Category: Birthdays

Individuals born on this date with an emphasis on American history and culture, including pop culture.

Louisa May Alcott…

was born on this date in 1832.

Garrison Keillor has this interesting background on The Writer’s Almanac.

It’s the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), but brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the Transcendentalists, of which her father was one. She’s remembered now for Little Women (1869), which she found tedious to write. In her journal she wrote, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” She much preferred writing lurid, Gothic stories, about women who sold their souls to the devil, and governesses who looked sweet and innocent by day but who ruined the souls of little children by night. She published these stories under several different pen names. Her publishers offered her more money if she would agree to publish under her own name, but she could not bring herself to embarrass her father and his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wrote to a friend, “To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety.”

Joseph Wood Krutch…

was born on this date in 1893. He graduated from the University of Tennessee and received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia. He became an author and lecturer and was drama critic for The Nation during the years 1924-1952. He wrote two criticially acclaimed biographies, Samuel Johnson (1944) and Henry David Thoreau (1948).

Krutch moved to Tucson in 1952 and turned his focus primarily to nature writing. Among his notable works were The Desert Year, The Voice of the Desert and The Great Chain of Life.

From The Voice of the Desert:

Here in the West, as in the country at large, a war more or less concealed under the guise of a “conflict of interests” rages between the “practical” conservationist and the defenders of the national parks and other public lands; between cattlemen and lumberers on the one hand, and the “sentimentalists” on the other. The pressure to allow the hunter, the rancher, or the woodcutter to invade the public domain is constant and the plea is always that we should “use” what is assumed to be useless unless it is adding to material welfare. But unless somebody teaches love, there can be no ultimate protection to what is lusted after. Without some “love of nature” for itself there is no possibility of solving “the problem of conservation.”

Coleman Hawkins, Father of the Tenor Sax, …

was born on this date in 1904. Listen to his seminal recording of Body and Soul [RealOne Player file]. As writer Len Weinstock noted,

Hawkins himself didn’t think there was anything outstanding about his Body and Soul saying “it was nothing special, just an encore I use in the clubs to get off the stand. I thought nothing of it and didn’t even bother to listen to it afterwards”. But the solo, two choruses of beautifully conceived and perfecly balanced improvisation, caused an immediate sensation with musicians and the public. It is still the standard to which tenorists aspire. A parallel can be drawn between Hawkins’ Body and Soul and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address . Both were brief, lucid, eloquent and timeless masterpieces, yet tossed off by their authors as mere ephemera.

Lincoln well knew what he had done at Gettysburg, but it’s a nice analogy even so.

Johnny Mercer…

was born on this date in 1909.

Lyricist, composer and singer Johnny Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1909. He had hit songs with Bing Crosby in the late 1930s, with Jo Stafford (“Candy’) and on his own, especially “Accentuate the Positive.” On the radio he sang with Benny Goodman and had his own shows, including “Johnny Mercer’s Music Shop.” Greatly admired in the music industry both personally and for his intelligent, optimistic lyrics, he wrote or co-wrote over 1,100 songs, including “Blues in the Night,” “That Old Black Magic,” “One For My Baby, “Come Rain or Come Shine” (all with Harold Arlen); “Lazy Bones” and “Skylark” with Hoagy Carmichael; “I’m a Old Cowhand,” “I Remember You,” “P.S. I Love You,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “When a Woman Loves a Man,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” and “Fools Rush In.” He won Academy Awards for “The Atchison, Topeka and The Santa Fe” (1946, with Harry Warren), “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (1951, with Hoagy Carmichael), “Moon River’ (1961, with Henry Mancini) and “Days of Wine an Roses” (1962, with Mancini). As president and co-founder of Capitol Records, Mercer was instrumental in the early recording careers of such musicians as Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. He died in Los Angeles in 1976.

Source: www.johnnymercer.com

Inconceivable!

NewMexiKen missed some interesting birthdays during the week.

Tuesday, November 11, was the birthday of author Kurt Vonnegut. He was born in 1922.

Wednesday, November 12, was the birthday of Tracy Kidder, Pulitizer prize-winning author of The Soul of the New Machine. He was born in 1945.

Wednesday was also the birthday of actor and playright Wallace Shawn. He was born in 1943. Wallace Shawn is the son of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1952-1987.

Friday, November 14, was the birthday of Astrid Lindgren creator of the world’s strongest girl, Pippi Longstocking. Lindgren died last year in Stockholm at age 94. When was asked what she wanted for her 94th birthday, she had said, “Peace on earth and nice clothes.”

From The Writer’s Almanac

Aaron Copland…

was born on this date in 1900.

Martha Graham: “When Aaron first presented me with the music its title was Ballet for Martha – simple, and as direct as the Shaker theme that runs through it. I took some words from the poetry of Hart Crane and retitled it Appalachian Spring. When Aaron appeared in Washington for a rehearsal, before the October 30, 1944, premiere, he said to me, “Martha, what have you named the ballet?”

And when I told him he asked, “Does it have anything to do with the ballet?”

“No”, I said, “I just like the title.”