Tim Jarrett

Deserter pardoned: the Obediah story

Obediah Jarrett’s tombstone, Antioch Ponder cemetery

A few years ago I shared a pointer to my sister Esta’s oral history record with my uncle Forrest, including his telling of how my great-great-grandfather, whose name is varyingly spelled Obadiah or Obediah, was personally saved from being executed as a deserter by North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance. It’s a great story, one that he told over and over and over.* But there’s always been a small question in the back of my mind: where was the evidence? What was the rest of the story?

Well, last night sitting with Esta and my parents after the funeral, I went looking for the evidence. And I found it, in a 2012 book by Aldo S. Perry, Civil War Courts-Martial of North Carolina Troops. And, astonishingly, the family story is true! Mostly. And the parts I didn’t know are stranger than fiction.

So, then. Obediah Jarrett, together with his brother Jacob P. Jarrett, enlisted in the North Carolina Fifth Cavalry on May 14, 1862 in Marshall, North Carolina. The unit was, essentially, a “mountain boy” division, made up of folks from western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and they saw a fair bit of action over the next year all over the southeast, including battles at Brandy Station, Virginia on June 9, 1863, described as the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America and as a pivotal turning point in the Civil War, and at Chickamauga, Georgia on September 20, later that year. Chickamauga in particular appears to have been a bloodbath; 20% of the Confederate forces were killed.

Just exactly when Obediah attempted to desert is not clear. One source I consulted says that he deserted on August 7, 1863, between his unit’s two battles, but I think that’s unlikely unless the policy toward deserters changed. Because at his desertion recorded on August 1, 1864 in Concord, Tennessee, he was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to be executed.

Side note: Perry’s history of Obediah’s division records that the Fifth Cavalry merged with the Seventh Cavalry to form the Sixth Cavalry within the 65th Regiment, and that this merger may have been the reason for the desertion of Obediah and others. In fact, the unit led the Confederacy with 31 absences per company, 10 courts martial, and 7 death sentences. Perry notes that the North Carolina soldiers volunteered into North Carolina units of company size, but found themselves realigned into a huge regiment that included companies of Virginians and was led by a Virginian. In 1864, the captain of Obediah’s company, Company I, resigned his commission because “my command has deserted to the enemy and to the mountains of western NC and after attempting I find it impossible to get them together.”

At any rate, Obediah deserted on August 1, 1864, together with a fellow Madison County soldier, Jobe R. Redmon. They were court-martialed on separate days and both sentenced to death. Redmon wrote a letter home on November 2, 1864 from his imprisonment in Kinston, North Carolina, telling his family:

“My dear wife and children I seate myself this morning with a troubbeled harte and a destrest mind to try to rite a few line to let you no that I hird my sentens red yesterday and hit was very bad I am very sory to let you no for [one line not legible] all ready I hafte to bee shot the 9 of this month I am sory to in form you that I have but 7 days to live But I hope and trust in God when they have slane my body that God will take my sould to rest.”

Redmon’s descendants kept this letter and read it every year on the anniversary of his execution.

So what happened to Obediah? Well, it’s remarkably like what my Uncle said. A man named H. H. Baird prepared a request for pardon for both men to Jefferson Davis, and separately sent a letter to his cousin, governor Zeb Vance, appealing the decision, and specifically citing the change in terms of his commission as a reason for clemency. In a postscript, he emphasized, “The day has not as yet been appointed for the execution of Private Obediah Jarrett.” Whatever happened, Obediah’s death sentence was remitted by SO #260, issued on November 1, 1864—strikingly a day before Redmon’s letter home. Redmon’s sentence was not commuted and he died.

Why Obediah was spared and Redmon executed is unknown, as is why Redmon had a date for execution before Obediah despite having been court-martialed six days later. The record is silent, but suggests that there was some sort of favoritism shown to my great-great-grandfather—and thank goodness.

At any rate, Obediah, his death sentence commuted, remained in prison until Union forces defeated the remainder of the 65th at the Battle of Wyse Fork, fought March 7-10, 1865, near Kinston. He was taken prisoner of war by the Union troops but released after taking an oath of allegiance to the United States, and from thence headed home.

The last part of the story as my Uncle tells it, is that my great-grandfather Zebulon B. Jarrett was named for the North Carolina governor who saved his father’s life. That part is almost certainly true. However, genealogical records give us one last wrinkle: Zeb Jarrett was born three years and 11 months before his father was freed, and a year before he enlisted. Zeb was almost certainly named after Zebulon Vance, but he had a different name at birth, which has sadly been lost due to the destruction of our family Bible when my Aunt Jewell’s dorm burned in a fire.

