Birds At Our House

Posted on July 10, 2013 by J L tagged.

We live north of San Francisco in Marin County, where we have a house that is too small and too expensive on a hectare (two and a half acres) of beautiful California terrain. Henceforth this area shall be known as the Piliwale Andrew hectare.

I sit here writing this web log and look out the window at a railing where birds come to find the birdseed that Elise so kindly provides for them. I’m so glad that we decided to replace our windows, as if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to see these beautiful birds that have decided to pay us a visit. My friend had told me about a company called, Graceland Windows (https://gracelandwindows.com/) that they used for their replacement windows and they had some great designs on there which would enable us to get a better view of the birds. Unfortunately, though we don’t live in the area so we had to use a company that was more local to our area. If we ever moved to Texas, we will definitely consider using this company. For the time being though, I’m going to enjoy looking at the birds through our windows. Also, I often see them in our outdoor home security cameras, pecking awaty at the lawn or drive. They’re relaxing to watch.

We get some good views of these fascinating and varied creatures.

There is a family of foxes who live on the Piliwale Andrew hectare, a lot of hungry deer, bobcats, skunks, a snake or two, racoons, coyotes, occasionally a mountain lion, but what we see and hear mostly are birds.

At night we often hear, but rarely see, the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). I love their lonesome sound.

This little valley where we are has been home to Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) probably for thousands of years. They stretch out their wings to dry and then circle lazily overhead, riding the thermals and living the good life.

The Turkey Vulture will not eat anything that is alive, and they are one of the few birds with a sense of smell.

The vultures are very comfortable here and perhaps twenty of them circle around and come to rest on various tree stumps near our house. This is their laughing place.

The Corvid family (crows, ravens, jays, magpies) is well represented. There must be forty crows who carry on and carouse in the pines, cawing and gossiping, squabbling and commenting loudly on anything that catches their attention. Crows can be taught to “talk” in captivity. They actually practice their vocalizations. You can hear them. They do this even in their sleep. Their ability to mimic is uncanny. They can mimic a squeaky door closing if they choose.

These birds are larger than you might think. Seeing the occasional one who lands on our railing reduces all of us (two humans, a dog and two cats) to a kind of reverential awe. Our crows are nearly the size of eagles.

Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are serious carnivores and their search for food leads them to live in more varied habitats than any other California bird. They eat road kill, any kind of meat they can find in dumps, crickets, grasshoppers and almost anything else.

The Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) is also an improbably large bird with a crest, comb, topknot, whatever you want to call it. They are raucous, noisy and thieving. They will eat other birds and they often imitate Red-tailed Hawks to frighten intruders.

You can see clearly with the jays that they are descended from dinosaurs. They have an otherworldly look and their behavior is aggressive and predatory. Ornithiscian dinosaurs, they will eat almost anything and rob eggs when they can.

Woody Woodpecker in the Warner Brothers films has a characteristic call that is based on bop rhythms, popular music in the 1940s when he was created, but the pileated woodpeckers around here have a call that is quite similar to Woody’s. You recognize it right away. “And, then I said Baby!” If you sing that very quickly on an ascending scale, you will hear the woodpecker cry.

Our woodpeckers bore hundreds of holes in the trees. They have an extra backward pointing toe for clutching the bark and they lean on their strong tails while working. Woodpeckers have a stiff extending tongue for insects and their eggs.

When you first hear them you think it is someone hammering a nail somewhere.

They knock busily against the tree trunks looking for insects and making nests. I hear them right now hard at work.

Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) like dead or dying trees and we have a lot of those.

The Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) often selects nest holes on the downward side of leaning trees, where gravity can hinder any tree climbing predators.

The Downy is a small woodpecker, the smallest in North America, and it likes to live around bay trees. It drums loudly on dead limbs.

In the spring we see Olive-Sided Flycatchers (Contopus borealis) who like our wooded canyon in the coastal lowland and so come here to breed.

Olive-Sided Flycatchers spend the winter in Central America. Lucky them. That’s a lot of flying, though.

Western Wood-Pewees (Contopus sordidulus) come see us in about mid-April to early June. They and the Flycatchers have a crest or comb which makes them look distinguished. We have an “ephemeral” stream running through the Piliwale Andrew hectare and the Pewees like that. That “stream” becomes a raging torrent in February. My friend Clark brought his metal detector here one day and found a 1900 dime in the water.

The towhees might be the bird we see most. This is the California Towhee. which resembles a large, good looking sparrow. The plumage is very even and smooth.

The towhee is a handsome bird with a patch under the tail, called the crissum. One of the subspecies of the towhee is called crissalis because of this patch.

Rufous-sided Towhees (Pipilo erythrothalmus) have regional accents. The ones in California talk like surfers. No, no, just kidding, but they do sound quite different from eastern towhees. Their call can sound like a buzz.

Towhees like to eat nuts, seeds and fruits.

Spotted Towhees (Pipilo maculatus) like to live near the ground but I see them on our railing pecking at nuts and seeds. They are also sparrowlike.

Males are gleaming black above (females are grayish), spotted and striped with brilliant white. This is a sparrow in overdrive.

Sometimes we see a Chestnut-backed Chickadee (Poecile rufescens) and think it is a towhee.

This is a handsome chickadee that matches the rich brown bark of the coastal trees that it inhabits.

The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is the species to look for up and down the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest but especially on the Piliwale Andrew hectare. I saw one today in a tree out by the “river,” actually a trickle through the rocks at this point, though, I repeat, a raging torrent in February. Riparian pride is strong on the hectare.

Active, sociable, and noisy as any my little chickadee, these Chestnut-backed Chickadees move through tall conifers with titmice, nuthatches, and sometimes other chickadee species.

I have seen these birds in the shrubs in the heart of San Francisco. They seem at home everywhere.

Dark-eyed juncos are sparrows that nest on or near the ground in forests. In winter, they typically form flocks and often associate with other species. It’s fun to watch their beaks move as they “chew” their food. When they land, Juncos will fold their white feathers under, perhaps to escape detection by falcons and hawks.

When disturbed the entire Dark-eyed Junco flock suddenly flies up to a tree, usually perching in the open and calling in aggravation at the intrusion. I like to see animals talking back this way.

The House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) is a plain brown bird, very widely distributed. You probably see them everyday. They nest almost anywhere and will sing incessantly.

Bewick’s Wrens (Thryomanes bewickii) have a very long tail, tipped in white which they flick and jerk side to side. These hyperactive vocalists belt out a string of short whistles, warbles, burrs, and trills to attract mates and defend their territory, or scold visitors with raspy calls.

The Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) have scarlet-and-yellow shoulder patches they can puff up or hide depending on how confident they feel. Females are a subdued, streaky brown, almost like a large, dark sparrow. We always like to see them because they mean spring is coming, plus, they are a beautiful bird.

The hawks sit up high where they can see everything with their extremely acute vision. This is a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). They like canyons like ours with rivers or creeks running through them.

Accipiter striatus (Sharp-Shinned Hawks) like broken woodlands of coniferous, deciduous or mixed forest, so the Piliwale Andrew hectare is perfect for them. They are more common than the Cooper’s Hawk.

The Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) has its main San Francisco Bay population center in Sonoma and Marin Counties, so we see a lot of them.

The Red-Tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is hunted as the “chicken hawk,” but this bird is far more valuable for rodent control than for its occasional taking of a chicken. We value this hawk and wish there were more of them on our hectare.

The Red-Tailed Hawk breeding season begins with a spectacular sequence of aerial acrobatics. Male and female fly in large circles and gain great height before the male plunges into a deep dive and subsequent steep climb back to circling height. Later, the birds grab hold of one another with their talons and fall spiraling towards earth. This has to be the origin of several ancient myths (Icarus comes to mind). Here is probably the origin of another myth: Red-Tailed Hawks are monogamous and they mate for life.

The American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) is the smallest falcon in North America and is the smallest American raptor. It will often hover over its prey, deciding before diving. We see them maybe more than any other falcon or hawk. This kestrel, the only kestrel in the Americas, has three basic vocalizations: the “klee” or “killy”, the “whine”, and the “chitter.” The “klee” is usually delivered as a rapid series – klee, klee, klee, klee when the kestrel is upset or excited. This call is used in a wide variety of situations and is heard from both sexes, but the larger females typically have lower-pitched voices than the males.

The Wild Turkey (Meleagris galloparvo) was very rare here in Marin after the great hunting slaughter of the 1870s, but since the 1960s, these turkeys have been reintroduced several times and are now a very successful species. You see them in any open field, often contending with the cattle on Flander’s Farm down the road on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. The males strut around and show themselves to the females. It’s all very educational.

Wild Turkeys look like the classic Thanksgiving Turkey, especially the males with their preening, overweening behaviors. The females mostly wander around ignoring such ostentation, but it is difficult to enter the mind of a turkey. She may have her own designs, unknown to us. They probably center around reproduction and the continuance of the species.

I always think of the turkey and the chicken as Indian birds, because, if you really look at them, it seems as if they recently arrived from the Subcontinent. They are too ornate, too exotic, too beautiful and too obviously related to the peacock to originate anywhere around here.

We on the Piliwale Andrew hectare are vegetarians, so we observe these feathered bipeds with great interest but not great hunger. We hear chickens in the morning, as we hear the Great Horned Owl at that time, but we are up long before they are, working, toiling, scratching for worms ourselves, indifferent to their carnal attractions, but always aware of their beauty.

How do California Quail survive? They are slow, they are stupid, their call is distinctive and they are very easy to see. Every predatory animal within reach must be intent on their immediate slaughter, and yet they live from year to year scampering along with little regard for safety. Our cats regard their comings and goings with great interest and yet the quail still live… how? They have large broods for one thing. They can run, walk, really, very fast, fast enough to get out of the way of an onrushing car. They will only fly as a last resort. They are like island birds that way.

Mountain Quail (Oreortyx pictus) walk upslope in the summer and downslope in the winter. Quail travel in flocks except when paired for breeding. They have a curious, guttural cry which some people interpret as “chi-ca-go,” which is as good a way to describe their vocal as any. That song is very low and in the back of the throat. Quail, pheasants, turkeys and chickens all eat grain and they are all related.

I usually hear hummingbirds before I see them. When I am gardening I hear a buzz and think it is a large fly, but turn to see the hummer. This is the Black-Chinned Hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri).

We leave our doors open a lot and we have a skylight, so hummingbirds will fly in and then try to escape upward to the skylight. Which reminds me, we are currently in the midst of a few home renovation projects and are actually thinking of replacing our skylight soon. We have been looking at DaLyte residential skylights for some inspiration. If hummingbirds buzz against the glass long enough, they die of exhaustion, so there is always a great rushing around for ladders and brooms to try to show them the way out. The trick is to catch them when they are really tired and then they will land on the broom and we can convey them outside. Easier said than done. Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) is a frequent visitor who is often seen flying backwards.

Allen’s Hummingbirds ( Sealasphorus sasin) visit us early, somewhere from January to March.

This is a Canada goose washing. When we leave the Piliwale Andrew hectare and drive anywhere we see these beautiful birds in ditches, streams and ponds. They breed here and in Canada. They nest on the ground, but sometimes build nests in trees too.

The goslings follow their parents and learn what to eat.

One of the oldest songs in the English language, maybe THE oldest song in the English language is The Cuckoo. Peter Albin and I did The Cuckoo long before there was a Big Brother and the Holding Company, and long after too.

The song finally became Oh, Sweet Mary, but The Cuckoo was long a staple in folk music days. Janis Joplin and James Gurley used to sing the lyrics, which went something like, “Oh, the Cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies, she never hollers cuckoo, til the fourth day of July. Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, I’ve known you from of old, you’ve robbed me of my silver, you’ve robbed me of my gold.”

The Cuckoo song is about treachery and betrayal and it is fitting because the cuckoo and her relatives are parasites and traitors, at least viewed from our Judaeo-Christian überconsciousness.

The cuckoo lays her egg(s) in someone else’s nest, the egg then hatches, and ejects the other eggs from the nest.

Now, there is probably no real evil (nor good, for that matter) in the universe, but, if there were, this throwing of the “real” young out of the nest might come close to some kind of evil. This is why the cuckoo became the symbol in ancient folklore for betrayal, treachery and infidelity. Some birds will actually build a new nest bottom over this false progeny and begin their nesting life anew, but most accept the new, huge, ungainly, false offspring, who has killed her “siblings.”

The Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) is the California version of the Cuckoo. Cowbirds deposit their eggs in the nests of over 220 bird species. If the egg is accepted into the brood, the cowbird doesn’t disrupt the family further. But if the egg is rejected, cowbirds trash the nest, destroying the host’s eggs. This brutal behavior led ecologists to dub the species “mafia birds.” Cowbird eggs hatch earlier than host eggs, and although the parasitic hatchling rarely attacks other nestlings, it cries louder, demanding a greater share of the food-which it almost always gets.

This Cowbird behavior frequently leads to the starvation of host nestlings. Here is the problem of Good and Evil nakedly presented. Are we to blame the Cowbird for her behavior? She is acting on instinct. There is no thought, no consciousness here. No free will. Is she “wrong?” Is she “unethical?” Who would posit such a thing? And yet? And yet? If the Brown-headed Cowbird is not evil, then what is? Is “evil” an idea that won’t fit a situation like this? And then, if so, what area would “evil” fit? Adolph Hitler comes to mind. Other very sick people. Allow me to quote myself, “What used to be evil is now a disease.” Such are the lessons of observing nature.

The Western Kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis) has ashy gray and lemon-yellow plumage, and is a familiar summertime sight at our house. This large flycatcher sallies out to capture flying insects from conspicuous perches on trees or utility lines, flashing a black tail with white edges. Western Kingbirds are aggressive and will scold and chase intruders (including Red-tailed Hawks and American Kestrels) with a snapping bill and flared crimson feathers they normally keep hidden under their gray crowns.

Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica) build their cup-shaped mud nests almost exclusively on human-made structures. This is a bird of open country which normally uses man-made structures to breed and consequently has spread with human expansion. It builds the nest from mud pellets in barns or similar structures and feeds on insects caught in flight. In England this bird is known simply as the swallow.

The American Goldfinches (Spinus tristis) are active and acrobatic little finches that cling to weeds and seed socks. Goldfinches fly around here with a bouncy, undulating pattern and often call in flight, drawing attention to themselves. I like the group name for finches, “clarity.” A clarity of finches. It sounds so Elizabethan. My friend Tom Finch and his family are a clarity of Finches. It seems such an appropriate name for them.

Lawrence’s Goldfinches (Carduelis lawrencei) are named after George Lawrence, a New York businessman and ornithologist. The bird was given this name by John Cassin in 1850. This goldfinch feeds on seeds and insects. Their plumage is very beautiful and subtly colored. The female lays 3-6 pale white or pale blue eggs which hatch in 11 to 13 days.

The Lesser Goldfinches (Carduelis psaltria) travel in swiftly moving packs and they like to be on warm south slopes where there is open fresh water.

Lesser Goldfinches will imitate and mimic songs of other birds.

House Finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) are small-bodied finches with fairly large beaks and somewhat long, flat heads. The wings are short, making the tail seem long by comparison.

Many finches have distinctly notched tails, but the House Finch has a relatively shallow notch in its tail.

White-crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) are a large sparrow with a small bill and a long tail. The head can look distinctly peaked or smooth and flat, depending on the bird’s attitude. We see White-crowned Sparrows low at the edges of brushy habitat, hopping on the ground or on branches usually below waist level.

The Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) is, to me, one of the most striking birds on the hectare. They arrive in the fall and winter. The Cedar Waxwing is a medium-sized, sleek bird with a large head, short neck, and short, wide bill. Waxwings have a crest that often lies flat and droops over the back of the head. The wings are broad and pointed, like a starling’s. The tail is fairly short and square-tipped. These birds are so smooth and sculpted that they don’t look quite real.

The Latin/Greek name for the Northern Mockingbird says it all. Mimus polyglottos. Mockingbirds are best known for the habit of some species mimicking the songs of other birds and the sounds of insects and amphibians often loudly and in rapid succession. They can put on displays of calls that they have learned that will rival any concert hall offering.

When I was a boy I was fascinated with these birds and tried to kill as many of them as I could with my BB gun. Such is the insane legacy of testosterone. There were hit songs about mockingbirds, musicians always being fascinated with a fellow songster. Says here (English Wikipedia) that Darwin studied mockingbirds when he was in the Galápagos and not finches. News to me. I would have bet on the finches. On his second voyage he used what he had heard about the tortoises varying from island to island with his data on mockingbirds to buttress his case for the mutability of species.

