he
wasn’t paid for his performances, but he did manage to earn money
playing halls and clubs in towns where people had heard him on the
radio. He also played in Halifax theatres before the movies started and
performed, for $10 a week, on a CHNS musical show sponsored by a company
that manufactured a popular laxative. At the urging of the station’s
chief engineer and announcer, he adopted the name Hank because it went
well with cowboy songs and once again, influenced by Jimmie Rodgers, he
became “Hank, The Yodeling Ranger.” Snow also appeared occasionally on
the CBC’s regional network.[2]

Signed to RCA Records Canada in 1936, the radio hook-up brought him greater fame and he started touring across Canada. Eventually radio stations south of the border started playing his records and Snow moved to Nashville, where he had a growing audience. In 1950 Ernest Tubbs invited Snow to perform at the Grand Old Opry. He didn’t go over so big until he wrote his first hit song, I’m Moving On:

Even had he not discovered Elvis, Hank Snow would still be remembered today for his music. However, as the Wiki tells us:

A regular at the Grand Ole Opry, in 1954 Snow persuaded the directors to allow a young Elvis Presley to appear on stage. Snow used Presley as his opening act and introduced him to Colonel Tom Parker.
In August 1955, Snow and Parker formed the management team, Hank Snow
Attractions. This partnership signed a management contract with Presley
but before long, Snow was out and Parker had full control over the rock
singer’s career. Forty years after leaving Parker, Snow stated, “I have
worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for
them all except one. Tom Parker (he refuses to recognise the title
Colonel) was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I’ve ever had
dealings with.”

One of my favourite jokes:

If Hank Snow married June Carter, there would be 6 inches of Snow in June.

But I digress. According to his website:

Hank
Snow sold over 70 million records in his career that spanned 78’s, 45’s,
extended 45’s, LP’s, 8-tracks, cassettes and compact discs.

Throughout his life he recorded over 100 LPs, including everything from hit
parade material to gospel, train songs, instrumentals (alone and with Chet
Atkins), tributes to Jimmie Rodgers and the Sons of the Pioneers, and
recitations of Robert Service poems. He has always kept a warm spot in his
heart for Nova Scotia, and he paid homage with his album “My Nova Scotia
Home”. He also recorded “Squid Jiggin’ Ground” in honor of the fishermen he
sailed with out of Lunenburg in his early youth.
Every August Liverpool, Nova Scotia, holds a multi-day Hank Snow Tribute. This year’s shindig will happen August 18-21 and tickets are already available. However, as Not Now Silly likes to say: It’s all in the grooves. This is why people still sing and play Hank Snow tunes:









Bill O’Reilly and Flavor Flav ► Throwback Thursday

Happy birthday to Flavor Flav, born and named William Jonathan Drayton, Jr., 57 years ago today.

There’s a strange nexus between Flavor Flav and the Fox “News” Channel which requires further explanation.

When I first started writing for NewsHounds — under the nom de blog Aunty Em Ericann — one of the bizarre rumours I heard concerned Flavor Flav and Bill O’Reilly, who would prefer to DO IT LIVE!!!

The crazy rumour was this: That before Maureen E. McPhilmy married Bill O’Reilly — aka Loofah Lad — she once dated Flavor Flav. I know! Right?

This was the kind of job the Not Now Silly Newsroom was made for and I set out to get this wacky story confirmed or denied.

It took a while, but I finally got Flavor Flav ON THE RECORD concerning this rumour. He denied wholeheartedly that he ever dated the ex-wife of the Falafel King, but it certainly made him laugh. It made me laugh, too. Still does.

Les Paul ► The Man Who Made Rock and Roll Possible

Not Now Silly celebrates the birth of the man that made it all possible: Lester William Polsfuss, better known as Les Paul.

Les Paul didn’t invent the guitar, which falls into the family of chordophones.Those go back several thousands of years to India and China. Modern descendants include the lute and violin, not to mention the guitar as we now know it.

Les Paul didn’t even invent the electric guitar. That happened in 1931 when George Beauchamp invented a magnetic pick-up for the Ro-Pat “Frying Pan” lap steel guitar. Les Paul didn’t get around to inventing his solid body electric guitar until 10 years later and even then it was just a 2×4 with the electronics hidden inside. It was so ugly, and Les received so many negative comments on it, he disguised it by hiding it in a dummy guitar.

Les Paul didn’t even invent overdubbing, although he perfected it and popularized the technique.

Yet, Les Paul is often credited with inventing all three. The New York Times 2009 obituary stated:

Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer.
He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby.
In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by
1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric
guitar, although there are other claimants. With his guitar and the
vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording
and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.

Mr.
Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic
richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his
technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose
main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.

Nothing I could write would explain it any better than the wonderful documentary “Chasing Sound,” which intercuts contemporary footage of Les Paul performing at the Iridium Jazz Club — which he did right up to his death at the age of 94 — with historic footage and music telling Les Paul’s life story. Watch:

I’ve also put together a Les Paul Jukebox for your listening pleasure:
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Happy Birthday Frank Lloyd Wright

Dateline June 8, 1867 – Frank Lloyd Wright is born in Wisconsin. By the time he died at the age of 92, he would be considered the greatest architect that ever lived.