This is why I study history: truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s sometimes downright weirder.

* The last “over” there goes to the Applachian Barns Project’s documentation of the 19th century barn on my grandmother’s farm, documented from my uncle’s stories.

Laying a giant to rest

Forrest Jarrett with me and my kids, The Boy and The Girl. Photo courtesy Esta Jarrett.

We laid my uncle to rest yesterday beside his wife, my aunt Alene, in their plot in the family’s corner of the mountain cemetery where my grandparents, my Aunt Jewell, my great-grandparents, and my great-great-grandparents lie.

It was a large service, in Asheville’s First Baptist Church, full of (almost entirely) masked mourners whom I knew from my uncle’s stories, or his get-togethers at his pond, or from the wild game dinners I attended a few times that were held in his name as a fundraiser for various outdoorsy causes. But the center of it all was his story.

The story of a boy who was so shy he hid from the mailman, who trained himself to be the life of the party. Who had a frank and open face until a baseball flattened his nose (and convinced the county high school to invest in protective gear for its high school baseball catchers). Who stood with such straight and perfect posture that they called him String, until a training accident in a tank sent a recoiling 90mm gun into his back and side, leaving him with a limp and perpetual back pain that sent him home from the Army. Who was going to be his father’s heir in scientific farming, until the accident made him seek another career—a career that his second cousin, who was the political kingpin of Madison County and his lifelong quiet opponent in a family feud rooted in a land deal, told him would never be near his home. Or, as my Uncle would say, “When I come out of service, my good kinfolks, Mr. Zeno Ponder, sent word to me by my first cousin, Marvin Ball, that he’d see me in hell before I’d get a job in Madison County.”

Who was sponsored for a job with Southern Railway by famed lawman Jesse James Bailey. Who, thanks to an early job as bodyguard for railroad executive and later Southern Railway president D.W. Brosnan, followed that career through eleven Southern cities and through multiple promotions until he retired as chief of railroad police. Who managed diplomacy with the old mountain gift for giving: small favors, “pettin’ pokes” with fresh produce, country sausage, or suspiciously clear Mason jars. Or by throwing enormous all-day-long barbecues. Or by taking you hunting. Whose gift of diplomacy built a network that showed up, in force and in masks, yesterday.

Presented to Forrest Jarrett on his departure from Atlanta. He moved to Roanoke that year, where he retired.

Who, when he retired, papered the walls of a study in his home on the old family farm with certificates and plaques: certified Railroad Policeman in Indiana. Certificates of appreciation from the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the office of the mayor of Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Secret Service. Honorary Illinois state trooper. Honorary chief of police in Hickory, North Carolina. Honorary assistant Attorney General in Alabama and Georgia. Honorary Lieutenant Colonel, Aide de Camp, Governor’s Staff in Georgia. Honorary Lieutenant Colonel and Aide de Camp in the Alabama State Militia. Honorary colonel and Aide-de-Camp in the Fairfax County Police Department. Kentucky Colonel. North Carolina Order of the Long Leaf Pine. Photograph with United States Senator Strom Thurmond. Christmas card from Barbara and George H.W. Bush. Congratulatory letter from Vice President Dan Quayle. Keys to several cities, including the key to Washington, DC presented by Mayor Marion Barry. Signed and framed copies of the Crime Control Act of 1990 (S.3256), which granted railroad police the power to enforce the laws of the jurisdiction in which they were operating, and which was passed largely on the strength of his diplomacy.

And who then promptly ignored that study, except to show visitors who asked, preferring to sit on his porch and watch the mountains, or down by his pond and soak in the silence. Or to take his grandchildren down the bumpy road to the pond on the Gator.

Forrest Jarrett with The Girl, courtesy Esta Jarrett.

Because in the end, he was a man of enormous accomplishment for whom family was not only the most important thing, it was everything.

Godspeed, Uncle Forrest. You will be missed.

Exfiltration Radio: Flute’n the Blues

This go-round of Exfiltration Radio investigates an unusual jazz instrument, the flute. This one has been bubbling around in my mind since I started putting jazz mixes together. I kept running across unusual instrumentation on some of the recordings, well beyond the sax or trumpet plus piano/bass/drums that I first started listening to thirty years ago. First it was organ, then vibes, and today I finally started pulling together this playlist, which focuses on that other woodwind, the flute.