This is a photograph of a University of Florida student being mercilessly harassed by a mockingbird who is protecting her nest, but it reminds me of another species (were they Cedar Waxwings?) at San Francisco State University where I took a graduate course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales one summer long ago.

When we walked across campus we would be divebombed by birds who had been eating more fermented berries than was strictly wise, and the drunken avians would fly down, tear at our hair, and then make their getaway. They seemed mightily proud of doing this.

This upclose and familiar encounter with the birds was actually most entertaining.

The American Robin (Turdus migratorius) must be the best known American bird, although what an oddly funny Latin name she has. The Robin lays three to five guess what color? eggs in a tree nest made of mud and grass.

This should be our national bird. She is a migratory songster, named after the European Robin because of her reddish-orange breast, though the two species are not closely related, since the European robin belongs to the flycatcher family. Do you find this somewhat disillusioning? I do, but am not sure why.

The American robin belongs to the thrush family.

Some people think that the American Robin ranks behind only the Red-winged Blackbird (and just ahead of the introduced European starling) as the most abundant, extant land bird in North America.

The American Robin is active mostly during the day and assembles in large flocks at night. Her diet consists of invertebrates (such as beetle grubs, earthworms and caterpillars), fruits and berries.

The American Robin is one of the earliest bird species to lay eggs, beginning to breed shortly after returning to its summer range from its winter range. Its nest consists of long coarse grass, twigs, paper, and feathers, and is smeared with mud and often cushioned with grass or other soft materials. It is among the first birds to sing at dawn, and its song consists of several discrete units that are repeated.

Hermit Thrushes (Catharus guttatus) have a chunky shape similar to an American Robin, but smaller. They stand upright, often with the slender, straight bill slightly raised. This is a winter bird.

I just saw an article about Swainson’s Thrush (Catharus ustulatus) this morning (8 June 2013) in the Marin Independent Journal.

“A local population of Swainson’s thrushes – a melodic songbird heard along trails and near streams – has had its 1,500-mile-plus migration tracked from Bolinas to Mexico with the use of small tags applied by researchers.”

“The findings could help better protect the habitat of the birds as their lifecycle and travels are better understood, according to Point Blue Conservation Science – formerly the Point Reyes Bird Observatory – which did the research.”

“Until now, all we knew was that these birds likely wintered in Mexico or Central America,” said Renée Cormier, an avian ecologist at Point Blue and lead author of the study. “We’re very excited to finally pinpoint where Swainson’s thrushes spend the winter.”

The Swainson’s Thrushes are distinguished from other spotted thrushes by their eyering and “buffy” face.

Bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus) weave a very unusual hanging nest, shaped like a soft pouch or sock, from moss, spider webs, and grasses. They are fairly plain brown-and-gray birds. Slightly darker above than below, they have brown-gray heads, gray wings, and tan-gray underparts.

The Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) is a beautiful, small thrush that often gathers in small flocks to feed on insects or berries, giving their quiet, chortling calls.

Western Bluebirds spread mistletoe seeds and they make us happy. The bluebird of happiness.

It’s always a bit of a shock to see a Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides). They look as if they just flew out of a Disney cartoon because their coloring is so vivid. They will nest up under the eaves of the house or shed, like these lp smartside sheds, because they seem to like human built structures. Sheds are more popular for these birds as they’re not often disturbed, whereas there’s often people in the house. Additionally, if homeowners are keen gardeners and have worms in a compost heap or store birdfood, like suet, mealworms or peanuts in their sheds, the birds will love choose to nest and feast in the shed, compared to the house where they’ll still have to forage for their food.

The Black headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus) is one of the few birds able to eat Monarch butterflies, despite the noxious chemicals those insects contain from eating milkweeds in their larval stage.

These birds visit us most years and even when we can’t see them we hear the young ones who whine and whistle for food.

Western Tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana) are popular at our house because they eat wasps, ants, beetles and termites. They build their nests, usually in coniferous trees, at a fork in the horizontal branch well out from the trunk.

The Western Tanager’s plumage and vocalizations are similar to members of the cardinal family. They sing somewhat like American Robins, but more hoarse. The call sounds like “pit-er-ick.”

Golden-Crowned Kinglets (Regulus satrapa) weigh about as much as two pennies so they are one of the tiniest birds and rather elusive. In Marin County, they breed mostly in Douglas fir and redwoods.

They eat a lot of insects, gnats, caterpillars, aphids and spiders. The female lays a surprising 5 to 11 eggs, sometimes in double layers. The male feeds her while she sits on the nest during incubation.

Early Marin ornithologists weren’t even aware that the Golden-Crowned Kinglet bred here and the birds probably didn’t react well to early logging, but they returned with the regrowth of dense forests. Golden and ruby-crowned kinglets are the only members of their genus in North America, but they are astonishingly similar in appearance and behavior to their two Old World cousins – the goldcrest and firecrest.

We see the Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia) fairly often and they were once considered abundant in Marin.

Female Yellow Warblers sing sweet-sweet-sweeter-than-sweet or sweet-sweet-l’m-so-sweet, but males sing various other songs as well, one of them being mean-mean-meaner than mean or mean-machine-I’m so mean. It is rather difficult to write out a bird song even using music notation. Birds’ songs and calls are ineffable and so beautiful. This morning I heard three hawks talking to each other and the conversation was so interesting that I wanted to fly up there myself and say a thing or two about vole catching, an area where I feel they could use a little improvement.

The dreaded cowbird often lays her parasitic eggs in Yellow Warbler nests who thwart these “evil” birds by building a new floor over the cowbird eggs and laying a new clutch of their own. Persistent cowbirds have been known to return five times to lay more eggs in the nest, and the even more persistent warbler builds SIX layers of nest floors to cover up the cowbird eggs. This goes on all the time, whether we are there or not.

Have you ever heard that Latin saying, I think Horace wrote it? It goes Ars est celare artem, and it means it is art to hide art. Keep’em guessing, would be the American vernacular equivalent. Anyway, we now consider the Vermivora celata, the hidden wormeater, otherwise known as the Orange-Crowned Warbler.

Adult male: dusky olive green upperparts, grayer on crown and nape. Whitish or yellowish narrow broken eye ring, indistinct dusky eye line. Greenish yellow underparts with indistinct blurry streaks. Undertail coverts always brighter yellow than belly. Adult female: duller and grayer than male. Immature: duller, similar to adult female. So, where is the orange crown?

The most frequent call is a very distinctive, hard stick or tik. Flight call: a high, thin seet. Song: a high-pitched loose trill becoming louder and faster in the middle, weaker and slower at the end. Birds don’t drawl the way Americans do. An American pronounces “stick” with a bit of a twist. It’s almost like “styi ck,” it’s a lazy diphthong. Birds speak more as British or Continental people do. “Stick,” very short and bitten off to our ears. It’s fast and clipped, virtually without a vowel. “Stck.”

With a length of only 12cm/4.75in, the specific name pusilla (small) given to Wilson’s Warbler (Wilsonia pusilla) by Alexander Wilson in 1811 is appropriate.

Alexander Wilson moved from Scotland to Pennsylvania in 1794 at the age of 28, became interested in ornithology in 1801 and decided in 1802 to publish a book illustrating all the North America birds. This appeared as the nine volume American Ornithology between 1808 and 1814.

Wilson met John James Audubon in 1810 and probably inspired him to publish his own book of illustrations, even though Audubon’s reaction to Wilson is described as ‘decidedly ambiguous’. (He declined to subscribe to American Ornithology, felt his own illustrations were much better and, in 1820, decided to publish the ‘greatest bird book ever’.)

This bird is quite small and will fit in the palm of your hand with room to spare. Occasionally I see the females down by our creek in the underbrush, so little that I think at first that they are flies. How can you fit all that life into such a diminutive package?

The Violet-green Swallow (Tachycineta thalassina) is a truly beautiful bird and the only swallow that lives in the woodlands and forests of Marin County. The purple on the upper-tail coverts, often not seen, identifies this as a male. Green on the back can be bright in both sexes, male head usually relatively bright green; female head duller green to brownish. The extension of white above the eye is a mark that allows distinction of Violet-green from Tree Swallows in flight. The two species co-exist in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the Violet-green usually at higher altitudes and the Tree more often near bodies of water

These swallows will find old woodpecker holes or natural cavities in trees for nest sites, and they will also use nest boxes or crevices in buildings.

Swallows catch insects in flight. They have a short, wide bill that opens into a gaping mouth ideal for scooping up prey in mid-air.

The Violet-green Swallows are winter birds. They arrive sometimes as early as mid-January. They get along well with other swallows and add some much needed color in the cold months.

I see other birds here on the Piliwale Andrew hectare, but I don’t know what they are and need to take a good photograph for identification. Birds are singers and travelers, so we feel a lot of kinship with them. See you next week.

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Polyonymously Perverse

Posted on July 7, 2013 by J L tagged.

Polyonymously Perverse

Polyonomous could mean having many names. Cicero was known in his time as Marcus Tullius Cicero. My name is Sam Houston Andrew III.

Where we lived at the Fur Peace Ranch.

Melina Riverblues has many names.

Stephen Bruton, Leah Hawk and Kris Kristofferson.

Jorma Kaukonen and Don Aters

Il diavolo si nasconde nei dettagli. The devil is hiding in the details.

My beautiful and wise friend Sally.

We were the Spice Boys.

The meeting and eating house at the Fur Peace Ranch near Darwin, Ohio.

I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am. Ann Coulter (how does she find any?)

La bottega dei sogni. The dream boutique.

If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. Ann Coulter.

The welcome kitty at Fur Peace Ranch.

I’ll play what you want or I won’t play at all.

All the world is a birthday cake, so take a little, but not too much.

Ahahahahhaah, ma che faccia ho! My god, what a face I have!

About fifteen minutes from Athens, Ohio.

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote. Ann Coulter (noted cheater at the polls).

I wanted to be successful, not famous.

Gossip is the devil’s radio.

Jorma was so kind and generous to us. Everyone was. This was a wonderful stay.

Le ragazze del rock. The girls of rock.

Polls? Nah! They’re for strippers and cross country skiers. Sarah Palin.

I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Music belongs to everyone. It’s only the music publishers who think that someone in particular owns it.

Don Aters took this photo of Levon Helm.

Interessante…. dove? come? partecipazione libera? Interesting… where? how? free participation?

I could possibly have beaten Senator McCain in the primary. Then I could have been the candidate who lost to Barack Obama. Mitt Romney.

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their team have failed the American people, and that is why their majority will soon be out the door. Mitt Romney.

Elise Wainani Piliwale at Fur Peace Ranch: 29 June 2013.

If someone thinks that “love and peace” is a cliché that must be left behind in the 1960s, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

Absolutely all the people I know are a little crazy.

Che presenza inquietante hai lì dietro di te! Con tanto di simil “funcia”! What a disquieting presence there behind you! And you can function with all of that!

As usual there is a great woman behind every idiot.

Hot Tuna à l’italiana.

When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Richard M. Nixon.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true. Richard M. Nixon.

Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen sat in an apartment one day and recorded some songs while Jorma’s then wife Margareta typed a paper for her UC Berkeley class in the next room. This is the typewriter she used.

The clicking and clacking of the keys went straight onto the tape.

Ho perso tutte le foto di quella sera tranne la più bella. I have lost all the photos from that evening except for the most beautiful one.

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody. Richard M. Nixon.

Solutions are not the answer. Richard M. Nixon.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. Richard M. Nixon.

Vanessa Kaukonen made us feel at home on the Fur Peace Ranch. She is Jorma’s wife now and a capable, intelligent woman.

Mi viene da piangere. Cosa mi sono persa? I’m about to cry. Oh, no, I missed it.

The press is the enemy. Richard M. Nixon.

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren’t for the goddamned people. Richard M. Nixon.

John Hurlbut, a prince among men, the factotum at Fur Peace.

I let the American people down. Richard M. Nixon.

Ringrazia la sorellona che ti ha fatto questa foto. Thank the big sister who took this photo for you.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is. Dan Quayle.

Peter Albin and I did an interview with John Hurlbut and Jorma. John wrote questions like this one, and Jorma asked them.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican. Dan Quayle.

I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix. Dan Quayle.

Ma che figata!

Edd Hart. Elise’s mother Carla Piliwale is married to Edd. We had a beautiful drive through Ohio with these people.

Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement. Dan Quayle.

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history. Dan Quayle.

Bobby Knight told me this: ‘There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.’ In other words a good offense wins. Dan Quayle.

Carla Piliwale.

Musica e rappoorti umani…camminano insieme. Music and human relationships…they go together.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us. Dan Quayle.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change. Dan Quayle.

For NASA, space is still a high priority. Dan Quayle.

We stayed in London, Ohio, for a couple of days and I haunted the library.

Volevo farti i complimenti perchè hai reso perfettamente l’idea di quello che, credo, ognuna di noi pensa. Complimenti! I wanted to give you my regards because you have rendered perfectly the idea that each of us, I believe, thinks. Congratulations!

The future will be better tomorrow. Dan Quayle.

I deserve respect for the things I did not do. Dan Quayle.

Nella vita e nelle feste non smettere mai di giocare!

Jim Wall, drummer extraordinaire and good friend.

It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. Dan Quayle.

It’s wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago. Dan Quayle.

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child. Dan Quayle.

Adorabile.

Peter Albin in the green room at Fur Peace.

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check. Dan Quayle.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century. Dan Quayle.

A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls. Dan Quayle.

Minchia questa e fantasticaaaa!

I love this Kevin Morgan painting of Jorma.

This president is going to lead us out of this recovery. Dan Quayle.

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other. Dan Quayle.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever. Dan Quayle.

Grazie alla fotografa. Thanks to the photographer.

The loss of life will be irreplaceable. Dan Quayle.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made. Dan Quayle.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future. Dan Quayle.

Che uomo fortunato che è Luca… What a lucky guy Luke is…

Vanessa, Jorma and John Hurlbut.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future! Dan Quayle.

It’s a question of whether we’re going forward into the future, or past to the back. Dan Quayle.

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system. Dan Quayle.

Questa è la mia preferita. This one is my favorite.

Ben, Sam, Jim, Stefanie and Peter holding forth at the Fur Peace Ranch.

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right. Dan Quayle.

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared.’ Dan Quayle.

This election is about who’s going to be the next President of the United States! Dan Quayle.

Veramente bella questa foto. Truly beautiful this photo.

Jorma with lovely Nikon.

Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists. Dan Quayle.

Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here. Dan Quayle.

I do have a political agenda. It’s to have as few regulations as possible. Dan Quayle.

“Cosa sono questi occhi stupiti”, diceva una vecchia canzone italiana… “What are those amazing eyes,” said an old Italian song…

Jorma’s family.

I don’t watch it, but I know enough to comment on it. Dan Quayle.

I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made. Dan Quayle.

Che belle le rottoballe! What beautiful bales of hay!

Jorma on his way to Hawaii.

I was known as the chief grave robber of my state. Dan Quayle.

I want to be Robin to Bush’s Batman. Dan Quayle.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace. John Lennon

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure. Dan Quayle.

Non ti facevo così mainstream. I didn’t think you were that mainstream.

Jack Nicholson has his eyebrows insured. Jack Casady should probably do the same.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student. Dan Quayle.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it. Dan Quayle.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite. Dan Quayle.

Se tutte le serate finissero cosi… If only all nights finished this way…

Don Aters

Reading is like kissing: with someone who doesn’t do it a lot, you notice it on their tongue.

It’s a very good historical book about history. Dan Quayle.

It’s rural America. It’s where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America. Dan Quayle.

..chi ci ha già rinunciato e ti ride alle spalle forse è ancora più pazzo di te.. …who has already refused and maybe laughs behind your back is even crazier than you..

Rabbits in the road at the Fur Peace Ranch.

Let me just be very clear that the Republican Party will select a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton. Dan Quayle.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children. Dan Quayle.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite. Dan Quayle.

Sarebbe davvero bello rivedersi! It would be really wonderful to see each other again.

Driving into the Fur Peace Ranch in the early morning.

The more I see, the less I know for sure.

The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make. Dan Quayle.

Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less. Dan Quayle.

Sentivamo la tua mancanza. We felt your absence.

Brett at Fur Peace.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur. Dan Quayle.

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive. Dan Quayle.

We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe. Dan Quayle.

Stupenda.

Don’s Nikon.

We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in ‘Red Storm Rising.’ Dan Quayle.

We’re going to have the best American educated people in the world. Dan Quayle.

What you guys want, I’m for. Dan Quayle.

Svegliarsi dalla notte e vedere certe sorprese.. To wake up in the night and see certain surprises..

Changing strings.

Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush and my fellow astronauts. Dan Quayle.

The other day the President said, I know you’ve had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused, then said, would you like a puppy? Dan Quayle.

I have a very good family. I’m very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It’s one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it. Dan Quayle.

Due MITICI! Two MYTHS!

Hubert Sumlin. I love his guitar playing.

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is. Dan Quayle.

You do the policy. I’ll do the politics. Dan Quayle.

You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be. Dan Quayle.

Guardali…bellissimi! Look at them…beautiful!

Janis!

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the Constitution may or may not say. Dan Quayle.

El Salvador is a democracy so it’s not surprising that there are many voices to be heard there. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans…I have heard a single voice. Dan Quayle.

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings. Dan Quayle.

Che belli che siete! How beautiful you are!

Warm, friendly people.

I’m going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we’ve had in a couple of hundred years. Dan Quayle.

Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That’s a statement in and of itself. Dan Quayle.

The thing is, if you control the Senate meetings, you control the gavel. And the gavel is a very important instrument…an instrument of power. An instrument that establishes the agenda. Dan Quayle.

…scusate sono di fretta devo correre a Porcia…..la festa sta’ per iniziare….. Excuse me, I am in a hurry, I should run to Porcia…the party is about to begin….

Lenny Bruce and the Mothers. What a bill.

Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win. Dan Quayle.

To those of you who received honors and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States. George W. Bush.

When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $ 2 million missile at a $ 10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive. George W. Bush.

Non è vero, se non fosse stato per Samuele sarei caduta 8000 volte. It’s not true, if it weren’t for Sam I would have fallen 8,000 times.

It was fun driving through Ohio.

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on. George W. Bush.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it. George W. Bush.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace. George W. Bush.

Voto 10. I vote 10.

Educating myself in the London, Ohio pubic, I mean, public library.

I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun. George W. Bush.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it. George W. Bush.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. George W. Bush.

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods. George W. Bush.

We got to put more food on our families. George W. Bush.

Bellissime le mie bimbe.. Most beautiful my bimbos.

The London, Ohio, city hall.

The legislature’s job is to write law. It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law. George W. Bush.

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction. George W. Bush.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do. George W. Bush.

Ma no te si neanca bona a girar le foto?

Don Aters captures life at the Fur Peace Station.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first. Ronald Reagan.

A people free to choose will always choose peace. Ronald Reagan.

Ahhh, ecco! Contenta? Ah, there! Happy?

Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement. Ronald Reagan.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected I had my high school grades classified Top Secret. Ronald Reagan.

Polyonymous for sure…

Elise Wainani Piliwale and Sam Houston Andrew III

___________________________________

Ants

Posted on June 28, 2013 by J L tagged.

Ants

The word ant is derived from ante of Middle English which in turn is derived from æmette of Old English and is related to the Old High German ?meiza, hence the modern German Ameise.

Many of the shots below, particularly the better ones were taken by Dr. Alex Wild, whose work may be found at www.alexanderwild.com

Dr. Wild is a biologist at the University of Illinois where he studies the evolutionary history of various groups of insects. Alex conducts photography as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work. We highly recommend a visit to his site and note that all of his photographs are copyrighted.

All of these words come from West Germanic *amaitjo, and the original meaning of the word was “the biter” (from Proto-Germanic *ai-, “off, away” + *mait- “cut”).

The family name Formicidae is derived from the Latin form?ca (“ant”) from which the words in other Romance languages such as the Portuguese formiga, Italian formica, Spanish hormiga, Romanian furnic? and French fourmi are derived.

It has been hypothesized that a Proto Indo European word *morwi- was used (Sanskrit vamrah, Latin form?ca, Greek ?????? mýrm?x, Old Church Slavonic mraviji, Old Irish moirb, Old Norse maurr).

From the Greek ?????? mýrm?x, we get the scientific name for the study of ants, myrmecology. This is the Croatian version of the word.

For every human in the world there are one million ants and a human weighs a million times more than an ant, so that works out to the same presence on earth for humans and ants. Taken altogether, they weigh as much as we do taken altogether.

The ant’s sense of smell is as acute as the dog’s. Ants have survived on earth for more than 100 million years. Not many other animals can make that statement. There are more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world. An ant can lift twenty times her own body weight.

Ants have elbowed antennae, metapleural glands, and a constriction of their second abdominal segment into a node-like petiole. The head, mesosoma and metasoma are the three distinct body segments. The petiole forms a narrow waist between their mesosoma and gaster (metasoma).

Ants have an exoskeleton, an external covering that provides a protective casing around the body and a point of attachment for muscles, in contrast to the internal skeletons of humans.

Insects do not have lungs. Oxygen and other gases such as carbon dioxide pass through their exoskeleton via tiny valves called spiracles.

Insects also lack closed blood vessels; instead, they have a long, thin, perforated tube along the top of the body ( the “dorsal aorta”) that functions like a heart, and pumps hemolymph toward the head, thus driving the circulation of the internal fluids. The nervous system consists of a ventral nerve cords that runs the length of the body, with several ganglia and branches along the way.

An ant worker is less than one millionth the size of a human being, but if you weighed all of the ants in the world they would be about the same poundage as all of the human beings in the world. Ants feast on insects and spiders and they clean up ninety percent of their dead bodies dragging them back to their nests for food. Ants spread seeds around the world and they move more soil than earthworms. They live deep in the ground and high up in the trees. Whilst this is true, some homeowners may have seen some ants in their backyards. Ants can become a nuisance when there seems to be an infestation of them. They don’t cause a lot of damage, but they can distrupt the soil around plants. This can have an impact on the growth of the plant. If these ants seem to be causing some problems, homeowners could always visit https://www.lawncare.net/service-areas/michigan/ to see if they could remove this problem. Hopefully, that will keep plants safe. Ants, termites, stingless bees and polybiine wasps make up an astonishing eighty percent of the insect biomass. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Ants are as social as humans, which probably accounts for their success as a species. An ant colony is a superorganism, a social unit. As long as the queen lives, the gene pool is secure. The individual worker, warrior, caregiver is nonreproductive and completely expendable. The colony is immortal, churning out queens and males year after year. Solitary insects are pioneers. They can go to strange places and live for a long time. Ant colonies take time to grow and they move slowly but once they get going it is difficult to halt their progress.

An ant begins as an egg, which if fertilized will be female (diploid). If the egg isn’t fertilized, it will be male (haploid). There is a complete metamorphosis, larval and pupal stages before adulthood. The larva is largely immobile and is fed and cared for by workers. Food is given to the larvae by trophallaxis. The feeding ant regurgitates liquid food from her crop, the “social stomach.” Adults also share food this way. Larvae may also be fed solid food such as pieces of insects brought back to the nest.

The larvae molt several times and then begin the pupal development. Their appendages are free, unlike butterflies at the same stage. Whether the larva becomes a queen, a worker, and what caste she belongs to is determined in some species by what kind of food she is given. Larvae and pupae need to be kept at fairly constant temperatures to ensure proper development, and so often, are moved around among the various brood chambers within the colony.

A new worker spends her first few days of adult life caring for the queen and young. She then graduates to digging and other nest work, and later to defending the nest and foraging. These changes are sometimes fairly sudden, and define what are called temporal castes. An explanation for the sequence is suggested by the high casualties involved in foraging, making it an acceptable risk only for ants who are older and are likely to die soon of natural causes.

Ant species in general have a system in which only the queen and breeding females have the ability to mate. Colonies of these ants are called queen-right.

Some ant nests have multiple queens while others may exist without queens. Workers with the ability to reproduce are called “gamergates” and colonies that lack queens are then called gamergate colonies.

The winged male ants, called drones, emerge from pupae along with the breeding females and these males do nothing in life except eat and mate.

Most ants are univoltine, producing a new generation each year. During the species-specific breeding period, new reproductives, females and winged males leave the colony in what is called a nuptial flight. The males generally fly up into the heavens before the females.

Males then look around to find a common mating ground, for example, a landmark such as a pine tree to which other males in the area converge. Males secrete a mating pheromone that females follow. Females of some species mate with just one male, but in some others they may mate with as many as ten or more different males.

After they mate, females then seek a suitable place to begin a colony. They break off their wings and begin to lay and care for eggs. The females store the sperm they obtain during their nuptial flight to selectively fertilise future eggs.

The first workers to hatch are weak and smaller than later workers, but they begin to serve the colony immediately. They enlarge the nest, forage for food, and care for the other eggs.

Species that have multiple queens may have a queen leaving the nest along with some workers to found a colony at a new site, a process akin to swarming in honeybees.

Anthropomorphized ants have long been used in fables and children’s stories to represent industriousness and cooperative effort.

In the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, ants are held up as a good example for humans for their hard work and cooperation. Note Aesop’s version of this in his fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, a story that I think about quite frequently.

In the Qur’an, Sulayman (Arabic: ???????) is said to have heard and understood an ant warning other ants to return home to avoid being accidentally crushed by Sulayman and his marching army.

In parts of Africa, ants are considered to be the messengers of the deities.

In Hopi mythology, ants are considered as the very first animals.

Ant bites are often said to have curative properties. The sting of some species of Pseudomyrmex is claimed to give fever relief, and ant bites are used in the initiation ceremonies of some Amazon Indian cultures as a test of endurance. (This is an Alex Wild photograph, copyright, all rights reserved.)

Ants communicate with each other using pheromones, sounds, and touch. The use of pheromomes as chemical signals is more developed in ants than in other hymenoptera. Ants perceive smells with their long, thin, and mobile antennae. The paired antennae provide information about the direction and intensity of scents.

Most ants live on the ground, so they use the soil surface to leave pheromone trails that may be followed by other ants. In species that forage in groups, a forager that finds food marks a trail on the way back to the colony; this trail is followed by other ants, these ants then reinforce the trail when they head back with food to the colony. (Photo copyright: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

When the food source is gone, no new trails are marked by returning ants and the scent slowly dissipates. When an established path to a food source is blocked by an obstacle, the foragers leave the path to explore new routes. If an ant is successful, it leaves a new trail marking the shortest route on its return. Successful trails are followed by more ants, reinforcing better routes and gradually identifying the best path.

An injured or crushed ant emits an alarm pheromone that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy and attracts more ants from farther away.

Some ant species use “propaganda pheromones” to confuse enemy ants and make them fight among themselves.

Pheromones are produced by Dufour’s glands, poison glands and glands on the hindgut, pygidium, rectum, sternum, and hind tibia. Pheromones also are exchanged, mixed with food, and passed by trophallaxis, transferring information within the colony.

Trophallaxis (regurgitation) allows other ants to detect what task group (foraging or nest maintenance, for example) to which other colony members belong. (Photo copyright: Dr. Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

In ant species with queen castes, when the dominant queen stops producing a specific pheromone, workers begin to raise new queens in the colony. The latest movement in myrmecology is the study of these pheromones using very delicate instruments.

Janis Joplin is stridulating here.

She is rubbing a comb over a ribbed guïro.

If she were doing this quicker and it were a higher pitch, it would sound like a grasshopper, a cricket, a cicada… all stridulating insects. It’s not unlike the most unwelcome of insectual pests, locusts, which are wholly unpleasant and often swarm in the thousands and even millions, as explained here – https://www.evolutiondarlington.com/what-are-locusts-and-why-do-they-swarm/.

Some ants produce sounds by stridulation, using the gaster segments and their mandibles. Sounds may be used to communicate with colony members or with other species. See how much like a guïro the ant’s sounding board looks?

You can just about hear ant stridulation in one or two species, although you can hear it very well in crickets and cicadas. I have always loved the sound which seems to be hypnotic in the way that chanting is.

Ants stridulate to communicate.

It’s a Ugandan jumping spider who has taken on the ant shape to confuse predators who won’t eat stinging ants. (Alex Wild took this photograph, which is copyrighted: www.alexanderwild.com)

Ants attack and defend themselves by biting and, in many species, by stinging, often injecting or spraying chemicals such as formic acid.

Bullet Ants (Paraponera) in Central and South America, are considered to have the most painful sting of any insect, although it is usually not fatal to humans. This sting is given the highest rating on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

The sting of Jack jumper ants (less than a centimeter long with bright orange pincers) can be fatal and an antivenom has been developed for it.

Fire Ants (Solenopsis) are unique in having a poison sac containing piperidine alkaloids. Their stings are painful and can be dangerous to hypersensitive people.

Trap-jaw ants of the genus Odontomachus are equipped with mandibles called trap-jaws, which snap shut faster than any other predatory appendages within the animal kingdom.

One study of Odontomachus bauri recorded peak speeds of between 126 and 230 km/h (78 – 143 mph), with the jaws closing within 130 microseconds on average.

The ants were also observed to use their jaws as a catapult to eject intruders or fling themselves backward to escape a threat.

Before striking, the ant opens its mandibles extremely widely and locks them in this position by an internal mechanism. Energy is stored in a thick band of muscle and explosively released when triggered by the stimulation of sensory organs resembling hairs on the inside of the mandibles. The mandibles also permit slow and fine movements for other tasks.

Trap-jaws also are seen in the following genera: Anochetus, Orectognathus, and Strumigenys, plus some members of the Dacetini tribe, which are viewed as examples of convergent evolution. (Photo: Alex Wild. All rights reserved.)

A Malaysian species of ant in the Camponotus cylindricus group has enlarged mandibular glands that extend into their gaster. When disturbed, workers rupture the membrane of the gaster, causing a burst of secretions containing acetophenones and other chemicals that immobilize small insect attackers. The worker subsequently dies.

Suicidal defences by workers are also noted in the Brazilian ant Forelius pusillus where a small group of ants leaves the security of the nest after sealing the entrance from the outside each evening.

In addition to defence against predators, ants need to protect their colonies from pathogens.

Some worker ants maintain the hygiene of the colony and their activities include necrophory (undertaking), the disposal of dead nest-mates.

Oleic acid has been identified as the compound released from dead ants that triggers necrophoric behavior in Atta mexicana while workers of Linepithema humile react to the absence of characteristic chemicals (dolichodial and iridomyrmecin) present on the cuticle of their living nestmates to trigger similar behavior.

Nests may be protected from physical threats such as flooding and overheating by elaborate nest architecture.

Workers of Cataulacus muticus, an arboreal species that lives in plant hollows, respond to flooding by drinking water inside the nest, and excreting it outside.

Camponotus anderseni, which nests in the cavities of wood in mangrove habitats, deals with submergence under water by switching to anerobic respiration.

Many animals can learn by imitation, but ants may be the only group besides mammals where interactive teaching has been observed. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

An experienced forager of Temnothorax albipennis will lead a new nest-mate to freshly discovered food by the process of tandem running.

The leading tutor teaches the follower. The leader is acutely sensitive to the progress of the follower and slows down when the follower lags and speeds up when the follower gets too close.

Experiments with colonies of Cerapachys biroi suggest that an individual may choose nest roles based on her previous experience.

A generation of identical workers was divided into two groups whose outcome in food foraging was controlled. One group was continually rewarded with prey, while it was made certain that the other failed. As a result, members of the successful group intensified their foraging attempts while the unsuccessful group ventured out fewer and fewer times. A month later, the successful foragers continued in their role while the others had moved to brood care.

Ants generally build complex nests, but some species are nomadic and do not build permanent structures.

Ants may form underground nests or build them in trees. These nests may be found in the ground, under stones or logs, inside logs, hollow stems, or even acorns.

Materials used for construction include soil and plant matter, and ants carefully select their nest sites.

Temnothorax albipennis avoid sites with dead ants since these may indicate the presence of pests or disease. They are quick to abandon established nests at the first sign of threats.

The army ants of South America and the driver ants of Africa do not build permanent nests, but instead, alternate between nomadism and stages where the workers form a temporary nest from their own bodies, by holding each other together. This is called a bivouac. (Photo copyright: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

The weaver ants (Oecophylla) build nests in trees by attaching leaves together, first pulling them together with bridges of workers and then inducing their larvae to produce silk as they are moved along the leaf edges. Some species of Polyrhacis nest similarly.

Other ant species build nests in and on buildings. Interior spaces in walls, windows, and even electric appliances such as clocks, lamps, and radios in the interior of buildings may be used as sites for nests.

Ants are usually predators, scavengers, and indirect herbivores, but a few have evolved specialised ways of obtaining nutrition.

Leafcutter ants (Atta and Acromyrmex) feed exclusively on a fungus that grows only within their colonies. They collect leaves which are taken to the colony, cut into tiny pieces and placed in fungal gardens.

The largest of these ants cut stalks, smaller workers chew the leaves and the smallest tend the fungus. Leafcutter ants are sensitive enough to recognise the reaction of the fungus to different plant material, apparently detecting chemical signals from the fungus.

