Motley Moose – Archive

I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in “Cheers & Jeers”.

OK, you’ve been warned – here is this week’s tomfoolery material that I posted.

ART NOTES – an exhibition entitled Chivalry in the Middle Ages is at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles through November 30th.

AN EXCELLENT meet-up took place yesterday in suburban Boston hosted by Cheers & Jeers – with around 25 attendees, nice birthday wishes given to me and a chance to welcome a woman who has recently relocated to New England. Unseasonably hot (how the hell did we get September weather in August, and August weather in September, anyway?) yet a great time had-by-all. Here is a brief photo diary – there may possibly be another in the very-near-future …. Navajo insisted upon this (and we were not about to tempt fate).  

LEGAL NOTES – due to clogged courthouses, the nation of Trinidad & Tobago seeks to join other small Caribbean nations in abolishing (or restricting) trial-by-jury.

THURSDAY’s CHILD is Tucker the Cat – whose medical conditions (a sad face/sensitive skin, due to genetic abnormalities) were too much for her family to care for … but now adopted.

IN A WORRYING SIGN the government of Japan threatens to upset relations with China and South Korea by embracing its right-wing flank – which seeks to retract a 1993 apology for the use of ‘comfort women’ during WW-II, among other things.

FOR THE FIRST TIME the leader of the EU’s European Council in Brussels will be an eastern European, Donald Tusk – the prime minister of Poland since 2007.

FRIDAY’s CHILD is Sally the Cat – an Australian hero kitteh who jumped on a man and screamed at him … alerting him to a fire that consumed nearly 80% of his home.

BRAIN TEASER – try this Quiz of the Week’s News from the BBC.

THIS PAST WEEK saw the death of my Aunt Kay – a few weeks short of age 92. She lived well and died after a short illness so it was not a dirge; people were remarkably composed (as we had expected it).

But I did like one story told: her daughter called her to come downstairs for dinner a few years back, which she did .. then went back for a few minutes. “Mom, was anything wrong?” Mary Lou asked. But like a woman of her generation she replied, “No, I just forgot to put on my earrings”. For a mid-week dinner of leftovers.

DIRECT DESCENDANTS? – musician Buddy Holly – as well as the 20-year-old Georgia college student Daniel Ashley Pierce – whose family tried an anti-gay ‘intervention’ recently.

   

…… and finally, for a song of the week ……………………. while Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were more famous, another female singer of the Blues Era of the 1920’s was Ida Cox – whose career lasted until the 1940’s, leading Paramount Records to to declare her to be the “Uncrowned Queen of the Blues”. And unlike many of her contemporaries: she was in charge of much of her own career and material.

Born as Ida Prather in Toccoa, Georgia in 1896 (the daughter of sharecroppers) she began singing in church before leaving at age 14 to sing in vaudeville shows. Making a name for herself, she eventually joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels – whose success had helped Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey before. While life on this circuit was not easy for its performers, Ida Cox became well-known enough to escape it in the 1920’s.

She was married three times, first in 1916 to trumpeter Adler Cox, who died during World War I. The second time (briefly) was to Eugene Williams, with whom Cox had her only child. In 1927 she married Jesse Crump – a pianist (ten years her junior) who helped manage her career before they split during the late 1930’s.

It was the success in 1920 of Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues – part of the National Recording Registry – that opened-the-door to the Blues Era. Ida Cox performed with Jelly Roll Morton before receiving her own recording contract in 1923 at the age of twenty-seven: where she recorded a total of 78 singles for Paramount Records before the decade was out.

Ida Cox had several noteworthy distinctions as a female black performer: (a) most others sang songs written by men: she wrote (or co-wrote) much of her own material, adding a woman’s touch to her material, (b) she often used as a pianist/bandleader Lovie Austin – unusually, a female instrumental accompanist to another female performer, (c) she managed or co-managed her own career and (d) her songs touched on themes of female independence, feminism, unemployment during the Depression, death and sexuality … rarely explored in detail like she did.

As the Blues Decade began to wane with the onset of the Depression, she and Jesse Crump founded a travelling tent show revue named Raisin’ Cain – which performed at Harlem’s Apollo Theater at a time when other blues singers faltered. Her troupe was eventually re-named the Darktown Scandals which had an interesting sidenote: a young tapdancer in the troupe was Earl Palmer – a future Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member as a session drummer.

In 1939, she had a chance to perform at the concert that John Hammond arranged at Carnegie Hall entitled From Spirituals to Swing – a tribute show to Bessie Smith who had died a year earlier – and the success of the soundtrack album helped Ida Cox gain new audiences.

One tune of hers that became noted (and which she sang at that concert) was “Fore Day Creep” – about adultery ‘before day(light)’ – that seems to be a (female) mirror-image of the song by Blind Joe Reynolds entitled Outside Woman Blues – which the supergroup Cream popularized in 1967. Over the years, Ida Cox’s song title morphed into “Four Day Creep” – and which she was credited for when it was performed on the landmark live album by Humble Pie in 1971, yet which sounds nothing like how Ida Cox performed it at this link herself.

She performed with many jazz performers (such as Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian) and big bands into the 1940’s. All along, Ida Cox’s vocal range was limited (not much more than an octave) yet her phrasing was what won over audiences, as well her persona: often appearing in a tiara, cape and with a rhinestone wand.

Her career ended when she suffered a stroke on-stage in Buffalo, New York in 1945, and she retired to her home in Knoxville, Tennessee with her daughter. Yet in 1959, she was sought out once again (twenty years later) by John Hammond: this time with an ad in Variety Magazine. Hammond persuaded her to make one final recording, which was released in 1961. And while critics noted her voice had suffered (not only due to the stroke but by turning age 65) they did praise her delivery, making Blues for Rampart Street a success … of course, having musicians such as Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge helped.

Ida Cox suffered another stroke in 1965, and died in 1967 at the age of seventy-one.

While Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues is her best-known tune (and at this link you can hear her final 1961 rendition, with a cleaner sound and a mature voice) – I am also partial to a song she and her husband wrote, Last Mile Blues from 1940 – a look at capital punishment, and while lynchings were still going on. And below you can listen to it.