One thing that jumped out at me in looking through the credits on these tracks is the number of flautists who were also, or even primarily, known for their chops on the saxophone. James Moody, who leads off this set with his famous false start from his Last Train from Overbrook album, was one, but then there’s Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson on Alice Coltrane’s “Blue Nile,” and Yusef Lateef (who here is playing the xun, or “Chinese globular flute”).

But part of the fun of this set for me was digging into some of the artists who were best known for their work as flautists. Hubert Laws, whose playing graces “Windows” (here drawn from the Chick Corea compilation Inner Space, but originally released on his own Laws’ Clause), is all over recordings from the 1960s and 1970s where the flute appears — in fact, he’s also on “Blues Farm.” (There is an alternate universe in which this mix is all Hubert Laws, all the time.) Bobbi Humphrey’s fine playing on “Harlem River Drive,” though drenched in 1970s production values by the Mizells, is outstanding, as is the more modern playing on Chip Wickham’s “Soho Strut.” Finally, we come somewhat full circle on Matthew Halsall’s cover of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda.”

So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your earhole.

The Moody One – James Moody (Return From Overbrook)
The Plum Blossom – Yusef Lateef (Eastern Sounds)
The Great Pumpkin Waltz – Vince Guaraldi (It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown)
Windows – Chick Corea (Inner Space)
Blue Nile – Alice Coltrane (Ptah, the El Daoud)
Harlem River Drive – Bobbi Humphrey (Blacks And Blues)
Blues Farm – Ron Carter (Blues Farm)
Nancy Wilson – Brian Jackson, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Adrian Younge (Brian Jackson JID008)
Soho Strut – Chip Wickham (Shamal Wind)
Dogon Mysteries – Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids (Shaman!)
Journey In Satchidananda – Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra (Journey In Satchidananda / Blue Nile)

Eddie Costa, Mat Mathews & Don Elliott At Newport

Album of the Week, February 5, 2022

For every Miles, Trane or Monk, there is an Eddie Costa.

Even the most enthusiastic jazz reissue program inevitably falls into a rut. You get the umpteenth repressing of Kind of Blue, you get (admittedly fabulous) live concert recordings from a high school janitor who just happened to be taping Thelonious Monk. But you don’t see too many revivals of interest in players like Eddie Costa, Mat Mathews and Don Elliott.

The Clef Series, issued on Verve in the US and Columbia in the UK, consisted of recordings related to Norman Granz, the impressario behind Verve and Ella Fitzgerald. In this particular case, Granz was making a bet on some of the lesser known musicians that played the afternoon sets at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957.

Eddie Costa was on his way up then, a rising star on both piano and vibes, and was recording prolifically with his own groups and as sideman for Gigi Gryce, Gunther Schuller, Shelly Manne and others. He appeared on over 100 recordings before being killed in a car crash in 1962.

Mat Mathews, a Dutch jazz accordionist, was less well known, but he still recorded sessions with Herbie Mann, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Art Farmer, Percy Heath, Carmen McRae, Charlie Byrd and others. And Don Elliott was a multi-instrumentalist, recording on trumpet, vibes, mellophone and vocals in his career.

The sessions on this record are loose and swinging, up tempo and genuinely fun to listen to. They are not momentous, save perhaps in featuring an early recording by Don Elliott’s pianist, who had been studying with George Russell: Bill Evans. Evans would record one more album with Elliott before auditioning in early 1958 to replace Red Garland in Miles Davis’s sextet, and the rest is history.

I found this copy, of the first UK pressing, in my local bargain bin in Burlington. When I want to remind myself that jazz is supposed to be fun, I put this on the record player (or cue up the ripped tracks in Apple Music) and listen.

There doesn’t appear to be a full copy of the album anywhere, but here are a few tracks:

Eddie Costa, “There Will Never Be Another You”
Mat Mathews, “I Never Knew”
Don Elliott Quartet with Bill Evans, “Dancing in the Dark”

Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley

Album of the Week, January 29, 2022

It was the day after she died that I first heard of her.

I was listening to a jazz radio show on a Sunday morning in November 1996, probably driving back from church in McLean, Virginia, and I heard the announcers talking about a local performer who had passed away the previous day. They talked about her voice and how incredible it was to hear it coming from a small blond girl. They talked a lot, and I had to get out of the car before they actually played any of her music. But it made me want to seek her recordings out.

