One of many Easter services held on Apennine mountainside by the Tenth Mountain Division. Conducted by Caplain William H. Bell for the 605th Artillery Battalion at Rocca Pitigliano on April 1, 1945. A large group of soldiers sit in a grassy open field with heads bowed. Before them stands the chaplain with a box beside him, a jeep marked beneath the windshield with “Chaplain” in between two crosses, and a portable pump organ.
In the foreground, four men bow their heads together. Corporal Ralph Squires sits at a portable organ and two soldiers face the Chaplain who stands in front of his jeep draped with a white cloth in use as an altar for a small crucifix. Photo Credit: Roy O. Bingham/Denver Public Library
Photo is of Tenth Mountain Division Cpl. Squires playing the organ. Worshipers sit on the grass listening. Photo Credit: Roy O. Bingham/Denver Public Library
[Zim's Note: The article is a bit long but definitively worth the read if you like Johnny Cash and/or Native American topics.]
The untold story of Johnny Cash, protest singer and Native American activist, and his feud with the music industry
By Antonino D’Ambrosio, Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Johnny Cash touring Wounded Knee with the descendants of those who survived the 1890 massacre in December of 1968.
In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House’s Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America’s “silent majority.” “Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us,” Nixon asked Cash. “I like Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and Guy Drake’s ‘Welfare Cadillac.’” The architect of the GOP’s Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.
“I don’t know those songs,” replied Cash, “but I got a few of my own I can play for you.” Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of “Okie From Muskogee.” With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer’s rendition of the explicitly antiwar “What Is Truth?” and “Man in Black” (“Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”) and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash’s fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself — a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.
[Zim's Note: I came across a mugshot of Frank Sinatra and it got me thinking. Lately music and mugshots just seem to go hand-in-hand, I wondered if it was always this way. I stumbled across the following mugshots of famous musicians, there are far more but I decided to just post a few of the more famous ones. I labeled the post "vintage" so all of these are before 1980.]
“Frank Sinatra was arrested by the Bergen County, New Jersey sheriff in 1938 and charged with carrying on with a married woman (yes, you could get popped for that back then). The charge was later changed to adultery, and eventually dismissed.”
“Jazz great Billie Holiday was photographed by Bureau of Prisons officials in May 1947. Holiday, 32 at the time, was locked up for eight months in the federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia on a drug conviction. She died in 1959 at age 44.”
“Frankie Valli was arrested by Columbus, Ohio cops in September 1965. The poor crooner apparently got popped after his manager skipped out on a hotel bill in a neighboring town.”
“Johnny Cash was arrested in October 1965 when U.S. Customs agents found hundreds of pep pills and tranquilizers in his luggage. The Man in Black–who was returning by plane from a trip to Juarez, Mexico–spent a night in the El Paso jail, and later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count. Cash paid a $1000 fine and received a 30-day suspended sentence.”
“Mick Jagger posed for the above mug shot in 1967 after being arrested in England on a narcotics charge. Jagger, 23, was busted after police, acting on a tip, raided the country home of fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who was also collared. Jagger, photographed at a Brixton jail, spent a few nights in custody before making bail.”
“Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler posed for the above mug shot in March 1967 after Yonkers, New York police busted the future rock star, then 18, for pot possession.”
“Jimi Hendrix was arrested at Toronto International Airport airport in May 1969 after customs inspectors found heroin and hashish in his luggage. Hendrix, who claimed the drugs were slipped into his bag by a fan without his knowledge, was later acquitted of the charges.”
“Janis Joplin was arrested in November 1969 in Florida and charged with disorderly conduct after yelling obscenities at police officers during a Tampa concert. Charges were later dropped after it was ruled that the singer’s actions were an exercise of free speech.”
“Jim Morrison posed for this mug shot following his 1970 conviction in Florida on misdemeanor indecent exposure and profanity charges. The singer was busted after he exposed himself during a March 1969 concert in Miami.”
“Music legend David Bowie was arrested in upstate New York in March 1976 on a felony pot possession charge. The Thin White Duke, 29 at the time, was nabbed along with Iggy Pop and two other codefendants at a Rochester hotel following a concert. Bowie was held in the Monroe County jail for a few hours before being released. The above Rochester Police Department mug shot was taken three days after Bowie’s arrest, when the performer appeared at City Court for arraignment.”
“Legendary musician Jerry Lee Lewis was arrested by Memphis police in November 1976 and charged with public drunkenness and gun possession. Lewis, 41 at the time, was at Graceland waiving around a gun and demanding to see Elvis Presley when a guard called police on The Killer.”
“Sid Vicious, bassist for the Sex Pistols, was arrested by New York police for the October 1978 murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen. Sid’s subsequent drug overdose spared him the indignity of a homicide trial.”
“Buddy was the first person to have faith in my music. He encouraged me in my music and my writing. He was my friend. If anything I’ve ever done is remembered, part of it is because of Buddy Holly.”
