NewMexiKen

Pinetop Perkins would have been 98 today; he died in March. He was still performing on the road last year. “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” is one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. Listen — but be sure you can move your feet while you do.

By this time, Pinetop had developed his own unmistakable sound. His right hand plays horn lines while his left kicks out bass lines and lots of bottom. It was Pinetop, along with Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Little Brother Montgomery, who provided the basic format and ideas from which countless swing bands derived their sound – whole horn sections playing out what Pinetop’s right hand was playing. Although Pinetop never played swing, it was his brand of boogie-woogie that came to structure swing and, eventually, rock ‘n’ roll.

Pinetop Perkins Official Web Page

And he’s played everywhere, from Arkansas juke joints and Chicago blues dens to the White House.

“I played there before with Muddy Waters,” Perkins says. “I can’t remember the name [of the president]. Since I got older, I am so forgetful of the names.”

Pinetop Perkins: At 95, A Grammy Nominee : NPR

Pierre Cardin is 89.

Carl Hilding “Doc” Severinsen is 84 today.

Author David McCullough is 78 today. His works include some of the best—and best-selling—biographies ever, Truman and John Adams. His latest is The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. This excerpt is from an interview McCullough did with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole in 2003:

McCullough: There are certain books that I like very much. Reveille in Washington. I love Barbara Tuchman’s work, particularly The Proud Tower. Paul Horgan’s biography of Archbishop Lamy is a masterpiece. Wallace Stegner’s book on John Wesley Powell I’m fond of.

I like some of the present-day people: Robert Caro’s first volume on Lyndon Johnson was brilliant. I care for some of the best of the Civil War writing: Shelby Foote, for example, and Bruce Catton’s The Stillness at Appomattox. It was Catton’s Stillness at Appomattox that started me reading about the Civil War, and then on to people like Tuchman and others. There is a wonderful book called The Reason Why, about the Charge of the Light Brigade–and biographies–Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy, for example.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber. I’m very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down. To hold the reader’s attention, you have to bring the person who’s reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

When I did Truman, I had no idea what woods I was venturing into. Had I known it was going to take me ten years, I never would have done it. In retrospect, I’m delighted now that I didn’t know.

I love all sides of the work but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. There have been times when a book was taking year after year—not with this one so much, but with The Path Between the Seas—when I’d come down to Washington to do research in the National Archives, hoping I wouldn’t find anything new because it could set me back another year or two.

By the same token, to open up a box of the death certificates kept by the French at the hospital in Ancon, at Panama City and to read the personal details of those who died—their names, their age, where they came from, height, color of eyes—was a connection with the reality of them, the mortal tale of that undertaking, that one can never find by doing the conventional kind of research with microfilm or Xeroxed copies.

It’s Ringo Starr’s birthday. He’s 71.

Shelley Duvall is 62 today.

Ralph Sampson is 51. The 7-foot-4 athlete from Harrisonburg, Virginia, was three-time College Player of the Year at the University of Virginia, the No. 1 pick in the 1983 NBA Draft, Rookie of the Year and 4-time all-star.

Robert Heinlein was born 104 years ago today.

At the time, most science fiction stories were full of gimmicks and imaginary machines that had no relationship to actual science. Heinlein was one of the first science fiction authors to look at the world the way it was and try to imagine how it might actually look in the future. And he tried to make sure that all the imaginary technology in his stories could really work. He wrote about things like atomic bombs, cloning, and gay marriage years before they became realities. And he was one of the first writers to imagine how space travel could actually be accomplished.

He’s best known for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), about a boy who is born during the first manned mission to Mars, who is raised by Martians, and who then returns to Earth to become a preacher. Stranger in a Strange Land was also the first book to describe a waterbed.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige was born 105 years ago today. A huge star in the Negro Leagues, Paige began pitching in 1926 and was the oldest major league rookie ever when he joined the Cleveland Indians at age 42. Paige pitched in his last major league game in 1965 (at age 59).

In the barnstorming days, he pitched perhaps 2,500 games, completed 55 no-hitters and performed before crowds estimated at 10 million persons in the United States, the Caribbean and Central America. He once started 29 games in one month in Bismarck, N.D., and he said later that he won 104 of the 105 games he pitched in 1934.

By the time Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first black player in the majors, Mr. Paige was past 40. But Bill Veeck, the impresario of the Cleveland club, signed him to a contract the following summer, and he promptly drew crowds of 72,000 in his first game and 78,000 in his third game. (The New York Times)

“And don’t look back — something might be gaining on you.” — Satchel Paige.

