Few characters in American History are as deified as George Washington. In grade school, I found him to be one of the most boring people in the social studies textbooks. These books failed to convey even a smattering of the man’s panache or spirit. They declared that General Washington was revered by his troops, but offered not one insight into the vivacity that made this guy the “the Father of his Country.” He is placed so high on a pedestal that you can’t even see his humanity. According to the school textbooks, Washington, the man, was as wooden as his teeth. (They were actually made of ivory, but that’s another story.) Perhaps professor Charles V. Willies was thinking of Washington when he wrote these words: “By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. We fail to recognize that we could go and Continue Reading
Showmanship: The Persuasions Killed It
In the sleepy seaside town where I grew up, I acquired a reputation for being an obsessive collector of old phonograph records. While still in grade school, I could often be found cruising the bins of the local record stores and Lighthouse Avenue antique shops. Each weekend, I would prowl the garage sales listed in the Monterey Peninsula Herald, in search of vintage records. For a mere pittance, many of my classmates were grudgingly persuaded to clandestinely sell me their grandmother’s collection of dusty 78-rpm records. Back in the 1970s, before NPR tranquilized the airwaves with its homogeneous corporate-centric programming, the left-hand side of the FM dial was populated by small, listener-supported, non-profit community public radio stations. These eclectic regional stations featured local volunteer programmers broadcasting recordings from their own personal record collections or playing albums from the station’s vast music library. The Great Silence Broadcasting company, a hometown non-profit corporation, signed the tiny ten-watt Continue Reading
Tragedy and Performance: Will The Circle Be Unbroken?
On a Saturday night in May of 2003, I was invited to perform a living room house concert in Modesto, California, with a handful of other musicians. Although we were all friends we had never performed a show together and weren’t really familiar with each other’s repertoires. It was small crowd; it seemed there were as many of us performing as there were seated in the audience. Arriving late, about halfway through the show, a group of people seated themselves, more than doubling the size of the audience. Now the living room was full of people. Everybody was having a good time and they didn’t want the concert to end. Surprised by the need for an encore, we scrambled to quickly come up a song we all knew well enough to perform together for a big finale. This small group of musicians had in common a love of bluegrass and Continue Reading
Better to Fail in Originality than to Succeed in Imitation?
Herman Melville once wrote, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” And he knew what he was talking about. Though Moby Dick is now considered one of the greatest works of American literature, the critics panned it when it was first published in 1851. Fewer than 3,500 copies were sold during Melville’s life. The product of a year and a half of writing, the book draws on Melville’s experience at sea and on his reading of whaling literature. An unsuccessful poet, in later life financial troubles forced Melville to take a position as a customs inspector. He died in 1891. Three decades after his death – at the centennial of his birth – critics discovered his work and thus began the “Melville Revival.” Moby Dick has never been out-of-print since. A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown. As a professional entertainer, I Continue Reading