At that time there were two recordings available: an album of R&B duets recorded with the Godfather of Go-Go, Chuck Brown, and her only solo album, a recording called Live at Blues Alley. I opted to pick up the latter. And was blown away. Cassidy’s voice was pure but it was also passionate, vital, and utterly unforgettable. And she brought vulnerability with her to the stage; you could hear it in her voice as she introduced her cover of Buffy St. Marie’s “Tall Trees in Georgia.” What she did to Sting’s “Fields of Gold” helped me to understand the impact an interpreter could have on a song. And her bravura performance on “Cheek to Cheek,” the album’s opener, was alternately jaw-dropping, moving, saucy, and brilliant as her voice pivoted from high belting to subdued precision within the same chorus.

Needless to say, I was hooked. And disappointed; I had found an amazing talent and she was gone. After the Chuck Brown duets, there wasn’t anything else to discover.

Except, of course, there was. In 2000, when I was in grad school, I found Eva by Heart. Then the Songbird compilation, which would be the one that would vault her to posthumous fame. I think her official discography lists six studio albums and three live; not bad for someone who died at the age of 33.

Anyway, I’m writing about her today because the New York Times flagged the 25th anniversary double-vinyl reissue of Live at Blues Alley as one of their best recordings of 2021, and I had to pick it up. And it sounds better than ever, after all these years. Heaven… I’m in heaven.

Bonus video: there is actual footage of one of those two nights at Blues Alley, which appears to include songs from the eventual album release with others that wouldn’t see release until Nightbird, a few years later. You can really get the full impact of her performance here. Enjoy!

Bonus bonus: documentary on the Blues Alley performance and how it came about, with interviews with the surviving band members.

Footnote: I had forgotten I had written about this, some eighteen years ago, but thanks to her rediscovery in the UK, Eva was the #5 top selling musical artist on Amazon in their first ten years of business, beating out the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and others.

Returning to the Rotunda

I was in Charlottesville this weekend. The last time I visited was before the pandemic. Much was the same—the Corner will always be there, even if some of the restaurants are not; the Rotunda still stands above the Lawn; the Virginia Glee Club continues to spread harmony, love and brotherhood.

And yet: much has changed. The Glee Club is surging in membership, but off a small base due to pandemic attrition. Masks still abounded, though the positivity rate at the University among students is minuscule (less than 0.5%). And it was difficult to see the Rotunda and the Lawn without the overlays of the fascist torch march of August 2017, or the protests for racial justice in 2020.

In this context, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers looks even more like what it is: simultaneously a good first step to establishing a dialog of truth and a small but inadequate corrective against 200 years of corrosive white supremacy.

It was in this frame of mind that I revisited the Lawn in the dark, when the abstract promise of freedom was most believable, and then again in the Sunday morning sun, where I could see the temples of learning rising above the walls, gardens, and outbuildings where laborers, enslaved and otherwise, supported the faculty and students who would, in 1861, raise a Confederate flag above the dome of Jefferson’s temple of knowledge.

If America is a contradiction, it is in many ways due to Jefferson himself, who argued for the unfettered power of the mind over religion and tyranny even as he fettered his fellow humans. The contradiction is evident in his greatest accomplishment, where a great University can be seen to carry the shadows of the slaves who built it.

So it is that I find myself, with Jefferson, trembling when I reflect that God is just.

And yet, as Jefferson sought to continually improve, never satisfied with his house, his writings, or the state of democracy, so must we continue to iterate on his works. Because the plain truth is that the University’s symbol as a temple of knowledge is the more profound for having arisen out of its beginnings as a school for privileged white men. And it has arisen, as is readily apparent by even a cursory glance at the current student body, to say nothing of a dinner spent speaking with them. My neighbor at our table was a strikingly lovely first generation college student from New York, who was a history major, an archivist at the Small Special Collections Library who had accessioned the latest round of Glee Club historical materials, and a powerhouse low alto. The kids, as Pete Townsend said, are alright.

And so is the Glee Club. In the last five years I had sometimes worried about the musical output of Virginia’s Messengers of Harmony, Love and Brotherhood. But the strength of the vocal technique of the young men I heard last night was a massive step forward. Turns out that Frank Albinder knows how to teach young voices, if they’ll listen. And it also turns out that when you focus a group of young men on both singing and friendship, you build something stronger than the sum of the individuals.