- Waylon Jennings
Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly in 1959
“We were best friends.” Waylon Jennings once remarked about his relationship with Buddy Holly. Both men were influential in their own rights, Jennings secured his own recording rights and made music with a stripped-down production style and rock rhythm in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. By doing this, Jennings changed the direction of country music and indirectly created the outlaw movement (other artists of the movement included Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson). Buddy Holly is considered a pioneer in rock and roll music. He influenced such musicians as The Beetles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Holly achieved such honors by the age of 22. While Jennings’ career spanned decades, Holly’s lasted less than 5 years. The story of Holly and “The Day the Music Died,” is quite well-known, but what might not be as well-known is friendship between a rock and roll icon and an “outlaw” country performer.
“Winter Dance Party” tour poster
In 1954, Jennings moved to Lubbock, Texas and took a job at KLLL, a local radio station. Both Jennings and Holly had bands and through the various radio station shows, they met each other. On meeting Holly, Jennings remarked, “We just seemed like we were forever running into each other. We got to be friends. We’d hang out when we had a chance.” Holly soon became Jennings’ mentor, helping him produce songs and collaborations.
In late 1958, Holly’s band, the Crickets, needed a temporary bass player for their tour and they turned to Jennings. Besides Holly, the tour also included Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson). The Winter Dance Party tour was to last for three-weeks with stops all around the Midwest, opening on January 23, 1959. During the tour, the regular tour bus froze up because of the snowy and cold weather conditions. The musicians had to use a school bus with a faulty heater. It was so cold the drummer got frostbite on his feet and had to be hospitalized and the Big Bopper came down with the flu.
After a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly decided to charter a small plane for his band (consisting of himself, Tommy Allsup (guitar) and Jennings.Ritchie Valens and Tommy Allsup flipped a coin for the last seat, Valens won and took Allsup’s seat. Since the Big Bopper was sick, he asked Jennings if he could take his seat on the plane. Jennings said that as long as Holly was okay with it, he was too. When Holly found out Jennings was not going to be on the plane, he jokingly told him, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!” Jennings responded back, “I hope your plane crashes!” Those words would haunt Jennings for decades.
The Buddy Holly plane crash site. 5 miles north of Clear Lake, Iowa, February 3, 1959.
Allsup and Jennings got back on the school bus for the cold, long drive to Fargo, North Dakota for the next show. In the early morning of February 3, 1959, the small plane carrying Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens crashed and all, including the pilot, were killed. February 3rd infamously became known as “The Day the Music Died.”
Jennings felt deeply guilty about his last words to his best friend and it took him a long time to get over it. In 1996, he released Wayon, an autobiography in which he discussed his friendship with Holly. When asked by an interviewer what Jennings meant when he stated that he was probably the closest person to Holly at the end, Jennings stated:
We got close because it was almost as if he had the premonition that he wasn’t going to be around. And he did like me. He liked me a lot and I liked him. We never had a problem. And he tried to help me. He was trying to warn me about things and teach me about music as we went along. He loved music. The last day of his life he was still excited about music and every song he sang. I learned that from him and forgot it periodically: When you do a song, you’ve got to remember you are going to be doing that song for the rest of your life. You better make sure you like it.
Waylon Jennings passed away on February 13th, 2002 from complications with diabetes.
Here are YouTube links to two of Waylon Jennings’ songs about Buddy Holly:
Navy Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson plays “Goin’ Home” on the accordion as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s body is carried from Warm Springs, Georgia, where he suddenly dead from a stroke on April 12, 1945. Jackson, a celebrated musician who played in numerous command performances in Washington, was a personal friend of President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
As he plays, Jackson’s face shows the sorrow felt all around the nation at the passing of the President. His tear lined face was captured by Life photographer Ed Clark. Clark was in town on assignment to document the President Roosevelt’s funeral train as it left town on the way back to the nation’s capital. Instead, he found inspiration in the mourners and captured one of the most iconic photos of the time. The Life editors were so captivated with this photo that they ran it in a full-pageissue on April 17, 1945.
Amnon Weinstein prepares a violin from the Holocaust for exhibit. He began restoring the violins in 1996 and now has 30 of them to display in an exhibit called "Violins of Hope."
Amnon Weinstein first encountered a violin from the Holocaust 50 years ago. He was a young violin maker in Israel, and a customer brought him an old instrument in terrible condition and wanted it restored.
The customer had played on the violin on the way to the gas chamber, but he survived because the Germans needed him for their death camp orchestra. He hadn’t played on it since.
“So I opened the violin, and there inside there [were] ashes,” Weinstein says.
Weinstein was horrified; were these incinerated remnants of concentration camp victims? The Nazis plucked Jewish musicians from arriving cattle cars and forced them to play as other prisoners went to their death. Hundreds of Weinstein’s relatives — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — died in the Holocaust. To handle one of those instruments was too much.
“I could not. I could not,” he says.
It was many decades later in 1996, when Weinstein was ready. He put out a call for violins from the Holocaust. One came from a survivor who played in the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra.
UNC Charlotte music professor David Russell plays a violin that belonged to a member of the Auschwitz Men's Orchestra.
