[Dixielandjazz] A Lurker's Commentaries

[George Thurmond]

        I hasten to abide by our leader's directive to get a post out.  Will
try also to obtain at least one new subscriber to the list.  First, these
observations -

    1.  I've been on the list for a few years, as a non-musician, and I find
the discussions and dialogues regarding Artie Shaw about the most
interesting and entertaining of just about any thread ever on the List.  I
never thought of him as a jazzman while I grew up dancing to his swing.  But
now I want to run out and buy some of those CD reissues.  He was indeed a
most interesting fellow - and he knew when to quit; when on top.

    2.  Now, Jimmy Durante.  I fondly remember the Garry Moore & Jimmie
Durante show on the radio and TV.  BTW, Moore loved jazz - I've got an album
somewhere of his assembling some Chicago style musicians and putting out
some fine jazz under his auspices.  Maybe Bill Haesler knows the details of
this LP.  I wonder if Dan Spink remembers this Durante intro into his
themesong?

        Say it with flowers,
        Say it with mink,
        Say it with anything,
        Except never with ink  - ka dinki de, etc.

    3.  Tom Wiggins didn't escape from Texas - we ran him out and sent him
to California, and improved things in both states!

    4.  I'd like to hear the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band
play the National Anthem.  Maybe sometime in the next few years when Texas
meets the boys from the LSJU farm in the Rose Bowl.  It was one hell of a
ball game between UT and Michigan.  I, like listmates Richeux and Stoddard,
fail to understand why we get such sorry renditions of the Anthem by
egotistical performers at some bowl games, instead of from the bands from
the participating schools.  In the old days it was always played by the
massed school bands before the start of the game - very stirring.

    5.  School bands' playing of our Anthem always brings a tear to each my
eyes, but nothing like the flood of same after reading the lyrics posted by
Haesler to "Last Rose of Summer"!  That's got to be the saddest song ever
written if the melody is in sync with the words.

    6.  Finally, and while on the subject of toilets, life is like a roll of
toilet paper - it goes faster at the end.

    There - I've had my say for 2005 (and a Happy New Year to all) and now I
can go back to my lurking, having now paid my dues for the year.

George Thurmond