If a particular type of leaf is found to be toxic to the fungus, the colony will no longer collect it. The ants feed on structures produced by the fungi called gongylydia. The white clumps are gongylydia.

Symbiotic bacteria on the exterior surface of the ants produce antibiotics that kill bacteria introduced into the nest that may harm the fungi.

Ants when they forage for food travel distances of up to 200 metres (700 ft) from their nest and scent trails allow them to find their way back even in the dark.

Day-foraging ants in hot, dry places can easily die from the heat, so the ability to find the shortest route back is essential.

Diurnal desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis (Sahara desert ants, for example) navigate by keeping track of direction as well as distance travelled. Distances travelled are measured using an internal pedometer that keeps count of the steps taken and also by evaluating the movement of objects they see.

Ants measure direction by using the position of the sun.

They can also make use of visual landmarks when available as well as olfactory and tactile cues to navigate.

Some species of ant are able to use the earth’s magnetic field for navigation. The compound eyes of ants have cells that detect polarised light from the Sun, which is used to determine direction.

These polarization detectors are sensitive to the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.

In some army ant species, a group of foragers who become separated from the main column sometimes may turn back on themselves and form a circular ant mill. The workers may then run around continuously until they die of exhaustion.

Such wheels have been observed in other ant species, notably when a group has fallen into or been overcome with water, whereby the group rotates in a partially submerged circle on the surface of the water, which might allow for survival of a brief flooding.

Worker ants do not have wings and reproductive females lose their wings after their mating flights. Therefore, unlike their wasp ancestors, most ants travel by walking.

Jerdon’s jumping ant (Harpegnathos saltator) is able to jump by synchronising the action of its mid and hind pairs of legs.

There are several species of gliding ant including Cephalotes atratus; this may be a common trait among most arboreal ants. Ants with this ability are able to control the direction of their descent while falling. (Photo copyright Alex Wild. www.alexanderwild.com)

Some ants can form chains to bridge gaps over water, underground, or through spaces in vegetation.

Some species, such as fire ants, also form floating rafts that help them survive floods. These rafts may also have a role in allowing ants to colonise islands.

Polyrhacis sokolova, a species of ant found in Australian mangrove swamps, can swim and live in underwater nests. Since they lack gills, they go to trapped pockets of air in the submerged nests to breathe.

Ants have different kinds of societies. Bulldog ants are among the biggest of ants. They are eusocial, that is very social, but their behavior is poorly developed compared to other species. Each individual hunts alone, using her large eyes instead of chemical senses to find prey. (Photo: Alex Wild, all rights reserved)

Species such as Tetramorium caespitum attack and take over neighboring ant colonies. Others invade colonies to steal eggs or larvae, which they either eat or raise as workers or slaves.

Amazon ants are incapable of feeding themselves and need captured workers to survive. Captured workers of the enslaved species Temnothorax have evolved a counter strategy, destroying just the female pupae of the slave-making Protomognathus americanus, but sparing the males (who don’t take part in slave-raiding as adults).

Ants know their relatives through their scent, which comes from hydrocarbon-laced secretions that coat their exoskeletons. If an ant is separated from its original colony, it will eventually lose the colony scent. Any ant that enters a colony without a matching scent will be attacked.

(Photo copyright: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Ants attack each other even if they are of the same species because the genes responsible for pheromone production are different between them. The argentine ant, however, does not have this characteristic, due to lack of genetic diversity, and has become a global pest because of it.

Parasitic ant species enter the colonies of host ants and establish themselves as social parasites; species such as Strumigenys xenos are entirely parasitic and do not have workers, but instead, rely on the food gathered by their Strumigenys perplexa hosts.

This form of parasitism is seen across many ant genera, but the parasitic ant is usually a species that is closely related to its host. A variety of methods are employed to enter the nest of the host ant. A parasitic queen may enter the host nest before the first brood has hatched, establishing herself prior to development of a colony scent. Other species use pheromones to confuse the host ants or to trick them into carrying the parasitic queen into the nest. Some simply fight their way into the nest. (Photo: Alex Wild)

A conflict between the sexes of a species is seen in some species of ants with these reproductives apparently competing to produce offspring that are as closely related to them as possible.

The sperm of the male ant appears to be able to destroy the female DNA within a fertilized egg, giving birth to a male that is a clone of its father. Meanwhile the female queens make clones of themselves to carry on the royal female line.

An extreme of sexual conflict is seen in Wasmannia auropunctata where the queens produce diploid daughters by thelytokous parthenogenesis (giving virgin birth to female clones) and males produce clones by a process whereby a diploid egg loses its maternal contribution to produce haploid males who are clones of the father.

^{Ants are partners with many other beings including other ant species, other insects, plants, and fungi.}

^{Also, many other animals and even some plants prey upon them.}

^{There are arthropods who spend part of their lives within ant nests, either preying on them, their larvae, their eggs, consuming the food stores of the ants, or hiding from predators. These are inquilines and they may bear a close resemblance to ants. (Alex Wild, photographer, all rights reserved. www.alexanderwild.com)}

^{The nature of this mymyrmecomorphy, ant mimicing, varies, with some cases involving Batesian mimicry where the mimic reduces the risk of predation. (Alex Wild, copyright)}

^{Other cases show Wasmannian mimicry, normally seen only in inquilines. (www.alexanderwild.com copyright Alex Wild)}

Then, in a sense, ants prey on other animals, sometimes rather benignly. Aphids and other hemipteran insects secrete a sweet liquid called honeydew. The sugars in honeydew are a high-energy food source, which many ant species collect, almost as we collect milk from cows.

The aphids secrete the honeydew in response to ants tapping them with their antennae. The ants in turn keep predators away from the aphids and will move them from one feeding location to another. A human being can tap an aphid with a hair of the head and the same secretion will happen.

Many colonies will take the aphids with them when they move to a new area, thus ensuring a continued supply of honeydew.

Ants also tend mealybugs to harvest their honeydew which can allow mealybugs to become a serious pest of pineapples if ants are present to protect them from their natural enemies.

Ant loving (myrmecophilous) caterpillars of the butterfly family, Lycaenidae (blues, coppers, or hairstreaks) are herded by the ants, led to feeding areas in the daytime, and brought inside the ants’ nest at night.

The caterpillars have a gland which secretes honeydew when the ants massage them. Some caterpillars produce vibrations and sounds that are perceived by the ants.

Other caterpillars have evolved from ant-loving to ant-eating: these myrmecophagous caterpillars secrete a pheromone that makes the ants act as if the caterpillar is one of their own larvae. The caterpillar is then taken into the ant nest where it feeds on the ant larvae.

The tribe Attini, fungus growing ants, which includes leafcutters cultivates certain species of fungus in the Leucoagricus or Leucoprinus genera of the Agariceae family.

The ants and the fungus depend upon each other for survival.

The ant Allomerus decemarticulatus has evolved a three-way association with the host plant, Hirtella physophora (Chrysobalanaceae), and a sticky fungus which is used to trap their insect prey. Comme d’habitude dans les dossiers sur les espèces on s’attaque à celles qui ont quelque chose d’époustouflant voir d’extraordinaire et bien les Allomerus decemarticulatus sont extraordinaires dans le fait qu’elles construisent des pièges qui leur servent à attraper leurs proies. (As usual with species one is attracted to those who are somewhat bizarre or even extraordinary and Allomerus decemarticulatus are extraordinary in that they build traps for catching their prey.)

C’est une fourmi arboricole qui creuse des petits trous appelés “domaties” dans les branches d’une plante.
Les fourmis attendent à l’entrer de ces trous un insecte y mettant ses pattes … Et l’attrapent ! (Allomerus decemarticulatus is a tree ant who digs little holes called “domaties” in the branches of a plant, Hirtella physophora. The ants wait by the entry to these holes and when the insect puts its legs there… they catch it!).

Lemon ants make devil’s gardens by killing surrounding plants with their stings and leaving a pure patch of lemon ant trees, (Duroia hirsuta).

This modification of the forest provides the ants with more nesting sites inside the stems of the Duroia trees.

Although some ants obtain nectar from flowers, pollination by ants is somewhat rare. Some plants have special nectar exuding structures, extrafloral nectaries that provide food for ants, who in turn protect the plant from more damaging insects. (Photo: Alex Wild)

Species such as the bullhorn acacia (Acacia cornigera) in Central America have hollow thorns that house colonies of stinging ants (Pseudomyrmex ferruginea) who defend the tree against insects, browsing mammals, and epiphtic vines.

Studies suggest that plants also obtain nitrogen from the ants. In return, the ants obtain food from protein- and lipid-rich Beltian bodies. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Another example of this type of ectosymbiosis comes from the Macaranga tree, which has stems adapted to house colonies of Crematogaster ants.

Seed dispersal by ants (myrmecochory) is widespread and estimates suggest that nearly 9% of all plant species may have such ant associations. The ants are collecting a protein rich material attached to the seed. They do not eat the actual seed, which is later discarded in the ant midden. This makes a perfect seedbed. This symbiotic relationship is called myrmecochory.

Elaiosomes (Greek élaion “oil” and sóma “body”) are fleshy structures that are attached to the seeds of many plant species. The elaiosome is rich in lipids and proteins and may be variously shaped. Many plants have elaiosomes that attract ants, which take the seed to their nest and feed the elaiosome to their larvae. After the larvae have consumed the elaiosome, the ants take the seed to their waste disposal area, which is rich in nutrients from the ant frass and dead bodies, where the seeds germinate. (Photograph: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Some plants in fire-prone grassland systems are particularly dependent on ants for their survival and dispersal because the seeds are transported to safety below the ground.

A convergence (mimicry?), is seen in the eggs of stick insects. They have an edible elaiosome-like structure and are taken into the ant nest where the young hatch.

Most ants are predatory and some prey on and obtain food from other social insects including other ants. Some species specialise in preying on termites (Megaponera and Termitopone) while a few Cerapachyinae prey on other ants. While no one is sad to see the demise of termites thanks to the ants, ants aren’t particularly welcome either and are both pests most people will want to rid their properties of – you can view website of specialist exterminators and get in touch with them to begin this process.

Some termites, including Nasutitermes corniger, form associations with certain ant species to keep away predatory ant species.

The tropical wasp Mischocyttarus drewseni coats the pedicel of its nest with an ant-repellant chemical. (The pedicel is the part at the top that attaches the nest to a tree or a building.) It is suggested that many tropical wasps may build their nests in trees and cover them to protect themselves from ants.

Stingless bees (Trigona and Melipona) use chemical defences against ants.

Stingless bees, sometimes called meliponines, are a large group of bees (approximately 500 species) belonging in the family Apidae, and are closely related to common honey bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees and bumblebees. Their name is slightly misleading as male bees and bees of other species, such as those in the family Andrenidae, can not sting. Meliponines have stingers, but they are highly reduced and cannot be used for defense.

Flies in the Old World genus Bengalia (Calliphoridae) prey on ants and are kleptoparasites, snatching prey or brood from the mandibles of adult ants.

Wingless and legless females of the Malaysian phorid fly (Vestigipoda longiseta) live in the nests of ants of the genus Aenictus and are cared for by the ants. Most of what you see in the lower of the two photoes above are larvae of army ants of the genus Aenictus. The odd one out is the whiter ‘larva’ in the centre-which is not a larva at all, but a fully adult female of the phorid fly Vestigipoda longiseta.

Fungi in the genera Cordyceps and Ophiocordyceps infect ants. Ants react to their infection by climbing up plants and sinking their mandibles into plant tissue. The fungus kills the ants, grows on their remains, and produces a fruiting body. It appears that the fungus alters the behaviour of the ant to help disperse its spores in a microhabitat that best suits the fungus. This behavior is induced when the fungus takes partial control over the ant’s brain. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Strepsipteran parasites also manipulate their ant host to climb grass stems, to help the parasite find mates.

A nematode (Myrmeconema neotropicum) that infects canopy ants (Cephalotes atratus) causes the black-coloured gasters of workers to turn red. The parasite also alters the behaviour of the ant, causing them to carry their gasters high. The conspicuous red gasters are mistaken by birds for ripe fruits such as Hyeronima alchorneoides and eaten. The droppings of the bird are collected by other ants and fed to their young, leading to further spread of the nematode. (Photo: Alex Wild)

South American poison dart frogs in the genus Dendrobates (tree climbers) feed mainly on ants, and the toxins in their skin may come from the ants.

This Central American species (Dendrobates) occurs from southeastern Nicaragua to northwestern Colombia. Though mostly distributed in humid lowlands and premontane rainforests from 0-800 m elevation, some montane morphs can be found up to 1200 m elevation. Type locality is the Pacific island of Taboga in the Bay of Panamá. In 1932, that morph was introduced to the Hawaiian Island of O’ahu.

Army ants forage in a wide roving column, attacking any animals in that path that are unable to escape. The name army ant (legionary ant, marabunta) applied to over 200 ant species, in different lineages, due to their aggressive predatory foraging groups, known as “raids”, in which huge numbers of ants forage simultaneously over a certain area, en masse.

Another shared feature is that, unlike most ant species, army ants do not construct permanent nests; an army ant colony moves almost incessantly over the time it exists. All species are members of the true ant family, but several groups have independently evolved the same basic behavioral and ecological syndrome. This syndrome is often referred to as “legionary behavior”, and is another example of convergent evolution. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

In Central and South America, Eciton burchellii is the swarming ant most commonly attended by “ant-following” birds such as antbirds and woodcreepers. The objective of the army-ant-following birds is simple: to devour the grasshoppers, katydids, crickets and other insects that think they are escaping death by flying away from the swarm.

Birds indulge in a peculiar behaviour called anting that, as yet, is not fully understood. Here birds rest on ant nests, or pick and drop ants onto their wings and feathers; this may be a means to remove ectoparasites from the birds.

Anteaters, aardvarks, pangolins, echidnas, and numbats have special adaptations for living on a diet of ants. These adaptations include long, sticky tongues to capture ants and strong claws to break into ant nests.

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) have been found to feed on ants. About 12%, 16%, and 4% of their fecal volume in spring, summer, and autumn, respectively, is composed of ants.

The life of ants is as strange as anything in science fiction. They are fascinating animals. During the writing of this I have imagined myself as an ant being raised from an egg in a colony. I have dreamed that I became an ant.

Thank you and I’ll see you next week.

_______________________________

Big Brother history, part seventeen – 2005

Posted on June 26, 2013 by J L

Ben Nieves

1 January 2005 We played in Cleveland.

Then we went to Europe.

Driving through the Czech Republic, we were stopped at a Hrensko passport control (Zollamt) that looked as if it were in a 1940s film.

Bluesiana Club in Velden, Austria.

Velden, Austria (near Klagenfurt), is 30 kilometers or so from the Italian border and even closer to Slovenia, so Slovenians often came to see us.

With Slovenians and Kacee Clanton, Glenn Halvarsson, Chad Quist and Peter Albin.

1 April 2005 Bluesiana Velden Austria Between Villach and Klagenfurt on Lake Wörther.

Elise took this photograph of the Wörthersee.

4 April 2005 Spectrum Augsburg Germany

Halle Germany

7 April 2005 In Halle, Elise and I visited the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, the Provincial Prehistory Museum.

From the early Bronze Age, these are, however, made of gold.

Menschenwechsel. Human change. Evolution.

The theme at this museum was the evolution from Neanderthal to contemporary humans as it happened in Germany, right where we were. We were seeing the history of the same Sachsen-Anhalt region around us.

Some people stay in the same place for millennia. They are happy there, and they keep their families around them. Remember that dig in England where they ran the DNA testing on bones they found from thousands of years before, and one of the closest matches was to a school teacher who lived right down the road?

We were looking at tools and toys made by ancestors of people who were standing around us in the museum.

For an American, this is an unusual experience because we are new people in our continent, unless we’re talking about Native Americans. My friend Lance who is Navajo must feel something similar to this when he visits a museum in Phoenix.

This Neanderthaler, for example, looks a little like Rush Limpburger.

His thought processes may be a little subtler and quicker than Rush’s, but there is a certain physical kinship.

Handwedge or handaxe (Faustkeil) 200,000 years old. Beautifully made.

8 April 2005 Alter Gasometer Zwickau Germany

Zwickau

Sometimes they sit down on the job.

9 April 2005 Forlì Italy Today is Elise’s birthday. She celebrated it by driving us from Zwickau in eastern Germany to Forlì in Emilia Romagna, a long, heroic drive overnight and over the snowy Alps.

Ernesto De Pascale was an old friend of mine.