By 1956 Wright was so famous that the What’s My Line panel had to be blindfolded when he Wright appeared before them. And, as usual, Dorothy Kilgallen was the smartest person in the room.


If you were to remove all the buildings from the equation, Frank Lloyd Wright still lived a life that can hardly be believed. At the height of his initial fame, with a wife and 7 children, he ran away with a client’s wife. While in Europe he was denounced from pulpits across the country and he lost all commissions. People thought his career was over. However, he eventually returned to the States with Memeh Cheney and started all over again from the bottom.

Wright built Taliesin and restarted his career, reaching new heights. Then one tragic day in 1914, while Wright was off working on a building, a male servant set fire to Taliesin during a lunch Mameh was hosting. As people fled the smoke-filled dining room, Julian Carlton hacked seven people to death with an axe. Among the dead was Mameh Cheney and her two children. Wright was shattered.

But, it’s all about the buildings. It didn’t hurt that Wright was a consummate salesman and his #1 product was Frank Lloyd Wright.






More than anything else Frank Lloyd Wright changed the way all suburbs looked. His beautiful Prairie Home was copied tens of millions of times over by bad architects to become the ranch-style house that crowds out good architecture in our suburban landscape.

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Happy Birthday Chuck Barris

Today all of ‘Merka is celebrating the 84th birthday of game show producer, Gong Show Host, and paid CIA assassin Chuck Barris. 

Barris is often called the Father of Reality Television, a smear he has tried to live down. However, few people realize that long before he launched The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, he wrote Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon’s greatest hit, “Palisades Park.”


Less known is his career as a CIA hit man who rubbed people out in exotic locations around the world, while chaperoning Dating Game couples who won All Expense Paid Trips™. Barris repented in his “unauthorized autobiography” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The book was so compelling that director George Clooney felt compelled to turn it into a docudrama, with great effect.

However, no matter how many bad people he’s killed (33 at last report), Chuck Barris will never have been a greater service to his country than he was when he created The Gong Show. Your argument is invalid.





This segment was censored before being broadcast to the west coast





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Happy Birthday Chuck Barris

Today all of ‘Merka is celebrating the 84th birthday of game show producer, Gong Show Host, and paid CIA assassin Chuck Barris. 

Barris is often called the Father of Reality Television, a smear he has tried to live down. However, few people realize that long before he launched The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, he wrote Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon’s greatest hit, “Palisades Park.”


Less known is his career as a CIA hit man who rubbed people out in exotic locations around the world, while chaperoning Dating Game couples who won All Expense Paid Trips™. Barris repented in his “unauthorized autobiography” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The book was so compelling that director George Clooney felt compelled to turn it into a docudrama, with great effect.

However, no matter how many bad people he’s killed (33 at last report), Chuck Barris will never have been a greater service to his country than he was when he created The Gong Show. Your argument is invalid.





This segment was censored before being broadcast to the west coast





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Unpacking the Writer ► A New Name; A New Look

Aunty Em Ericann

When I was leaving Canada 9 years ago I told several people that my goal was to become a nationally known pundit under the nom de plume of Aunty Em Ericann. I did that.

For 8 years I became, for all intents and purposes, Aunty Em, entirely subsuming my identity under which I had already earned a writing reputation. It would have been far easier to have used my reputation as a writer, but somehow this writing project appealed to my warped sense of humour.

I have been a freelance journalist for the better part of 40 years. I got my start writing record reviews, eventually moving on to magazine work, investigative journalism, various words-for-hire projects. For ten years I worked as a Ventriloquist (News Writer) at Citytv. I have long joked that I have done every kind of writing there is, except greeting cards.  Not to blow my own horn, (if not me, who will?) but merely to explain what became a tangled mess in the end. However, as a professional writing project, the longest, greatest, funniest, most interesting, challenging and hardest I ever had was creating the Performance Art character of Aunty Em Ericann. Who knew she would eventually be hired to write for NewsHounds? When my editor agreed to let me keep the nom de plume, I was thrilled.

Johnny Dollar — aka Mark Koldys — plays with his organ.
Remember Mark, like ratings organ size doesn’t matter.

That all ended a year ago, an episode hilariously explored in the very first post on this blog: Johnny Dollar Has Proven Himself To Be A Very Dangerous Person. While he’s still dangerous, I was entirely mistaken: He’s barely a person. He’s a walking piece of shit who recently connected me to the terrorism in Boston. I no longer write for NewsHounds, but that hasn’t stopped him from smearing me.

Laughingly, Johnny Dollar seems to think I crossed some kind of line by publishing pictures of him with his family and he’s become incensed enough to expose his hypocrisy. Here’s the irony: Exposing my alternative lifestyle didn’t seem to cross any kind of moral line for Mark Koldys, but publishing his family pictures is despicable behaviour according to him. It’s refreshing to see he actually draws moral lines about some things, especially when he’s on the receiving end. But, I digress. This isn’t about THAT asshole, or his Flying Monkey Squad. Today’s a day of celebration.