And it was also profound, after making my way up the East Range, across the Lawn, past the Mews (an outbuilding behind Pavilion III occupied by enslaved persons, and then 100 years later by Harry Rogers Pratt, the conductor of the Glee Club, and his wife Agnes), by the Chapel, and then back up to the plaza that Stanford White built after sweeping away the ruins of the Rotunda Annex. On that plaza stands the statue of Jefferson atop four allegorical angels, representing Liberty, Equality, the Brotherhood of Man, and Justice. Jefferson’s back may be to Justice; she may have stood silently on an August night in 2017 where hundreds of men who sought to destroy Jefferson’s higher ideals waved torches, threw lighter fluid, and struck at a group of about twenty-six student protestors. But, by God, She is still there, and still holds the scales, and they will be balanced.

Exfiltration Radio: doing it in the mix

Boris Blank, of the 1980s band Yello, with the Fairlight CMI sampler

Today’s edition of Exfiltration Radio looks at making songs from other songs. I started making it just as an exercise in a certain type of 1980s dance music, but realized that what drew me into these songs were the bits of other songs and sounds that popped their heads up in the mix. And why not? The 1980s were when sampling came into its own—whether the cut and paste techniques of Steinski or the early digital sampling exercises of Art of Noise. Even some kinds of remixes fall into the pattern, where a song is deconstructed to its component pieces and augmented with other sounds to make something new. And weird, don’t forget weird.

Do not attempt to adjust your set, there is nothing wrong.

Jazz – Steinski (What Does It All Mean?: 1983-2006 Retrospective)
Close (To the Edit) – Art of Noise ((Who’s Afraid Of) The Art of Noise?)
Regiment – Brian Eno & David Byrne (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts)
Megamix – Herbie Hancock (Megamix)
Love Missile F1-11 (Ultraviolence Mix) – Sigue Sigue Sputnik (The Remixes)
Push It (Remix) – Salt-n-Pepa (Hot, Cool and Vicious)
Pump Up the Volume (USA 12) – Colourbox (Best of Colourbox: 1982-1987)
Wise Up Sucker (12″ Youth Remix) – Pop Will Eat Itself (This Is the Day…)
Beef – Gary Clail & On-U Sound System (End Of The Century Party)
God O.D., Pt.1 – Meat Beat Manifesto (Storm The Studio (Remastered))
Justified & Ancient (Stand By The Jams) – The KLF (Justified & Ancient)
Paranoimia – The Art of Noise with Max Headroom (Paranoimia (12″))

Complainer

As a singer, I am not a solo artist. I did not study at a conservatory, and don’t have a book of solos that I have practiced and performed. So when someone asks me to sing a solo in church, I have to really dig deep to figure it out.

This time, I agreed to sing a solo for Mark Morgan, our music director at Hancock United Church of Christ, with plenty of lead time, so I started thinking about what to do. My thoughts turned to shape note music; Mark shares my interest in early American hymn tunes, and it struck me that I might be able to find something. So I turned to my copy of Southern Harmony.

The Southern Harmony and Musical Compendium is the lesser known spiritual brother of the Sacred Harp, which is well known as the hymnbook preserving the shape note tradition. The Southern Harmony is the product largely of one man, William Walker, who both wrote new tunes and borrowed existing ones from the folk song all around him. I learned about the Southern Harmony, as so much that I know about shape note singing, from the Boston Camerata, who included “The Midnight Cry” on their Christmas album Sing We Noel.

So I opened my copy of Southern Harmony. And I found “Complainer.”

At first I giggled at the title, and skipped past it. Then I flipped back and hummed the tune to myself. Later, having put the book back, I was still hooked. So I decided I had to do something with it.

The problem was the text. Like many 19th century hymns that call to mind Terry Gilliam’s “God” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail—“Like those miserable psalms, they’re so depressing!”—the text was, shall we say, a bit of a downer, particularly in the ending:

I read that peace and happiness meet Christians in their way,
That bear their cross with meekness, and don’t neglect to pray
But I, a thousand objects beset me in my way
So I am filled with folly, and so neglect to pray.

Also, the original text was five verses long. About two or three too much. So I decided to bring in another text to supplement it, and after searching quite a bit, I found another text, this one from the Sacred Harp, in 7.6.7.6 meter, ironically in my sister’s church service while we visited.

So here’s the final setting, and here’s the service in which I sang it (the offertory starts at 23:45). While adapted as a solo, I think you could take the arrangement and have voices on the accompaniment parts instead. If you use the arrangement, please let me know!