Figli dei fiori… flower children

11 April 2005 Teatro Blu Milano …nel blu di pinto di blu.

Nowwww don’t tell me you didn’t know all along, You’re not Donna Read and I’m sho not Don Juan,

We’re just two losers with good come ons. But not quite good enough. (Merci, Thomas.)

The gig was in Hannover, but we stayed in the tiny town of Nienburg.

A shout out to George Michalski, the Elton John of San Francisco. Hi, George !

16 April 2005 Luzern In Italian Locarno. Everything here is in two or three languages.

Burg Satzvey: We actually played in this castle. I thought, wow, the reverberation will be awful with all that stone, but the sound was quite good.

When the Germans want to play Renaissance Faire, they do it very well.

Now we go to Frankfurt am Main.

19 April 2005 Frankfurt Das Städel is such a great museum.

They have this beautiful Botticelli there. Botticelli’s model was a woman named Simonetta and, improbably enough, she was the sister of Amerigo di Vespucci, the cartographer and explorer after whom our continent is named. Another coincidence is that the Vespucci lived in Vicenza, a place we visit often, the hometown of Arianna Antinori and Antea Salmaso.

Simonetta was also the model for The Birth of Venus and many other well known paintings from the Renaissance.

Primavera Many other artists in Florence painted Simonetta but none so well, perhaps, as Botticelli.

In that same small town Vicenza where Simonetta and Amerigo di Vespucci lived, a farmboy was born a little later. He was a worker on construction projects but he showed a great flair for design and architecture.

A nobleman recognized the boy’s talent, gave him a place to live, an education and a name, Palladio (in honor of the goddess Pallas Athena).

Palladio designed many, many buildings around Vicenza, Padua and surrounding areas. They look very familiar to us. This is the Villa Moro.

The White House and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello are both exact copies of buildings that Palladio made in Italy.

So, thank you to the little town of Vicenza, Italy, who gave us Simonetta and Amerigo di Vespucci, Palladio, Arianna Antinori and Antea Salmaso.

In Frankfurt, Chad and I walked back to the hotel from sound check. Find Chad.

In the black room… I mean, the green room.

23 April 2005 Augsburg This was the town of Augustus Caesar. Augusti burg. Augsburg.

Hamburg There is a wonderful museum here, the Kunsthalle, the art hall.

The Hanseatic city of Lübeck way up north just before you go into Denmark. A Hansa is a trading league or partnership. “Lufthansa” is an “air league.”

Århus Denmark This is a school town, bohemian.

25 April 2005 Copenhagen Denmark This was a most interesting museum. I like the name Glyptotek. Carving case, which is a way of saying sculpture museum.

When I was here with the Kozmic Blues Band in 1969, I had the most delicious mushroom soup, but couldn’t find it this time. I don’t know why. It’s only 36 years later.

27 April 2005 Randers Denmark

Peter Albin onstage in Randers, Denmark.

Late at night, after the gig, Elise photographed this building across the street from our hotel.

With Andra Mitrovich

30 April 2005 Bergen Norway

In the right testicle of Scandinavia, there she is, the town of Bergen.

Look at the venue name, Peer Gynt, Grieghallen. Hall of the Mountain King from the Peer Gynt Suite by Grieg was our theme for years. I still quote the tune in my solo on Blindman.

Andra Mitrovich Elise Piliwale

It’s not the girl with the pearl earring, but it’s the girl hearing Pearl.

As Charlie McCarthy would say, Bye, bye, Bergen.

Meanwhile, back in Fairfax…

12 May 2005 Dean Suzuki invited me to give a talk at San Francisco State University.

Photo: Polly Belinda Rendall

7 June 2005 Cleveland This was a wonderful show.

Manet did this one of her.

And she did this one of herself.

Kate Russo

Kacee Clanton lying down on the job and looking pretty darned good while she’s doing it.

23 June 2005 Mountain Festival Batesville Arkansas

I know that I do a lot of foolish and dangerous things.

How can I talk about how I sing? It’s something totally instinctive that comes from inside me. I can’t describe my insides.

The only things that count are feelings: and my music is feeling.

Being intellectual raises a lot of questions and very few answers. Your life is full of ideas but you go home alone.

We very seldom play in the south of Italy, so when I walked around the streets of Salerno, everyone looked like they were from Brooklyn or Queens, because “our” Italians generally come from the south.

7 July 2005 Salerno

Una Salernitana Chad Quist Sophia Ramos

Don’t say anything bad about Salerno.

8 July 2005 Sant’Elpidio This is a lovely place on the Adriatic.

Laura Albergante Visconti

Cesena

Cesena is a little to the south of Ravenna.

Michael Falzarano Diana Mangano Kerry Kearney

11 July 2005 Genova A beautiful town.

Emilia Febbraio a la batteria

Gianna Nannini was here in our hotel lobby in Genova. I had introduced her to the audience in Salerno, although they knew who she was better than I did. She is quite famous in Italy.

Genova is a wonderful town to walk in. Many hills to climb with great views of the harbor and the city.

13 July 2005 Up north in Udine, a beautiful place.

Udine, if not now, when?

14 – 17 July 2005

We recorded this gig and the result was the CD Hold Me released in 2006.

Friday 15 July 2005 Burg Herzberg Germany

20 July 2005 Louisville Kentucky

29 July 2005 Great American Music Hall San Francisco Still playing for Chet. This was a great night.

23 September 2005 Ko Samui Thailand

Sophia Ramos

Elise in the hangar after we flew around the island of Ko Samui.

With Sophia Ramos Alan Sadd Elise Piliwale Eugene Skuratowicz

Kate Russo Peter Albin

With Randal Myler

7 September 2005 Louisville

4 October 2005 The entrance to the Landmark Motel Hollywood.

28 December 2005 Coco’s Ko Samui Thailand

Guapísima Rosemarie

See you next week?

Sam Andrew Sophia Ramos

__________________________________________________________________

Notes from a Bindle Stiff

Posted on June 23, 2013 by J L tagged.

Bindle Stiff: (bundle man, hobo) Jack London in a 1901 letter, ”Wyckoff only knows the workingman, the stake-man, the bindle-stiff.”

Come live in my tent and pay no rent.

Appreciation makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.

A good education will show you how little you know.

If you understood everything I say, you would be I… or me.

Mistakes in improvised music? There are none.

Probably the main duty of the young is to challenge the received notions of the old.

A jest is a truth with a melody.

I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

When are you going to figure it out about guns? How many shootings is it going take? They are occurring almost daily now.

People see the past as better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be

It says “extinguisher,” but it looks more like “stinker.”

Anything is possible as long as you keep working at it. Don’t back down.

Common sense is not so common.

You can’t leave yourself out of that mix. You have to be honest enough to say, I’m the messed-up one in the family.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

God gives us nuts, but she doesn’t crack them.

Take a deep breath after any outburst of vanity or complacency.

It wasn’t Don Quixote’s madness that bothered him. It was Sancho Panza.

You Greeks are god driven crazy! One of the most beautiful peoples of the kosmos.

A stairstep not worn by footsteps is only a boring something made of wood.

Begin with what is right rather than what is usual.

Women dress for women.

I’d rather they all hate it and I like it, than vice versa. I make music to please myself first, and if the audience likes it, all the better.

My father wouldn’t get us a TV, he wouldn’t allow a TV in the house.

Kindness and politeness are not overrated at all. If anything, they are underrated.

I’m always happy to have a job.

Interviews are all right with me. I don’t pursue them. When the people I work with deem them appropriate, I’m perfectly willing to serve.

Characters with no integrity are just as interesting as characters with lots of integrity.

I think that no matter how much you don’t like yourself or the drama of your life you can still find some comedy in it.

The proper union of vodka and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived.

The mind and the heart have their own logic but do not often let others in on it.

It’s scary to wake up one morning and discover that your university class is running your state.

Watch out how you see yourself, because how you see yourself may be what you are.

Growing old is an interesting process. There’s no cure for it. The best medicine may be laughter, if laughter is any kind of medicine at all.

I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.

The universe is truly large. From here to Alpha Centauri is an unimaginable distance, and that is just a tiny, tiny corner in this whole universe, almost imperceptible. So, now, what were you worrying about again?

The feeling about a soldier is he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to play music that would be as ravishing, enlightening and as impassioned as there ever was, but how do we know this? History is full of examples of people who were almost going to die, and yet, because of some unlooked for miracle, survived and went on to do such great things that benefited us all. What a narrow escape, and think of those who didn’t escape. Anyone who reads biographies will be very conscious of this. There is only the most tenuous thread between life and death for us all. Accidents play a much larger part in life than we are willing to recognize. What if Jimi Hendrix had been killed in Viet Nam? Who WAS killed in Viet Nam?

I wanted to write about a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level.

If you’re feeling strong and emotional when you’re creating something, it will come out that way.

Whiskey is by far the most popular of all remedies that won’t cure a cold.

Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.

I don’t really want to control anyone, to be honest.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

I speak Spanish to god, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my goat.

Abolition of a woman’s right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsive maternity, a form of rape by the state.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages, as if the savages weren’t dangerous enough already.

The tragedy of war is that young soldiers die fighting each other, instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

The trouble with returning to a place where you once were is that you can never repeat the same experience.

Our neoconservatives are neither new nor conservative. They’re as old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Ignorance, apathy, hate, fear, greed, as long as these things are in human nature the Republicans will get some votes.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity for the human spirit.

It’s not the equipment, it’s the operator. It’s the singer, not the song.

I think when I practice, but feel when I play. The playing occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

Some parts of my solos are OK and other parts I can’t stand. You have to live with that.

I keep reading between the lies.

I was born lucky. I’ll be the first to admit that.

TV = Terrible Vaudeville.

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do a job, wait until you hire an amateur.

A person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view she can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Forgiveness is good for your health.

Aeschylus said that it is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered, but I think I have this quality. Several of my friends have gone on to fame and glory and I very seldom want to kill them.

OK, I’ll give Brooke back her underwear.

There are a lot of people in the phone book, but very few ideas.

Not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

The best time to buy something is a couple of years ago.

We all think we’re going to get out of debt.

I would have answered your letter sooner but you didn’t send one.

Much better to desire than to have.

I’d better say I belong to myself and the world rather than belonging to one nationality or another.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

The best cure for hypochondria is to forget about your body and become interested in someone else’s.

The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.

Artists don’t retire. They stop when there’s no more art in them.

We might be be the holographic image of a two dimensional structure.

Tell me about yourself, your struggles, your dreams, your telephone number.

I consider your conduct unethical and lousy.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

I consider myself more of a visual comedian than a physical one.

People look for happiness as a drunk looks for his house: he can’t find it, but he knows that it exists.

If you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead.

I’ve been so liberated it hurts.

Tokyo to Nagoya.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you’re not dead.

While I have never been a regular churchgoer, I’m anything but immune to the power and the majesty of a spiritual experience.

I swear, if you existed I’d divorce you.

In those days, boxing was very glamorous and romantic. You listened to fights on the radio, and a good announcer made it seem like a contest between gladiators.

The marvelous thing about a double entendre is that it only means one thing.

He won’t, won’t he? Then bring me my boots.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a music critic.

I am the the type to have a personal experience with a celebrity, but I’m too classy to bring that up.

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. She said that I was being ridiculous… everyone hasn’t met me yet.

If ten was the perfect score, he needed help in French.

My wife was afraid of the dark. Then she saw me naked and now she’s afraid of the light.

The way my luck is going, if I were a politician I’d be honest.

Nossa! Quanto tempo!

One of the fundamental truths about marriage. The wife is in charge. Fine by me.

There is hope for the future because god has a sense of humor and she thinks we’re funny.

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.

Do you ever really look at people in a health food store. They are pale, skinny and look half dead. In a steak house you see robust, ruddy people. They’re dying, of course, but they look great.

Wally!

Old is always fifteen years from now.

There are no authorities on love, just those who have had luck with it and those who haven’t.

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

Death is caused by being born.

His eyes so dim, so wasted each limb, that, heedless of grammar, they all cried, that’s him!

I have one day today, and I’m going to be happy in it.

Anyone who says he understands women is missing a lot.

Just because you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean that the circus has left town.

Timmy from Lassie.

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do.

Bella questa. Che stelline che siete! What stars you are.

I wanted to improve my looks at The Body Shop, but now I’m improving them at the Photoshop.

I’m shy, but I’m not clinically shy. I don’t have social anxiety disorder or anything like that. I more have a gentle shyness. Like, I have a little trouble mingling at parties.

One way to find out if someone’s honest. Ask. If he says yes, you know he’s not.

In the beginning there was nothing. Then god said, “Let there be light.” So then there was still nothing but you could see a lot better.

Aim high. That way you won’t shoot yourself in the foot.

People think because I can make them laugh on the stage, I’ll be able to make them laugh in person. That isn’t the case at all. I am essentially a rather quiet, dull person who just happens to be a performer.

Hello Kitty will never speak.

Marriage is a mistake every man should make.

As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn’t see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more. I was one meter and eighty-five centimeters when I lived in Paris in my twenties and now I am one meter and eighty-three centimeters, so I’m smaller that way too.

Better to burn out than to rust out.

Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.

Partnership is the way.

When we talk to god, we’re praying. When she talks to us, we’re schizophrenic.

Journalists were so unkind to me. They said I knew only three chords, but they were wrong. I knew four.

Sometimes the best songs come all at once in twenty minutes or half an hour. Chords, words, melody, everything.

Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.

Multitasking? I can’t even do one thing at once.

Who’s your real friend? The person who tells you the truth.

If you think your life is tough, read a bit of history.

Karl Rove said that if Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father weren’t a Nazi, Arnold wouldn’t have any credibility with conservatives at all.

The advantage for the snorer is that he is the one who’s sleeping. (Merci à toi, Thomas.)

The word “privacy” does not appear in the Constitution.

I want the world to be better because I was here.

Everybody’s nuts. Enjoy the ride.

If you hear me saying, “I’m a serious artist,” please slap me.

“Republican party” is an oxymoron, isn’t it?

People take comedians seriously and politicians as a joke.

Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. Believe in what you are doing.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

You can learn by travel, by reading or by associating with people who are smarter than you.

Advertising can convince you to spend money you don’t have to buy something you don’t need to impress somebody you don’t like.

Crime does pay… if you’re a lawyer.

Things aren’t what they used to be, and that’s a good thing.

There is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I’ve never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say that you can become so angry with yourself that you forget to hate your enemy. Actually, I doubt this very much.

A holding company is a guy you hand the stolen goods to when the police arrive.

Marriages are made in heaven. So are hurricanes.

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.

Don’t just do something, sit there.

If you love someone, say so.

What if, at this very moment, we were living up to our full potential?

People who complain about President Obama should consider how things would be if Romney and Ryan were running the country.

Not everyone in Hollywood is on the left. Just the smart ones.

Strength doesn’t have to be boastful, belligerent and loud. Quite the opposite, really.

Every musician knows that a melody can come to you that is so beautiful, so universal that it’s not yours but god’s. You’re just a conduit.

That’s what show business is, sincere insincerity.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

Such is life and life is such, and after all it isn’t much, first a cradle then a hearse, could’ve been better, could’ve been worse.

I started school in Okinawa, Japan, and have never really stopped.

Steam punk can be scary.

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

I always wanted to be a physicist, but it seemed that I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person.

Thank you for being here and we’ll see you next week.

__________________________________________________________

Big Brother history, part sixteen – 2004

Posted on June 19, 2013 by J L

I need you, darling, like the fish needs the sea.

Please don’t take your sweet, sweet love from me.

Kate Russo has played with us in hot places, México, Thailand, Arizona, Dallas, Austin, New York City in Manny’s Car Wash, where we were on a postage stamp sized triangular stage about the size of your closet filled with chain smoking New Yorkers out of their minds in the August heat. THAT was fun.

2 January 2004 The Docksider Erie Pennsylvania

See how Pennsylvania made that little portal out to Lake Erie ? Croatia has outlets to the Adriatic Sea much narrower than this, maybe a mile in length. Access to water is very important.

The Erie Canal, dug in the early 1800s, and connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie, is what made New York New York.

Many other ports, Savannah, Boston, were more important at the time, but with a way to get goods over the Appalachians (Alleghenies, Catskills) and to Ohio and points farther west and south, New York City became the dominant Eastern doorway to and from the rest of the country out to the rest of the world, all because of that canal.

Even today transport by barge on the Erie Canal uses a tenth of the fuel of a truck.

Goods could be taken from the New York harbor up to north of Albany, and then west on the Erie Canal, which connected with Ohio canals, and then with the Ohio river on to the Mississippi and then on down to New Orleans. The young nation was now tied together by her waterways.