On July 7th just 471 years ago, Hawikuh Pueblo attempted “to repel Francisco Vazquez de Coronado’s army, but the Indians are forced from their homes within five days. The Spanish confiscate provisions and continue their search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola based on fabricated stories of New Mexico.” New Mexico Magazine

Today is the birthday

… of former President George W. Bush, 65 today.

… of Sylvester Enzio Stallone, also 65 today. Stallone is one of three people to be nominated for a writing Oscar and an acting Oscar for the same movie. The others are Chaplin and Welles.

… of the woman born Anne Frances Robbins. Nancy Reagan is 90.

… of William Schallert, Patty Duke’s TV father; he’s 89. Schallert was also the somewhat goofy sheriff’s deputy in Lonely Are the Brave, the fine 1962 Kirk Douglas film shot in Albuquerque.

… of Ned Beatty. Beatty, who is 74 today, was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar for Network.

… of the “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Duke, Duke” Gene Chandler, 74 today.

… of Geoffrey Rush, 60 today. Rush has been nominated for four acting Oscars, winning for Shine. He’s one of about two dozen performers with an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy.

… of Curtis James Jackson III. He’s 36 today. You may know him better as 50 Cent.

Janet Leigh and Pat Paulson were both born on July 6th in 1927.

Bill Haley (“Rock Around the Clock”) was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1981.

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born on this date in 1907 [she claimed 1910]. Ms. Kahlo died in 1954. The following is from the obituary in The New York Times when Ms. Kahlo died in 1954:

Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera, the noted painter, was found dead in her home today. Her age was 44. She had been suffering from cancer for several years.

She also was a painter and also had been active in leftist causes. She made her last public appearance in a wheel chair at a meeting here in support of the now ousted regime of Communist- backed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala.

Frida Kahlo began painting in 1926 while obliged to lie in bed during convalescence from injuries suffered in a bus accident. Not long afterward she showed her work to Diego Rivera, who advised, “go on painting.” They were married in 1929, began living apart in 1939, were reunited in 1941.

Usually classed as a surrealist, the artist had no special explanation for her methods. She said only: “I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.” She gave one-woman shows in Mexico City, New York and elsewhere, and is said to have been the first woman artist to sell a picture to the Louvre.

Some of her pictures shocked beholders. One showed her with her hands cut off, a huge bleeding heart on the ground nearby, and on either side of her an empty dress. This was supposed to reveal how she felt when her husband went off alone on a trip. Another self-portrait presented the artist as a wounded deer, still carrying the shafts of nine arrows.

Robbie Robertson of The Band is 68.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, daughter of one president and granddaughter-in-law of another, is 63. It’s her husband David Eisenhower for whom presidential retreat Camp David is named.

Huey Lewis is 61.

Rich “Goose” Gossage is 60.

Bill Watterson is 53. He’s the creator of Calvin & Hobbes.

Edie Falco is 48.

David Farragut was born on July 5th in 1801. He entered the U.S. Navy as a 9-year-old; as a 12-year-old he took command of a prize ship and brought her to port during the War of 1812. Though a native of Tennessee, Farragut honored his oath to the United States and remained with the Union. A naval force under his command took control of New Orleans in 1862. In August 1864 he led the victory at Mobile Bay where he is reported to have said, “Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!”

Aboard Hartford, Farragut entered Mobile Bay, Alabama, 5 August 1864, in two columns, with armored monitors leading and a fleet of wooden ships following. When the lead monitor Tecumseh was demolished by a mine, the wooden ship Brooklyn stopped, and the line drifted in confusion toward Fort Morgan. As disaster seemed imminent, Farragut gave the orders embodied by these famous words. He swung his own ship clear and headed across the mines, which failed to explode. The fleet followed and anchored above the forts, which, now isolated, surrendered one by one. The torpedoes to which Farragut and his contemporaries referred would today be described as tethered mines.

Famous Navy Quotes

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born on this date in 1810.

In his 80 years, Barnum gave the wise public of the 19th century shameless hucksterism, peerless spectacle, and everything in between — enough entertainment to earn the title “master showman” a dozen times over. In choosing Barnum as one of the 100 most important people of the millennium, LIFE magazine dubbed him “the patron saint of promoters.”
. . .

In 1841, Barnum purchased Scudder’s American Museum on Broadway in New York City. He exhibited “500,000 natural and artificial curiosities from every corner of the globe,” and kept traffic moving through the museum with a sign that read, “This way to the egress” — “egress” was another word for exit, and Barnum’s patrons would have to pay another quarter to reenter the Museum!
. . .

One of Barnum’s biggest successes — literally! — came in 1882 with his acquisition of Jumbo. Dubbed “The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race, Whose Like the World Will Never See Again,” Jumbo arrived in New York on April 9, 1882, and attracted enormous crowds on his way to his name becoming a part of the language.

The Greatest Show on Earth