Today is the One Year Anniversary of having that asshole expose my nom de plume and the day I created this blog. The original name of this blog was a reaction to not using my name for 8 long years. So desperate to finally get credit, I called it “Headly Westerfield’s.” To retain the continuity and help bring along my NewsHound readers I used the tagline “Aunty Em Ericann Blog.” However, it’s time to give it the blog a brand new look and a brand new name. Of course, it will still include all the words you’ve come to expect from me. Just in a totally different order for each blog post.

If I had no readers, I’d have 84,842 fewer reasons to write, because that’s how many views Not Now Silly has had since it launched a year ago. However, not to offend any of my faithful readers, I’d be writing even if you weren’t reading. I was a writer long before I had any readers more than 45 years ago.

However, credit where credit’s due: I’m quite fond of most of what has risen to the Top Ten, and that’s entirely because my readers have good taste.

Here’s the Top Ten Of All Time Not Now Silly blog posts (and the date published):

1). Musical Appreciation ► Brian Jones – Jul 3, 2012
2).  The Detroit Riots ► Unpacking My Detroit ► Part Five – Jul 22, 2012
3).  Day In History ► Josephine Baker Born – Jun 3, 2012
4).  Chow Mein and Bolling 5 ► Bully Boy Lies (Again) – Oct 4, 2012
5). Is Marc D. Sarnoff Corrupt Or The Most Corrupt Miami Politician? – Feb 6, 2013
6). Aunty Em Ericann’s Bun Fight With James Rosen of Fox “News” – May 15, 2012
7). How Mitt Romney Didn’t Build That – Oct 17, 2012
8). Day In History ► May 31, 1921 ► When Whites Went Crazy In Tulsa – May 31, 2012
9). Unpacking Coconut Grove ► Part Two ► E.W.F. Stirrup House – Jul 11, 2012
10). Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► Barbara Walters ► Katehrine Hepburn ► Trees – Jun 1, 2012
  
So, onward and upward as we inaugerate Not Now Silly for the next 365 days. I’m glad you’re here to take the ride with me.

A special big Aunty Em shout out to Keg who designed the new Not Now Silly banner. Thank you so much. I love it.

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Musical Appreciation ► AUNTY EM!!! AUNTY EM!!!

2005 stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service

Dateline April 8, 1896 – Somewhere over the rainbow, in New York City’s Lower East Side to be exact, Isidore Hochberg was born.

He later changed his name to Edgar Harburg, but he was always known by his nickname “Yipsel” or “Yip.” As Yip Harburg he wrote the lyrics to some of the most popular songs in the ‘Merkin songbook, including Brother, Can You Spare a Dime; April In Paris; It’s Only a Paper Moon; Lydia the Tattooed Lady; and every song in The Wizard of Oz. He won an Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song for “Over the Rainbow.”

It should not be forgotten that Yip Harburg was later a victim of the Hollywood Blacklist in the ’50s. From 1951 to 1962 was unable to work in Tinsel Town due to his leftist leanings. He was luckier than some who were Blacklisted, since he was still able to write musicals for Broadway.

Here are just a few interpretations of Yip Harburg’s most famous songs:



E.Y. Harburg was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.

Idle No More ► Happy Birthday Eric!

Say no more!

He’s been a Python, a Rutle, a cartoon, a song writer, an author, a comedian, a hit Broadway playwright, and the comic relief at an Olympics ceremony. And he turns 70 today.

Whole episodes of Monty Python are available all over the place. Here’s one with English subtitles for those who have trouble understanding English:

Dr. Carl Sagan wishes he could have explained it this simply:

Enjoy this Eric Idle Jukebox and wish him a Happy Birthday.

Happy Birthday Mama Africa

Dateline March 4, 1932 – Zenzile Miriam Makeba is born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She would go on to become one of the great voices in World music. While her music will live on forever, it’s quite possible that a more lasting legacy will be her loud voice in the struggle for Civil Rights back in her homeland — from which she had been barred from ever returning — and the rest of the world. 

Miriam Makeba’s influence is such that Google has honoured Mama Africa with a one of its famous doodles today.

There are so many Miriam Makeba songs one could play, but Pata Pata, her first ‘hit,’ for which she won a Grammy, is still the one that seems to sum up her entire career. The joyful presentation, along with her unrestrained shout of joy at the 2 minute mark, perfectly encapsulates her entire career.

HIT IT!

For politics, there was no stronger song in her repertoire than “Soweto Blues” written for her by her former-husband Hugh Masekela, a Civil Rights activist in his own right. This clip also describes her joy at being able to return to her homeland after so many years of forced exile.

Let’s all remember how Miriam Makeba fought for the Civil Rights of all of us, whether you are Black, White, African, European, Jewish, Muslim, or ‘Merkin.