I used to sing this song in my folk music days. This printed music, however, is very odd, with its B#. I’ve never seen anything like this and in the fifth measure there is a trill between B# and C natural, and it looks as if the tablature has both notes in the same location. Very strange.

Anyway, I loved this haunting Erie Canal melody and the history embodied in the song.

This song is rather like what The Volga Boatman must have been to the Russians.

Minor key, strongly pentatonic, a chant, really, primitive, strong, good for keeping time while rowing or pulling a canal boat.

This version makes a lot more sense. This one’s in E minor. I think I used to sing it in D minor.

Rodney Albin Ellen Cavanaugh Peter Albin

3 January 2004 Sellersville Theatre Sellersville Pennsylvania

21 April 2004 Kellogg Foundation Lake Tahoe California At this event, I met Don Graham, a neurosurgeon who since has gone from this…

… to this. He and Sarah made Adyson Graham who is impossibly beautiful.

And, speaking of beautiful…

24 April 2004 Wild Hog Festival Helena Arkansas It rained so hard at this event.

We really thought we might be electrocuted. Everything was soaking wet.

Electrocuted in Arkansas, that would have been some fate.

Now we’re down at the mouth of the Mississippi in a Caribbean city, New Orleans.

25 April 2004 Rosy’s Jazz Hall New Orleans

Mama Mills

Orlando, where the Carol guitar was stored in a vault for a while, is an inland place. Photo: Anthony Edman

13 May 2004 The Vault Orlando Florida The Carol guitar travels around the country and is in San Francisco now, I believe. Those are some of Janis’ things behind me, a cape and a dressing gown.

When we played there in Orlando, I took the guitar out of The Vault and put it on stage.

The Vault in Orlando.

Elise and I moved into this Marin house where we live now in 2004. It’s a small house on two and one half acres, a hectare.

So, now we have lived here ten years, time enough to cram the place full of books and a lot of love.

The Hawaiian archipelago is actually much longer than these main islands. The whole archipelago extends some 1,200 miles over the Pacific.

Midway Island, that small two mile long dot there on the globe, is at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. It is one third of the way to Tokyo from Honolulu.

My family traveled once (1956, 1957) in a propeller plane that actually refueled at Midway en route to Okinawa, Japan. We refueled again at Wake Island too, if I’m not mistaken.

Chad Quist, guitar Kacee Clanton, singer Todd Zimberg, drums

Kona Brew Pub

Colin and Wayne, good guys, erstwhile equipment managers for Big Brother, now far richer than we are, PLUS, they get to live in Hawaii. Así es la vida.

See that red dot that says Makena? James Gurley and I lived on the beach there for two and a half years or so, off and on, lived there with maybe ten of our friends. I wrote a song called Maui about our sojourn there. That was a beautiful time. Of course now Makena has resort hotels and is spotless. They wouldn’t let our kind in there now. What else is new?

Regina and Kacee were with us.

19 June 2004 Red Cross Waterfront Festival Alexandria Virginia

Tristan Avakian played guitar with us and Todd Zimberg was on drums. Tristan is now with Jennifer Espinoza in some incredible Queen tribute scene, and Todd has a series of jazz camps up in Washington.

We certainly drank our share of it.

30 June 2004 Stop 345 Memphis Tennessee

31 July 2004 Magic Springs Theme Park Hot Springs Arkansas

6 August 2004 Sellersville Theatre Sellersville Pennsylvania Sellersville is a borough in Bucks County in the Philadelphia-Camden metro area.

7 August 2004 South Park Concert Site South Park Pennsylvania

13 August 2004 Gray’s Harbor Fair Elma Washington I always wanted to open for a parrot.

Kate Russo and I passed this one with ease. I could do this one with my eyes closed. I HAVE done this one with my eyes closed many times.

14 August 2004 Berbatti’s Pan Portland Oregon

18 September 2004 Tree Frog Music Festival Fairibault Minnesota

Met them in Monterey.

Jimi was once the sound man for Big Brother and the Holding Company and he did a good job. We played at his club The Generation in New York and he ran sound and recorded us on a Nagra tape recorder. Here he is applauding the band. This was a wake for Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior.

24-25 September 2004 El Dorado Hotel & Casino Reno

Chelsea Healey

Na’alehu Theatre

Chad Quist

Peter Albin Karen Lyberger

2 October 2004 Hamakua Music Festival Honoka’a Hawaii

Chloe Lowery and Elise Piliwale

The banyan tree downtown Lahaina, Maui. This tree just keeps on going and growing. It’s all one tree and it covers this entire very large block.

4 October 2004 The Landmark Hotel Los Angeles Photo: Howard Sounes

16 October 2004 Largo Cultural Center Largo Florida Wendy Rich

Peter Albin

31 December 2004 Coco’s in Ko Samui, Thailand. set lists

See you next week?

Peter Lewis Jerry Miller Sam Andrew

______________________________________________

Delta Blues

Posted on June 16, 2013 by J L tagged.

During May and June of 1901 and 1902 I was engaged in excavating for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University a mound in Coahama County, northern Mississippi.

At these times we had some opportunity of observing the Negroes and their ways at close range, as we lived in tent or cabin very much as do the rest of the small farmers and laborers, white and black, of the district.

Busy archaeologically, we had not very much time left for folk-lore, in itself of not easy excavation, but willy-nilly our ears were beset with an abundance of ethnological material in song, words and music.

In spite of faulty memory and musical incompetency, what follows, collected by Mr. Farabee and myself, may perhaps be accepted as notes, suggestions for future study in classification, and incidents of interest in the recollecting, possibly in the telling.

The music of the Negroes we listened to may be put under three heads: the songs sung by our men when at work digging or wheeling on the mound, unaccompanied; the songs of these same men at quarters or on the march, with guitar accompaniment; and the songs, unaccompanied, of the indigenous Negroes, indigenous opposed to our men imported from Clarksdale, fifteen miles distant.

Most of the noise of the township was caused by our men, nine to fifteen in number, at their work.

On their beginning a trench at the surface the woods for a day would echo their yelling with faithfulness.

The next day or two these artists being, like the Bayreuth orchestra, sunk out of sight, there would arise from behind the dump heap a not unwholesome mugmós as of the quiescent Furies.

Of course this singing assisted the physical labor in the same way as that of sailors tugging ropes or soldiers invited to march by drum and band.

They tell, in fact, of a famous singer besought by his co-workers not to sing a particular song, for it made them work too hard, and a singer of good voice and endurance is sometimes hired for the very purpose of arousing and keeping up the energy of labor.

This singing in the trenches may be subdivided into melodic and rhythmic: the melodic into sacred and profane, the rhythmic into general and apposite.

Our men had equal penchants for hymns and “ragtime.”

The Methodist hymns sung on Sundays were repeated in unhappy strains, often lead by one as choragus, with a refrain in “tutti,” hymns of the most doleful import.

Rapid changes were made from these to “ragtime” melodies of which “Molly Brown” and “Goo-goo Eyes” were great favorites.

Undoubtedly picked up from passing theatrical troupes, the “ragtime” sung for us quite inverted the theory of its origin.

These syncopated melodies, sung or whistled, generally in strict tempo, kept up hour after hour a not ineffective rhythm, which we decidedly should have missed had it been absent.

More interesting humanly were the distichs and improvisations in rhythm more or less phrased sung to an intoning more or less approaching melody.

These ditties and distichs were either of a general application referring to manners, customs, and events of Negro life or of special appositeness improvised on the spur of the moment on a topic then interesting.

Improvising sometimes occurred in the general class, but it was more likely to be merely a variation of some one sentiment.

This tantalizing report was written by Charles Peabody, an archeologist at Harvard, and one can only wish that there would have been some followup studies at that time on the music in the Mississippi Delta.

Charles Peabody and his team may have heard the earliest forms of Delta blues.

My wfie Elise Wainani Piliwale studied at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She tells me stories about Delta blues.

Twenty years before Elise, another person dear to me, Bill Ham, father of the modern light show, attended Delta State because, he said, it was the only school in his area to offer an art major.

The Delta is a flat, very flat alluvial plain and it must have been the real delta once, the place where the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, but the river has brought so much soil from the rest of the country down here that her mouth is now far to the south.

Frances (Fanny) Kemble wrote Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839. She is a sharp observer and her story is of great interest as a kind of prelude to the narrative of life in the Delta.

Dockery Plantation was wrested from the Mississippi mud around 1895 by Will Dockery. It had a post office, a commissary and a cotton gin. Many blues people spent time here, among them one of the first, Charley Patton, who mentored Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Muddy Waters.

Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary for men, was part plantation, part prison. Booker (Bukka) White spent time here and wrote Parchman Farm Blues. Alan Lomax made many recordings here for the Library of Congress.

Although Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929) was born south of Dallas near Wortham, Texas, and he has a distinct Texas sound in his voice, he spent much of his life in the Delta.

Howlin’ Wolf remembered seeing Blind Lemon in Mississippi in 1926, the same year he first saw Charley Patton.

Jefferson was very well liked in the Delta, where everyone tried to copy him.

Black Snake Moan shows Blind Lemon’s great voice and it was very popular in the Delta. The song is in C and the guitar playing is very good, fluid, in good time and most interesting.

Blind Lemon goes to an A (minor) before playing G, rather unusual in this style. It’s a twelve bar blues but he leaves in an extra measure here and there, so the form becomes a 14 bar frequently. The playing is very pentatonic.

A word here about keys. These recordings are almost a hundred years old now and tuning could be an arbitrary process, then and now.

Also the Delta blues people used different tunings such as DADFAD for the guitar low to high (Skip James) or open G, also called “Spanish” tuning DGDGBD (Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and many others).

And then some players would tune down a whole tone and put the capo on the second fret, so it’s not like we’re hearing a piano or a harmonica where the tuning is set. On the guitar as on all the stringed instruments the tuning can easily be wandering and imperfect.

Blind Lemon’s skillful guitar playing and impressive vocal range influenced Furry Lewis, Charlie Patton, Barbecue Bob and many other players up to the present time.

Ralph Lembo, a Sicilian-born dry goods salesman who owned a furniture store in Itta Bena, Mississippi, arranged for Jefferson to play in his store. Lembo charged customers 25¢ admission for a view of the artist, but after three hours of playing music Blind Lemon refused to continue because the money didn’t look good.

Another financial dispute marred his performance at Itta Bena’s Rolling Wall High School: ‘They had a big dance there and Lemon come in and play, and they was chargin’ 75¢ to come in,’ David Edwards recalled. ‘That was a lot of money then, and they couldn’t get him to play for that 75¢.’” Lembo’s attempt to pair Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton at a recording session also failed.

One Dime Blues is a fun tune to play on the guitar, but it’s difficult to play it as fast and fluid as Blind Lemon does.

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean is in E and everyone has done this song, including me. Lemon had a great voice, two octave range, and he sang in a clear, high style.

Charley Patton lived most of his life on Dockery Plantation. He was a small man, maybe five feet seven and weighing 135 pounds, but when he began to sing, his voice was strong and clear. Howlin’ Wolf said he had the voice of a lion. It was not only low, but wide and very clear. It was very strange to hear that big voice coming out of that little man.

Charley Patton had a large bag of showman’s tricks, theatrics, clowning, playing the guitar behind his back, between his legs. This is his youngest daughter Rosetta holding his portrait.

Charley Patton plays Spoonful Blues in the “Spanish” tuning DGDGBD with the capo on the second fret. He plays the guitar in his lap. The chord outline is very unusual and interesting. There is a little intro in E and then he goes to C# F# B E. Patton’s use of the bottleneck has a lot of vibrato and expression. He makes the guitar sound like a voice.

Charley Jordan plays Spoonful in G (so G E A D G) and does a good job. Mississippi John Hurt’s version is characteristically mellow, soft, kind. Comparing his version with Charley Patton’s tells you a lot about both men.

Patton’s Spoonful is about drug addiction and murder. Mississippi John Hurt’s is a love song. And they’re both singing the same song!

Howlin’ Wolf’s Spoonful, a different song entirely, is a love song too, come to think of it. That’s a regular sized guitar that Wolf’s playing. He was a giant, in more ways than one.

Charley Patton’s High Water Everywhere is the story of the 1927 Mississippi flood, a terrible event, that was a contributing factor in the Northern Migration (1920s) of black people to places like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Oakland where they started new lives and new blues styles.

High Water Everywhere is done in two parts and the guitar is tuned DGDGBD, open G tuning, “Spanish” tuning. A capo is put on the third fret so that it becomes an open Bb tuning.

He’s hitting the guitar, he’s stomping on the floor and he’s shouting and hollering. There is a very strong percussive feeling of tragedy and despair.

This was an area of land the size of New England, and it was flooded for five months.

This is a man who looked like this and sang like something else entirely.

Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. (1902-1988) sang Clarksdale Moan. He was a preacher and pastor for years, but at 25 he became a blues man.

In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, Son House developed to the point that Charley Patton deigned to invite Son House to share engagements, and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Their records, issued with perfect blues timing at the beginning of the Depression, did not sell and did not lead to national recognition for either musician.

Son was popular, and in the 1930s, together with Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahama County.

Son House had a big influence on a lot of people, including Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for Yale and Fisk University. The following year, Son House left the Delta for Rochester, New York and gave up music.

In 1964, a group of young white record collectors (including the great harmonica player Al Wilson) discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress.

With their encouragement, he relearned his style and repertoire and enjoyed a career as an entertainer to young white audiences in the coffee houses, folk festivals and concert tours of the American Folk Music Revival, so he was now a folk singer.

He still played with his old strength and wild abandon, especially with his right hand which flailed and thrashed across the guitar in such songs as Death Letter Blues which features a classic Delta riff beautifully played.

Son House recorded several albums, and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. He died in 1988.

Tommy Johnson and Charley Patton were from Drew, Mississippi (so was Roebuck Staples). Patton was loud, strong and passionate, but Tommy Johnson was probably the better guitar player with a rock steady sense of rhythm.

Johnson recorded Canned Heat Blues in 1928, telling about his struggles with alcohol addiction.

Sterno was popular during the Great Depression in hobo camps, or “jungles”, when the Sterno would be squeezed through cheesecloth or a sock and the resulting liquid mixed with fruit juice to make “Jungle Juice” or “Squeeze”. I remember finding cans of this stuff near railroad tracks when I was a boy.

They didn’t use it for cooking; they used it for the methanol and ethanol it contained.

On Canned Heat Blues, Tommy Johnson plays a guitar part in D that every rock and roll player will recognize, a very steady boogie beat, and he sings in a voice that slips easily into falsetto, a beautiful blues that is very soulful, telling about his self destructive streak.

Tommy Johnson had much more talent than fame or riches. He was not the first nor the last to have that distinction.

Tommy Johnson was born around 1896 and he died 1956 in Crystal Springs, Mississippi.

He was the first Delta musician to claim that his talent had come from selling his soul to the devil.

Robert Johnson would later, and more famously, make the same claim. Playing and practicing a lot probably had something to do with these musicians’ prodigious development too. The devil was no joke in Mississippi in the 1920s, though.

Tommy Johnson had a stutter and a lisp. H.C. Speir who was recording him said he sounded like a snake, but when Johnson began to sing, as is so often the case with vocalists and their speech defects, the stutter and lisp disappeared immediately, and a strong, confident voice took over.

Cool Drink of Water Blues is in F and it shows Johnson as a master singer sliding up into a high yodel that Jimmie Rodgers must have heard. “I asked her for water and she gave me gasoline.” Great singing, great playing.

“People’d walk five or six or ten miles to hear him, if they heard he was gon’ be in town,” says Houston Stackhouse, a guitar player, “They’d say, ‘Tommy Johnson’s in town! Got to go hear Tommy’ Yeah, he’d draw a crowd, man….They’d block the streets.”

I love these Delta blues and always have since I knew what they were. People like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Ishmon Bracey, Kid Bailey, Arthur Crudup, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, they all play such great music.

Think of all the ones that we don’t know, because it is so hit and miss, so accidental the ones who survived on records for us to hear. Whom did we miss? So many, probably most of the great players have died unheard of and in oblivion.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was only one of many, many people who sat out in the dark playing after a hard day in the fields playing their beautiful pure music. Stomping, giving life to these songs, as old as life itself. I remember them all in vivid detail. Old songs from the olden time.

All of these songs stay with me, but two of them are particularly haunting, Geeshie Wiley’s Last Kind Words and Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman.

Geeshie Wiley was from Natchez, Mississippi, according to Ishmon Bracey.

She played guitar on Elvie Thomas’ Motherless Child Blues, an unusual 16 bar blues (the first line is sung three times).