The Brackbill Farm history indeed(s)

Deed conveying the Brackbill Farm in Salisbury Township from Abraham Hershey to Benjamin Brackbill in 1867

After being reminded while writing the last post that I hadn’t dug up the deed to the farm back in 2009, I decided to spend some downtime this morning going back through the notes and seeing what I could find regarding the transfer of the farm from Abraham Hershey, who built the farmhouse in 1857, to the family of Harry G. Brackbill, whose descendants (my extended family) still own the property today.

And I might have found something. In reviewing the photos of the General Index of Deeds that were posted by the Southern Lancaster County Historical Society, I found a deed conveying property in Salisbury Township from Abraham Hershey et ux (and wife) to Benjamin Brackbill, my great-great-great grandfather, in 1867. No deeds in Salisbury Township were recorded after that date against Abraham Hershey, so I think this was probably the property.

Benjamin Brackbill, whose main residence and land holdings were in Paradise, was, according to his obituary, “a man of wealth.” He had two sons who were farmers, Elam (my 2x great grandfather) and Benjamin. I think it’s quite likely that Benjamin purchased the Abraham Hershey farm so that Elam could become established, without having to subdivide his farm in Paradise between his two sons.

Thanks to the index, I was able to view the actual deed (book T9, pp. 317-318) and confirm that Abraham and Barbara Hershey, who built the house on the farm in 1857, sold the farm to Benjamin Brackbill in 1867 for the sum of $22,357.50. From there, presumably the wills of Benjamin and Elam would show the property changing hands to Harry G. Brackbill, my great-grandfather. The deed also showed the history of the property before Abraham Hershey: it had been purchased from Christian Umble by Christian Hershey, Abraham’s father, on April 2, 1812. The deed for that transaction (book 8, p. 91ff) shows that the land originally belonged to Andrew Deig and his wife Ann, who sold it on April 14, 1807, to Christian Fisher; who turned around and sold the land to Christian Umble (or Ummel) on April 1, 1812; who then turned around the next day and sold it to Christian Hershey. At the time the parcel was only 30 acres; Christian and Abraham subsequently enlarged it to 101 acres before it was sold to Benjamin Brackbill.

And it doesn’t stop there! The deed (book Y3, p. 700ff) between Andrew Deig and Christian Fisher gives us more of the history. On March 27, 1786, Andrew and Robert Caldwell and their wives sold a parcel of 232 acres containing this property to John Rickebaugh and Christian Roop (or Roof); the two purchasers partitioned the land in 1790, but Rickebaugh purchased Roop’s share. From there it gets messy, with the land being divided and partitioned until it ended up in Deig’s hands via sale from Christian Hurst.

~~And if you want to trace it further back, you can do it yourself. 🙂~~

Just kidding! I couldn’t stop! The Caldwells got the land in 1746 from the executors of Stephen Cole’s estate (book FF, p. 172ff); Cole got it from the Penns in 1731 (book FF p. 168ff).

And that’s as far back as I think it’s going to go.

On the road again

After almost fifteen months of enforced home time, I’ve been traveling and visiting family for the last few days. The occasion: my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, which fell on the same day as my cousin’s son’s high school graduation. I wasn’t able to make the graduation ceremony due to flight times but have been accompanying (and chauffeuring) my parents to visits with our Lancaster County family for the past few days.

Our home base has been the Brackbill farm near Kinzers. My earliest memories here are the annual family picnics along the Pequea Creek, which borders the property. More recently, the availability of one of the three apartments in the 1857 farmhouse for visiting family has made it a logical place to stay for funerals and visits.

The house sits on a working farm, which while not as active as when I was a boy (the herd of cattle that feature prominently in my childhood memories no longer graze the field behind the barn), still produces organic vegetables and flowers for the family CSA.

We hit the road today, as I drive my folks home to the hills around Asheville, North Carolina … and probably through a bunch of rainstorms. Should be fun.

Exfiltration Radio: All Possibilities

It’s been quite a rollercoaster of a year, for all sorts of reasons, and there were times when it felt like we were hunkering down and waiting for a beating to end. But people are getting vaccinated now and it’s spring, and suddenly it seems reasonable to start hoping once more.

Musically, the period I associate most with “hope,” as opposed to “nihilism” or “despair” or “80s hair,” is the time from the late 1990s through about 2003 or so, which produced some of the loveliest songs of hope and happiness I can remember. Part of it was the rise of indie rock, part probably the sustained recovery of the world economy. Maybe it was just that I got married at the beginning of the period, who knows? For whatever reason, it feels like a good time to dust off some of these tracks and start hoping again.