On a recent day, the violin was being played by David Russell, a music professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Russell and Weinstein are old friends, which is how Charlotte came to host the North American debut of Violins of Hope. Eighteen instruments are here; Russell says each carries the touch and playing style of its previous owner.
“When I play one of these instruments, I go through that same process of discovering what makes this instrument sound the best,” Russell says. “That means that I’m walking in their footsteps and their voice is actually heard by my playing of this violin.”
The violin was perhaps the most important instrument for the Jewish people, Weinstein says. He has restored more than 30 Holocaust violins, and many are inlaid with an intricate Star of David in mother-of-pearl. Orthodox Judaism forbade displaying portraits or sculpture, so Weinstein says violins often hung as art on the walls.
“Never [would you] see a Jewish house without an instrument on the wall. It was a kind of tradition,” he says.
Weinstein began collecting these violins to honor that tradition, but also to break the silence: His family never spoke of the Holocaust. Once, he asked about his grandfather and says his mother silently opened a book about the war and pointed to a pile of bodies.
The Auschwitz Men's Orchestra is seen here in an undated photo. Jewish musicians were forced to perform in Nazi concentration camps.
Weinstein then married Assi Bielski, whose father was a famous Jewish resistance fighter portrayed in the film Defiance. Weinstein was amazed how happily the Bielski family talked about the war.
“We are completely different in this way,” he says. “Her family killed Germans, by quantities, not by one. My family was all killed by the Germans.”
Bielski says her family was always very happy, and they were not humiliated.
“It’s the number tattooed on your arm that is a constant reminder of the humiliation,” Bielski says. “For us there was none of it.”
Weinstein says that perhaps what he’s doing with the violins is to make his life a little bit easier from “all [of] this heritage, which is unbelievable.”
The Violins of Hope are Weinstein’s resistance. They’re like tombstones, he says, for the thousands of Jewish instruments and musicians destroyed in the war.
You can listen to a documentary about Violins of Hope from member station WDAV here
A strolling blind musician plays guitar and harmonica along Broadway at night in Times Square in 1944. (Photo by Peter Stackpole—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Definition: Not everything that looks expensive or precious actually is.
Origins: If you, like me, were raised on 90’s one hit wonders and the first thing that this phrase brings to mind is the refrain from Smash Mouth’s 1999 song, “All Star,” than I applaud your memory. However, I hate to be the one to tell you that the actual song words mean the opposite of this idiom. The refrain actually goes like this: “Hey now you’re an All Star get your game on, go play/ Hey now you’re a Rock Star get the show on get paid/ And all that glitters is gold/ Only shooting stars break the mold.” The song leaves out “not,” which changes the entire meaning and implies that all shiny precious things are just that. The origins for the saying “all that glitters is not gold” can be traced as far back as the 12th century where French theologian Alain de Lille wrote a variant of the saying: “Do not hold everything gold that shines like gold.” After de Lille, other authors, poets and playwrights such as Chaucer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare have taken on the saying in various forms. The present form of the phrase originated in 1687 when English author John Dryden stated, “All, as they say, that glitters is not gold,” in The Hind and the Panther.
Hendrickson, Robert. Words and Phrase Origins. 3rd ed. New York: Facts On File, 2004, 18.
(cartoon)
Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, a Union Army general in the Civil War, is credited with composing the iconic “Taps.” In 1862, Butterfield was camped at Harrison’s Landing in Virginia and it was here where he first played the tune. It has been argued that ‘Taps” was not an original idea but was instead a revision of several bugle calls. Butterfield’s version became popular during the war and the U.S. Army officially adopted ”Taps” in 1874.
It received its name because the music could be done with taps of a drum if there was no bugler available.
Due to his actions during the Civil War, Butterfield received the Medal of Honor for his service.
Villanueva, Jari. “24 Notes That Tap Deep Emotions,” found online here.
Daniel Butterfield’s photo.
The Mills Brothers at a London Palladium Appearance in 1934
With 2,250 recorded songs, the Mills Brothers have recorded more than any other artist.
They also achieved another unprecedented accomplishment by recording and broadcasting in every decade from the 1920s to the 1990s.
Throughout their career, the Mills Brothers circled the globe more than 17 times.
In 1998, the Mills Brothers were honored with a Grammy for Life-Time Achievement, but by this time, only one of the original four brothers was still living. He, along with his son, accepted the award.
They were also inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1998. The Vocal Group Hall of Fame states the Mills Brother’s wide influence in the following way:
The Mills Brothers were not only the first black vocal group to have wide appeal among whites, they were the most successful American group of all time, with 71 chart singles spanning four decades. . . . The Mills Brothers’ influence was pervasive: they made black music acceptable to a wide audience and encouraged other black vocalists to carry on what they had started. And lest we forget, they did it with dignity and grace in difficult racial times, carried forward by their warmth of character and mellow sound.
Vocal Group Hall of Fame website.
Photo and information found on Mills Brothers website.
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