Last Kind Words doesn’t have the usual 12 bar structure but it is a real blues in feeling, a very beautiful and even mystical song. The key is E but the first chord for the vocal is A minor and she sings the C in that chord. Her playing and singing are very relaxed. She doesn’t push. The music and words just seem to pour out slowly.

The last kind word I heard my daddy say, Lord, the last kind word I heard my daddy say, If I die, if I die in the German war, I want you to send my body, send it to my mother, Lord. If I get killed, if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul, I say just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole…

Skip James tuned his guitar to DADFAD or EBEGBE. It doesn’t matter really since they are both the same. It’s an open minor tuning and it depends on whether you use a capo at the second fret or not. If you tune it DADFAD and put a capo on the second fret, it’s going to be EBEGBE.

Most of the Delta people who used another tuning besides standard, tuned in the “Spanish” manner (open G), that is DGDGBD which has a major feeling, so James DADFAD tuning is minor and haunting already and then when his voice comes out, there is just nothing like it.

Skip James had married Oscella Robinson, a preacher’s daughter, educated and from a good family. He and Oscella moved to Texas, where she deserted him to be with a World War I veteran. James was grief stricken and he had thoughts of suicide and violent revenge. He didn’t remarry for twenty years. The result of this was one of the most amazing songs ever written, Devil Got My Woman.

I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman man. I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman man. Aw, nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind. Was nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind. I laid down last night, laid down last night. I laid down last night, tried to take my rest. My mind got to ramblin’, like wild geese from the west, from the west…

In Terry Zwigoff’s wonderful film, Ghost World, Enid (Thora Birch) asks the record collector (Steve Buscemi), “Where can I get other records like this?” He replies, “There are no other records like this,” which is exactly right.

On Devil Got My Woman, Skip James is playing in D minor (tuning DADFAD). After a short introduction he begins the tune in the dominant (A minor) in a high, eerie, lonesome voice. This is just not like any other singing that I know of. As with all great art, it scares you, it’s coming from somewhere else.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) studied the music of Skip James and always returned to it as a source of inspiration.

Johnson played the harmonica, the jaw harp and the diddley bow long before he picked up a guitar. To make a diddley bow, you could drive two nails into a plank, tie some wire to them, broom wire, cotton baling wire. Then, for a bridge, you could shove a piece of wood or an empty can under the wire and then play the contraption with some kind of slide, a bottle neck, a piece of metal, anything that would slide along the strings.

If you reverse the words “diddley bow,” you get Bo Diddley. He played one, Howlin’ Wolf did, B.B. King did, many people played the diddley bow.

Probably every child experiments with some kind of arrangement like this at some time, even if it’s just rubber bands stretched across a box.

When Robert Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant.

Johnny Shines and other musicians have noted that Johnson didn’t play his dark blues pieces in situations like these, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day.

He could pick up tunes at first hearing and so had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, especially since he liked jazz and country music.

Robert Johnson could quickly establish a rapport with his audience. He made new friends easily and established ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.

To play Cross Road Blues, Robert Johnson tuned to an open G (Spanish tuning) DGDGBD.

Then he put a capo on the third fret, which gave him an open Bb.

Johnson recorded Terraplane Blues in San Antonio in 1936.

He did this one in Bb too. After playing these two tunes in Bb, it’s a real relief to go into standard tuning and do them in A, as Roy Rogers does.

Similarly, one way of looking at Love In Vain is to imagine Robert Johnson playing in the ordinary tuning for guitar EADGBE and doing the tune in A. If you’ve been playing in Bb for a while and trying to imitate an open G tuning in your regular tuning, you’ll feel like a genius when you play Love In Vain in A, standard tuning.

I like the way Robert Johnson sings this Love In Vain, so easy and relaxed, and the guitar playing is subtle and perfectly matched to the vocal.

Well, the train left the station, with two lights on behind. The blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind.

Some people play Love In Vain with an open G tuning, capo on the first fret, and that sounds good too. It puts the song in Ab.

You could make a good case that that is the way Robert Johnson did the tune, but the A in standard tuning is very tempting also. Both ways are good. There’s James Joyce playing the guitar. I’m not sure what key he used for Love In Vain, but I notice he’s not using a capo.

Preaching Blues (Up Jumped The Devil) is in E and it shows the energetic, inspired Robert Johnson who played guitar marvelously well.

This is Henry Saint Clair Fredericks (Taj Mahal). I have heard him play several Robert Johnson tunes, including Preaching Blues.

Preaching Blues aside from featuring Robert Johnson’s strong singing is an encyclopedia of blues riffs for the guitar. He uses his thumb to hit the guitar top percussively between each chord that he plays with his three (not two) fingers. The main riff of the tune is E D G-E high to low.

Robert Johnson plays a lot of minor 2nds. That is, he strikes, for example, an F# note right next to an open G. This is a very strong sound on all the stringed instruments. On a violin, it’ll make your hair stand on end. It’s a good idea to look for these combinations all over your fingerboard.

Son House was often called a mentor to Robert Johnson but Son House didn’t see it that way. He saw Robert Johnson as a pesky interloper to be swatted as one would swat a mosquito. “Such another racket you never heard. It’d make people mad, you know. They’d come out and say, ‘Why don’t y’all go in there and get that guitar away from that boy! He’s running people crazy with it.’ I’d come back in and I’d scold him about it. ‘Don’t do that, Robert. You drive the people nuts. You can’t play nothing.’”

Some people quit when they hear things like this. Other people just grit their teeth, go ahead and keep playing. It’s a painful Darwinian process. I’ve had to live through it many times. It never gets easier.

When they show this learning process in films, it is always depicted as a momentary defeat and then comes a GLORIOUS TRIUMPH, but it doesn’t feel that way in real life. In real life, the defeat part can last a long time and the triumph part can seem very short lived, beside the point and inconsequential when it finally comes.

Musicians call this a turnaround, a short piece of material that goes between two verses. This is a typical Robert Johnson turnaround, although he more often began on the Bb (fourth string, 8th fret) while he was playing that top C, and then played Bb A Ab G (F F# G).

Robert Johnson plays Ramblin’ On My Mind in E and sometimes in D and his voice is so good on the tune. He sweeps up on the guitar often on the upbeat which makes for a strong rhythm. Roy Rogers, the master slide guitarist, not the cowboy, plays Ramblin’ in D and has a lot of illuminating things to say about Robert Johnson. That upbeat sweep across all six strings is the thing, though. Try that.

Something that may surprise people a great deal is that Ike Turner was a real live Delta blues musician. He was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and he knew how to play the blues in that Delta way, knew all the tricks in many styles.

Sam Cooke, another man who made the transition from Delta blues to pop stylings was also from Clarksdale.

Ike Turner was not only an accomplished guitarist in many different styles, but he also was, obviously, an entrepreneur and a person who made things happen for a lot of people.

Sam Cooke was a gospel singer, a very good gospel singer, and then he went to write a lot of songs in a distinctly pop style.

As I have noted elsewhere, there are two or three or four sides to every story, and I wish my life would have been blameless so far, but far, far from it. Anyway, we in Big Brother and the Holding Company knew Ike and Tina well and we did a recording session with them, Kathi McDonald singing. Let’s see, James passed out beneath my chair, so Dave the drummer got up and left the session. As usual, Peter and I kept playing. We finally got a drummer from Berkeley. I would like to find that guy today and ask him his impressions of that surreal afternoon in the studio, because that was a moment. It was definitely a moment.

Ike said, “Who these guys think they are, the fucking Beatles?” a not irrelevant question given our stellar performance in the studio that day. Tina was sitting there at the console, looking very regal and taking it all in. I would love to find the tapes of that session.

Anyway, Ike brought many people to fame and he helped them in substantive ways too. He booked their studio time and took his whole band into the studio to back them up and make them sound good.

Ike told Sam Phillips at Sun Records about Chester Burnett, thus doing Sam, Chester and all of us a big favor, since Chester Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf) would go on to make great music. I see Wolf is giving this guitar to Kerry Kearney.

Rocket 88 was credited to a local man, Jackie Brentson, but the man behind it all was Ike Turner, another Clarksdale transplant, who took a standard blues, put in a fat backbeat, added some fuzz, maybe from damage to the amp while driving down 61 to Memfus (Memphis), and, with all of that, came out with the number two rhythm and blues song in 1951.

Ike Turner alerted the Bihari brothers, owners of Modern Records, to the up and coming B.B. King, who was making a name in the Memphis area.

Ike Turner played piano and guitar on many of these “audition” tunes and did everything he could to help these newcomers.

Many of these recording sessions took place at The Memphis Recording Service (Sun Records) at 706 Union Avenue, a former radiator repair shop, that still looks more or less like a radiator repair shop.

Ike Turner had told Sam Phillips about Chester Burnett who walked into the studio in the summer of 1951, and Sam had heard Burnett’s voice on the radio, but he wasn’t ready for the man’s physical appearance. Howlin’ Wolf (Burnett’s stage name) was over six and a half feet tall and he stood on two of the biggest feet that Phillips had ever seen.

I had the same reaction to Wolf when I saw him sitting by a pool table playing his blues in Chicago 1966. Even sitting down he was a giant and he wore white socks which seemed further to exaggerate the size of his feet.

“I tell you, the greatest thing you could see to this day would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. God, what it would be worth to see the fervor in that man’s face when he sang…How different, how good!” Sam Phillips said that Wolf was the most talented man who had ever walked through the doors of Sun Records. I believe that. It’s easy to believe.

Howlin’ Wolf was born two hundred miles south of Sun Records in White Station, Mississippi, two hundred miles and a universe away. His early life reads like a Dickens story, abject poverty, medieval working conditions, indifference and cruelty on all sides. How he kept his positive and even glowing attitude and his strength of spirit is one of the inspiring stories of the human condition.

He used to forage barefoot for scraps of food down by the railroad tracks where he hoped the workers might have left something behind. He couldn’t read nor write nor do the most basic figuring even by the time he reached Sun Records. He could run, run away from whippings and beatings, and yet he grew to be a man who went to night school, even at the height of his success, and who kept learning all his life, an eternal student.

His father was a sharecropper and his mother was a cook and a maid. He was born 10 June, 1910, which made him much older than Ike Turner, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and others who had achieved success before him. Howlin’ Wolf was more like a contemporary of Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, and his voice seemed to come from long ago and far away. He was called Bigfoot, Foots, Buford, Bullcow and Wolf, from Little Red Riding Hood, Wolf to scare him.

His mother Gertrude Jones sang songs on the street and took her son to sing in the church choir. She abandoned her son when he was a young child because he was dark, he sang the blues, because he didn’t want to work in the fields for fifteen cents a day, because she had a new man who didn’t want a boy in the house, so he went to live with a mean uncle who whipped him with a plow line and made him take his meals apart from the family.

He was sad, but he could sing. He sang loudly when he plowed the fields, sang all day, made up songs. He had his instruments too, a tin bucket, a diddley bow that he made himself, pots and pans, a fifteen cent harmonica. In 1928 when he was seventeen, Wolf got his first guitar and Charley Patton helped him learn how to play it and showed him how to be a performer.

Wolf began playing at house parties, juke joints and street corners and even crossed the river to play in Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Brinkley or West Memphis, a rough wide open town. Johnny Shines who saw him at this time says, “I was afraid of Wolf. Just like you would be of some beast or something. It wasn’t his size. I mean, what he was doing, the way he was doing, I mean the sound he was giving off. That’s how great I thought he was.”

Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck Ford Rice Miller) finished Wolf’s schooling on the harmonica. Howlin’ Wolf traveled with Robert Johnson and played with Son House and Willie Brown. He also worked with Johnny Shines, Jimmy Rogers, Honeyboy Edwards, so his musical education was deep and varied.

When World War II came, Howlin’ Wolf went into my father’s outfit, the Signal Corps, where he was to learn radio communication as a Technician Fifth Grade, but this didn’t really work out for him.

He was hospitalized in Portland, Oregon, for dizziness and physical exhaustion and his violent outbursts resulted in an Honorable Discharge, on 3 November 1943.

Wolf moved to West Memphis and formed a band, the House Rockers: Willie Johnson, piano; M.T. Murphy, guitar; Junior Parker, harmonica and Willie Steele, drums. Sometimes James Cotton would join the group. Howlin’ Wolf bought his first electric guitar, and the House Rockers became the best electric blues band in the Delta.

The band was primal and they beat their instruments so that the physical sound became as important as the pitch of the notes. People said things about Wolf’s voice like “stronger than forty acres of crushed garlic” (Ronnie Hawkins) or “a runaway bucket of nails” (Newsweek).

KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, began broadcasting King Biscuit Time on 21 November 1941, which makes it the longest running daily radio show in the country.

Emulating KFFA, KWEM gave Wolf a twenty minute slot and he ran with it. “This here’s the Wolf comin’ at you, baby,” he would growl. Another Wolfman would make a whole career out of imitating this comeon.

The first song Howlin’ Wolf recorded for Sam Phillips was Moanin’ at Midnight, a magical mantra that began with Wolf howling a B-Bb and then guitarist Willie Johnson begins playing a pattern in E and Wolf starts singing an F#. The whole effect is eerie and elemental. When Big Brother and the Holding Company lived in Lagunitas, California, we tried for three days to learn this song. I always thought we couldn’t because we were young and inexperienced, but I tried the song again a couple of years ago and it still eluded me. It seems as if everyone in the band is playing backwards to each other, and as soon as they settle into one groove, they switch it up and accent another beat. Such a great song.

How Many More Years, probably with Ike Turner on piano, was from the same session. The song is a twelve bar blues in G and the thing that makes it remarkable aside from Wolf’s great voice, emotive delivery and harp playing is the guitar riff that goes G B EDE. A lot of people who copied this song didn’t do that simple figure and they missed a good thing. There are some guitar smears in the middle that illustrate the House Rockers’ pure sound approach to making music. They don’t make “sense,” but they are so cool. It’s rather as if you daubed a vivid color on an already good canvas and all of a sudden it made the painting twice as interesting.

Howlin’ Wolf made the big move to Chicago in 1954 and he did it in style, with his own car and a lot of money. Leonard Chess found him a place to stay… at Muddy Waters’ house.

Wolf recorded No Place To Go at his first Chess session in 1954. This tune hearkens back to the early Delta days when people did songs with no chord changes and the atmosphere was everything, and there was plenty of atmosphere here.

The B side was Rockin’ Daddy, a more conventional dance song. This record entered the charts in May and stayed there till July.

Howlin’ Wolf went back in the studio and recorded a Willie Dixon tune Evil Is Going On,” which stayed on the charts from July until November and sold well not only in Chicago, Memphis and Atlanta, but also in Nashville, Cleveland and Detroit.

Wolf put a Chicago band together with Jody Williams on guitar, Otis Spann and later Hosea Lee Kennard on piano, and the very stylish Hubert Sumlin, another diddley bow player, on guitar. This was a high powered band and Wolf gloried in it. He prowled the stage, he climbed the curtains, he put a coke bottle in his pants, shook it up, opened his zipper and sprayed it on the audience. He lay down on the floor and played the guitar. He played the real thing and he dressed it up in extreme showmanship.

Howlin’ Wolf, despite his background, was a happy man. He was born that way. He communicated his happiness and delight in life to everyone he met. The first thing he said to me was, “You got more soul than I have on my shoe.” Considering that it was a very big shoe (pace Ed Sullivan), I took this as a compliment, because it was the first time I ever heard the expression, and he was laughing and happy, pumping my hand to beat the band as he said it.

He had a microphone cord that must have been fifty yards long and Wolf prowled the environs. He would go out on the street corner and startle passersby, dancing, hollering, moaning. The police often had to take him back to his bandstand. When I played saxophone, I copied this routine from Wolf, of having a very long microphone cord and wandering out into traffic in Oakland blowing my brains out on the horn. It was a lot of fun.

I have to quote something here from Ted Gioa’s already classic study of the Delta Blues. It’s from Robert Palmer who says, “Wolf counted off a bone-crushing rocker, began singing rhythmically, feigned an exit, and suddenly made a flying leap for the curtain at the side of the stage. Holding the microphone under his beefy right arm and singing into it all the while, he began climbing up the curtain, going higher and higher until he was perched far above the stage, the curtain threatening to rip, the audience screaming with delight. Then he loosed his grip, and in a single easy motion, slid right back down the curtain, hit the stage, cut off the tune, and stalked away, to the most ecstatic cheers of the evening.”

We’re talking about a man who is fifty-five years old here. And through it all he was a real musician, everything served the song and the thread was never lost. Wolf had an innate sense of how to make his music better and more understandable, but he always kept it real.