Do not attempt to adjust your set…

Untitled 4 (“Njósnavélin”) – Sigur Rós (( ))
Scratch – Morphine (Yes)
The Laws Have Changed – The New Pornographers (Electric Version)
When You’re Falling – Afro Celt Sound System (Volume 3: Further in Time)
The Way That He Sings – My Morning Jacket (At Dawn)
Diamond In Your Mind – Solomon Burke (Don’t Give Up On Me)
Brief & Boundless – Richard Buckner (Since)
All Possibilities – Badly Drawn Boy (Have You Fed The Fish?)
Time Travel is Lonely – John Vanderslice (Time Travel Is Lonely)
Shine – Mark Eitzel (The Invisible Man)
Why Not Smile – R.E.M. (Up)
You Are Invited – The Dismemberment Plan (Emergency & I)
Where Do I Begin – The Chemical Brothers (Dig Your Own Hole)
I’m Still Here – Tom Waits (Alice)

Exfiltration Radio: Shorter story

Lee Morgan’s “Search for The New Land” session, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 15, 1964. This is the cover shot for Shorter’s “The All Seeing Eye.”

I’ve been going down a rabbit hole in my listening lately, as I grow increasingly conscious that great artists live among us… but perhaps not for too much longer. One I’m thinking about right now is the great saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter.

I started listening to Shorter over 30 years ago, thanks to a CD copy of The Best of Wayne Shorter: The Blue Note Years that I found in Plan 9. Like all single-disc anthologies (and like this mix!), it’s a sparse summary of an astonishing period of creativity and excellent performances. But it hooked me… especially the opening track, the title from Shorter’s sixth album, which manages to be both relaxed and full of tension at the same time thanks to his unshowy use of modal scales.

I think I heard this album before I came across the Second Great Quintet recordings he did with Miles, which included many of Shorter’s compositions (especially the great “Footprints,” heard here) in very different arrangements. Miles’s version of “Footprints,” on Miles Smiles, ups the anxiety in the modal scale through tempo and urgency, especially in Tony Williams’ polyrhythmic drumming. I also looked backwards in time, finding some of the great recordings that he did with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (and recently uncovering some of the sideman work he did for some of his colleagues, including Lee Morgan here).

Thanks to early-90s bias against fusion (which, in fairness, had fallen pretty low by the late 1980s), it took me years to discover Weather Report, particularly the first album, and I only recently began to listen to some of Shorter’s mid-1970s output, which featured a more accessible side of the great composer on songs like “Ana Maria.” And his late-period works with Danilo Perez, John Pattituci and Brian Blade continue to blow my head off with the genius of the collective improvisation, even as they document Shorter’s declining physical stamina. (He retired from performance in 2019 due to mounting health issues.)

Like that first Blue Note compilation, this sixty minute set is necessarily scanty, but hopefully will convince you to seek out more of Shorter’s work as well—and to utter a silent word of thanks that we walk the earth at the same time he does.

Enjoy…

Speak No Evil – Wayne Shorter ( Speak No Evil )
Ping Pong (No. 1) – Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers ( Complete Studio Recordings (with Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter…) )
Edda – Lee Morgan ( The Rumproller )
Yes or No – Wayne Shorter ( JuJu )
Footprints – Miles Davis Quintet ( Miles Smiles )
Tears – Weather Report ( Weather Report )
Ana Maria – Wayne Shorter ( Native Dancer )
Aung San Suu Kyi – Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock ( 1+1 )
Adventures Aboard The Golden Mean (live) – Wayne Shorter Quartet ( Emanon )
Pinocchio – Herbie Hancock Quintet ( A Tribute To Miles )

Exfiltration Radio: I feel no shame

I was a sixth grader in 1983 from a very white part of town. I went from going to school less than two miles from my home to getting on a bus and riding 40 minutes every day to my middle school, one of two sitting next to each other on the edge of downtown. (Kind of reverse-busing.) The bus was loud, the older kids were scary. But… someone always had a radio.

Technically, they had a boom box. But no one ever seemed to be playing a cassette; it was almost always tuned to one of the local stations, often Z-104. I had grown up in a house that played classical radio, and when not that, easy listening (WFOG!), so the top-40 stuff that was being played was new to me.

So was the other stuff that was sometimes played. I don’t remember the station identifications, but a fair amount of what I remember wouldn’t have been played on Top-40 radio — think “Roxanne, Roxanne” or “Electric Kingdom.” So part of my memory from this time comes with no liner notes and I’m still finding some of the songs.

But the stuff that stuck the longest, earwormed the most thoroughly, was probably the adult contemporary balladry of the time. Many of them aren’t great songs! But they’re really easy to get into, even for a pop music neophyte — the “quiet storm” jazz crossover stuff like Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo” flavored some of what was going on (there’s a common thread between this stuff and Sting’s Dream of the Blue Turtles that also touched the Pointer Sisters; listen to “Automatic”).

And then there were the really goopy ballads. Anita Baker need have felt no shame for “Sweet Love,” but oh man, “On My Own.” And “All Cried Out.” I banished them so far from my memory, I never even touched them when going through 1980s music in a series of ten mixes starting in 2003. But they’re there, and some of them might be worth more than you think.

Just maybe not Gregory Abbott. (Oh well well.)

One last note: I was reminded about more than a few of these songs courtesy of Stereogum’s The Number Ones column, which is essential reading. I’ve linked a few articles below for further reading on some of the tracks, but you should really read the whole thing.

Rumors – Timex Social Club – Timex Social Club (Un, Dos, Tres…Playa Del Sol (12 Magic Summer Hits))
Radio People – Zapp (The New Zapp IV U)
Fresh – Kool & The Gang (The Very Best of Kool & The Gang)
In My House – Mary Jane Girls (20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of Mary Jane Girls)
Juicy Fruit – Mtume (Juicy Fruit)
Mr. Wrong – Sade (Promise)
Automatic – The Pointer Sisters (Break Out)
Sweet Love – Anita Baker (Rapture)
Love Zone – Billy Ocean (The Very Best of Billy Ocean)
Stop to Love – Luther Vandross (80’s Pop Hits)
On My Own – Patti LaBelle (’80s Pop Number 1’s)
Shake You Down (Single Version) – Gregory Abbott (80’s Pop Hits)
All Cried Out (with Full Force) – Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam (80’s Pop Hits)
Human Beat Box – Fat Boys (Fat Boys)

Object oriented ourobouros

Isaac Rodriguez at RealPython: Inheritance and Composition: a Python OOP Guide.

The very first job I had after college¹ was at American Management Systems, where I was hired as a business systems analyst and very rapidly molded into a programmer. In my first few days of training, I was introduced to concepts of object oriented programming, and it made a very strong impression on the way I solved problems. (Much to the chagrin of some of my fellow PowerBuilder developers.)

In that first six years as a programmer and architect, I learned a lot about object oriented concepts and tradeoffs: overriding, then invoking, behavior from a parent; the promise and madness of multiple inheritance; performance impacts of deep inheritance hierarchies. And I learned that, like every other tool, inheritance could be overused.²

I haven’t been a programmer for a long time, but I’m learning some Python now at work, and I was looking for some guidance on OO concepts in the Python world. Rodriguez’s article is thorough and well written, even if I’m not ready to adopt all the practices yet. Mostly, after wading through StackOverflow incantations and poorly written library how-tos, I’m just relieved to read intelligent discussions on how to program. I’ll be returning to this well.

¹ Other jobs held before and during college: comic book store employee; electrician at particle accelerator; SGML encoder at UVA electronic text center.

² Or as a former coworker liked to say, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a hippie.”

New year, new writing

I haven’t written much on the blog in a while. But that’s not because I haven’t been writing.

On Wednesday, December 30, I finished my first draft of a book I’ve been working on, off and on, for years: the history of the first 150 years of the Virginia Glee Club. Sort of finished, anyway: I closed the document, took our dog for a walk, and realized when I walked back in the door that I had forgotten things.

I expect to continue to have that realization for a while. There is, of course, a lot of ground to cover, and I’ve inevitably left things out—like the biographies of many individual Glee Club members I’ve researched over the years. Or important historical events that add context to the work. Or…

Well, you get the drift. The reality is that the work that I’ve done on the history of the group is spread across a bunch of places: Glee Club newsletters, the history wiki, even a Pinterest board I started over the summer. The book will hopefully, for the interested reader, be the tip of the iceberg.

And now I can, maybe, start writing in other places. Like here. Someday.

Just as soon as I get the thing published. And that’ll be a whole different journey that I will share as I am able.