So, Howlin’ Wolf became the most exciting performer in the country. Little Richard and James Brown came to study him and sit in with him. When he played the Apollo Theater, owner Frank Schiffman observed, “I haven’t seen anything like it in my thirty years with the Apollo.”

In January 1956 Howlin’ Wolf went into the studio and cut Smokestack Lightning in the key of E, although he had played it in D in the past. The guitar player does a two bar riff that hits the G on the third fret and that’s the tune, no other chord changes. Wolf puts the variety into the song with his mighty crackling voice. Ah-oh, smokestacklightning Shinin’ just like gold Why don’t ya hear me cryin’? Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo Whoo.

Chester Burnett died on 10 January 1976, after influencing several generations of musicians with his spirited playing and singing and his creative, joyful self.

When he was seventeen, Muddy Waters acquired his first guitar for $2.50. It was a Stella, a decent guitar then, but a byword for a cheap, difficult to tune and play guitar by the time I bought my Silvertone, another cheap guitar, in the mid 1950s.

McKinley Morganfield was born on 4 April 1913 in Jug’s Corner in Issaquena County, Mississippi. When he was three, his mother died and he moved to Clarksdale a hundred miles north to live with his grandmother Delia Grant in this cabin on the Stovall Plantation.

In the summer of 1941, Alan Lomax went to Stovall, Mississippi, on behalf of the Library of Congress to record country blues musicians. ”He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house, and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody’s records. Man, you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’” Every musician, every performer will recognize this magic moment.

They called him Muddy Water. McKinley Morganfield was a mouthfull. Later a typo, or an intuitive person, changed the last name to Waters.

He learned his singing from Son House and his guitar playing from Robert Johnson, but Muddy Waters was always an original.

In 1943, Muddy took his mojo to Chicago with the hope of becoming a full-time professional musician. He lived with a relative for a short period while driving a truck and working in a factory by day and performing at night.

Big Bill Broonzy, then one of the leading bluesmen in Chicago, helped Muddy break into a very competitive market by allowing him to open for his shows in the rowdy clubs.

In 1945, Muddy’s uncle, Joe Grant, gave him his first electric guitar, which enabled him to be heard above the noisy crowds.

In 1946, he recorded some tunes for Mayo Williams at Columbia but they were not released at the time.

Later that year he began recording for Aristocrat Records, a newly-formed label run by two brothers, Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz from Motele, Poland. The brothers changed their names to Leonard and Phil Chess. Their father had a business selling empty bottles which a member of Al Capone’s organization bought and filled with bootleg liquor. Leonard Chess then opened a liquor store and later the Mocamba Lounge where the brothers decided to sell records that they made themselves, first at Aristocrat and later at Chess.

In 1947, Muddy played guitar and Sunnyland Smith was on piano playing “Gypsy Woman” and “Little Anna Mae.” These were also shelved, but in 1948, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home” became big hits and Muddy Waters’ popularity in clubs began to take off.

The plantation system still existed, even in Chicago, and, in the beginning, the Chess brothers would not allow Muddy to use his own guitar in the recording studio, because the piano was the respectable instrument in those days.

Muddy was provided with a backing bass by Ernest “Big” Crawford, and by musicians assembled specifically for the recording session, including Leroy Foster and Johnny Jones.

Gradually Chess relented, and by September 1953, Muddy Waters was actually allowed to play his own guitar on recording sessions.

Muddy Waters was now recording with one of the most acclaimed blues groups in history: Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elga Edmonds (a.k.a. Elgin Evans) on drums and Otis Spann on piano.

Soon after this, Aristocrat changed their label name to Chess Records and Muddy’s signature tune Rollin’ Stone became a hit. Muddy Waters’ songs were autobiographical and filled with mystical events: a gypsy woman is foretelling his uniqueness, seven doctors preside at the birth of this prophet born on the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month. In the song Mannish Boy recorded in 1955 we are told that Muddy will be the greatest man alive and in I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man, the gypsy says that he will be a son of a gun. No other singer in any style dared to sing songs like this.

Willie Dixon, bass, who was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1915 wrote a lot of songs, I’m Your Hoochee Coochee Man, I Just Want To Make Love To You, I’m Ready, Little Red Rooster, Diddy Wah Diddy, Wang Dang Doodle, My Babe and Mellow Down Easy among many, many others.

Along with his former harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs and recent southern transplant Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy reigned over the early 1950s Chicago blues scene, his band becoming a proving ground for some of the city’s best blues talent. While Little Walter continued a collaborative relationship long after he left Muddy’s band in 1952, appearing on most of Muddy’s classic recordings throughout the 1950s, Muddy developed a long-running, generally good-natured rivalry with Wolf.

Otis Spann from Muddy’s band went on to have a solo career and many releases under his own name beginning in the mid-1950s. He was an intelligent, versatile player and he could be a bandleader himself

Muddy also did quite a bit of playing with an old friend of ours, Willie Mae Thornton.

Another Muddy Waters protégé was Buddy Guy, a thoroughly admirable character who had a great guitar style.

Buddy Guy is a loose, relaxed guy with nothing to prove. His guitar style is easy and casual while he does the most amazing things. And then there is his stage presence which is maniacal, loopy and inspired. Once I saw him when there was a lamp over his head suspended by a wire. As Buddy played, he reached up and swung the lamp around. He would play a run and then push the lamp around in ever increasing circles, making his own crazy light show and playing some great guitar at the same time.

Buddy Guy has a sweet, humble manner and yet he can be a savage on the guitar. He was born in 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and so is one of the last guitarists from our period. He was a guitar for hire at Chess Records and then went to Vanguard where he did some great work. In his early days, he listened a lot to people like T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. He even did an album of North Mississippi blues, few chord changes and drones in one tonality, like John Lee Hooker.

Muddy Waters died on 30 April 1983 of carcinoma of the lungs and cardiorespiratory arrest. Some of the people at his funeral, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Junior Wells, Johnny Winter and James Cotton went to Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge to jam and say one last goodbye to Muddy.

John Lee Hooker is in many ways the closest to me of all these Delta blues people and yet he is more mysterious than any of them both in his music and in the details of his life. There is much that is not known for sure about him, when he was born, how many were in his family and some really basic facts about him.

My friend Rich Kirch played with John Lee for years. Carlos Santana played with him. I’ve talked with him backstage several times. Canned Heat did an album with him. Pete Sears actually wrote and recorded a song with John Lee Hooker, and yet John Lee remains an international man of mystery.

I know his daughter Zakiya and have shared the stage with her several times, notably in Ko Samui, Thailand, where we played at a club called Cocos and also at a festival.

John Lee Hooker was the first of the Delta blues people that I heard, aside from Jimmy Reed, but even today he sounds mysterious to me, mainly because of his music which seems to come from the same mystic place as that of Geeshie Wiley and Skip James, a sacred place, non verbal, rich, religious, deep, ancient.

He was born just outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, but where? When? Every time you asked him, he gave you a different answer. The courthouse burned down in 1927 so there are no records. None of the other Delta blues people talk about him when he was young. His family say he just left one day. He recorded under a different name almost every time he recorded. His blues sound earlier than the earliest blues.

Don’t look back, indeed. The first thirty years of his life are completely unknown. John Lee says his boogie came from his stepfather Will Moore, a sharecropper born in Shreveport, Louisiana, but nothing else is known about that man. His mother, née Minnie Ramsay, moved in with Will Moore, and John Lee came with her, but the other children stayed with their father, Reverend William Hooker, who allowed John Lee to have a guitar only if he kept it outside the house.

John Lee may have moved away from the Reverend William Hooker, but there is a strong church element in his blues, an instrospective, spiritual quality that he may have learned as a gospel singer in his father’s church.

John Lee’s beloved E7 chord. My friend Eugene Skuratowicz, who had much to do with John Lee’s career, gave me a beautiful CD called Jack O’Diamonds that was recorded 1949 in the kitchen of Gene Deitch who did Cat cartoons for Record Changer magazine in the 1940s, 1950s.

After dinner, John Lee performed right there at the dining room table. Deitch, using his studio’s DuKane tape recorder, captured the moment on tape. John Lee sang the songs in his set, and then went on to remember tunes from back then in the Delta, including some from his father’s church. The tape recorder picks up everything, including John Lee’s foot tappings which add much.

John Lee Hooker’s Jack O’Diamonds. I love playing along with it on the guitar. The keys for the first seven tracks are Ab, Db and then at track number eight, Jack O’Diamonds, John Lee gets his guitar in standard tuning and from there on out, the keys become C, D, G.

John Lee Hooker’s recording career began in 1948 when his agent placed a demo, made by Hooker, with the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern Records label. The company initially released an up-tempo number, Boogie Chillen’,which became Hooker’s first hit single.

Though they were not songwriters, the Biharis often purchased or claimed co-authorship of songs that appeared on their labels, thus securing songwriting royalties for themselves, in addition to their own streams of income. This is not an isolated instance of this disreputable practice. Unscrupulous record company owners and producers signed their names to all kind of songs that they had nothing to do with writing.

The Bihari brothers, Jules, Lester and Saul, used a number of pseudonyms for songwriting credits: Jules was credited as Jules Taub; Joe as Joe Josea; and Sam as Sam Ling. One song by John Lee Hooker, Down Child, is solely credited to Taub, with Hooker receiving no credit at all. Another, Turn Over a New Leaf is credited to Hooker and Ling.

John Lee Hooker recorded over 100 albums. He lived the last years of his life in Long Beach, California. In 1997, he opened a nightclub in San Francisco’s Fillmore District called John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Room, after one of his hits.

He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died on June 21 at the age of 83, two months before his 84th birthday.

If John Lee Hooker seemed the most remote Delta blues player from contemporary life, B. B. King seemed the closest, and once again it’s right there in the music. Riley B. King played a fluid single note style of guitar that influenced everyone and he learned it, not by following the Delta blues musicians, but by listening to records, just as we all learned from him by listening to his hits. “I believe I listened harder than anyone in the history of listening.”

B.B. King once had 30,000 records and he was a disc jockey. He acquired his first guitar when he was twelve; it was a cherry red Stella that he bought secondhand for fifteen dollars. King’s mother and Booker White’s mother were cousins, so the boy heard White when he visited twice a year, and he learned some music and philosophy from Reverend Archie Fair who taught him a few chords and explained that music could be something more than a sexual, physical thing, that it could express a higher power. It seems that every musician in the Delta struggled at some point between playing for the church and playing for the dancers.

He joined a group called The Famous St. John Gospel Singers, which was influenced by the Golden Gate Quartet and the Dixie Hummingbirds. but B., as his friends call him, found that he made the most money on the street corners when he played the blues.

One day King looked into a ten-cent vending machine that played a film clip of the most famous band at that time, Benny Goodman’s, and there in the middle of all that swing was a black guitar player, Charlie Christian, who was playing single note lines and beautiful harmonies. This was a significant moment in B.B. King’s perception of himself and his work.

King has developed one of the world’s most identifiable guitar styles. He borrowed from Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker and others, integrating his precise and complex vocal-like string bends and his left hand vibrato. The result of listening to those 30,000 records has been that B.B. King has mixed blues, jazz, swing, mainstream pop and jump into a unique sound. He says, “When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.”

King was born (16 September 1925) in a small cabin on a cotton plantation outside of Berclair, Mississippi, to Albert King and Nora Ella Farr on September 16, 1925. In 1930, when King was four years old, his father abandoned the family, and his mother married another man. Because Nora Ella was too poor to raise her son, King was raised by his maternal grandmother Elnora Farr in Kilmichael, Mississippi. He sang in the gospel choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church.

In 1948 B.B. King performed on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio program on KWEM in West Memphis, where he began to develop a local audience for his sound. King’s appearances led to steady engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill in West Memphis and later to a ten-minute spot on the legendary Memphis radio station WDIA. King’s Spot became so popular, it was expanded and became the Sepia Swing Club.

He worked at WDIA as a singer and disc jockey, gaining the nickname Beale Street Blues Boy, which was later shortened to Blues Boy and finally to B.B. It was there that he first met T-Bone Walker. ”Once I’d heard him for the first time, I knew I’d have to have an electric guitar myself. ‘Had’ to have one, short of stealing!”, he said.

In 1949, King began recording under contract with Los Angeles-based RPM Records. Many of his early recordings were produced by Sam Phillips who later founded Sun Records. ”My very first recordings [in 1949] were for a company out of Nashville called Bullet, the Bullet Record Transcription company,” King recalls. “I had horns that very first session. I had Phineas Newborn on piano; his father played drums, and his brother, Calvin, played guitar with me. I had Tuff Green on bass, Ben Branch, on tenor sax, his brother, Thomas Branch, on trumpet, and a lady trombone player. The Newborn family were the house band at the famous Plantation Inn in West Memphis.”

In the 1950s, B.B. King became one of the most important players in rhythm and blues music, with an impressive list of hits including 3 O’clock Blues, You Know Love You, Woke Up This Morning, Please Love Me, When My Heart Beats like a Hammer, Whole Lotta Love, You Upset Me Baby, Every Day I Have The Blues, Sneakin’ Around, Ten Long Years, Bad Luck, Sweet Little Angel, On My Word of Honor, and Please Accept My Love.

B.B. King made 342 appearances and 3 recording sessions in 1956 alone. In 1962, King signed to ABC-Paramount Records which was later absorbed into MCA Records and thence into his current label, Geffen Records. In November 1964, King recorded the Live At The Regal album at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

Big Brother and the Holding Company played on the same bill with B.B. King several times.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968 and we all gathered at Jimi Hendrix’ Generation Club in New York on 7 April to hold a wake for Reverend King. Marci Hooper was there. Noel Redding or Mitch Mitchell was filming with a Super 8 camera. Buddy Guy and Paul Butterfield were there. So was Joni Mitchell. We did Down On Me, Catch Me Daddy, Piece of My Heart and some other tunes. Jimi was at the soundboard. There is a film of this on YouTube somewhere.

B.B. King sat backstage and talked about the tragedy in beautiful, moving terms and then went out to play his set. B’s music was always full of feeling but this night it was something else, sanctified and holy. The music really was serving a higher power that night. This was the most inspiring gig we ever played… by far. B.B. King was the perfect person to lead us through this time.

I’ve left out a lot of the great Delta blues musicians here. People like Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Kid Bailey, Arthur Crudup, all great players and true blues people. The sound of the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s, 1930s is still with us today.

__________________________________________________

Sam Andrew

(San Antonio, Texas, 1955, When and where I first heard the music of T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian.)

_________________________________________________

Big Brother history, part fifteen – 2003

Posted on June 12, 2013 by J L

2003

18 January 2003 Porterville Auditorium Porterville California

Back to the Beans and Bangers circuit.

13 March 2003 The Brook Southampton UK

14 March 2003 The Rayners London Harrows UK I asked Kacee Clanton to sing with us on this trip, and she did a good job. I said, “Only thing is, don’t bring anyone with you, and pack extremely light. We only have a small van to travel in. Also, where we will be staying, there are often no elevators and many flights of stairs,” so Kacee showed up with her girlfriend and the largest suitcase I have ever seen. She’s been to Europe many times since then. I bet her luggage was lighter each time.

The band this time: Chad Quist, Glenn Halvarsson, Kacee Clanton and Peter Albin.

The band with the van. Yes, we can. Yes, we have to.

15 March 2003 The Borderline London

16 March 2003 The Borderline Diest Belgium Quite a coincidence to play two clubs with the same name in two different countries on two consecutive nights.

Ingrid Maassen

17 March 2003 Club Banana Peel Ruiselede Belgium This was a tent in an open field. A happening place, though.

One of the best men who ever lived: Vincent Van Gogh. I read his letters to his brother Theo, and, even allowing for the fact that he is putting on his best face for a dear relative who is going to send him money, comfort and love, still, the piety, honesty, penetration, sheer energy and deep feeling of Vincent are amazing and very affecting. If he had never painted a stroke, he would still be a very remarkable person.

Van Gogh’s birthplace.

He was born in Zundert, in the far south of the Netherlands.

18 March 2003 Stairway To Heaven Utrecht Netherlands

19 March 2003 Rijksmuseum Amsterdam I went to this museum long ago when I was in the Kozmic Blues Band, and back now.

Elise Piliwale, Stela Mandel and Nancy Pollock

20 March 2003 Wilhelmina Eindhoven Netherlands

My mother’s name was Wilhelmina.

She was named for this queen of the Netherlands.

21 March 2003 Patronaat Haarlem Netherlands This is the hometown of Frans Hals, an extraordinary painter.

Franz Hals visited this home for retired men and painted the inhabitants in the very room where I saw his work. One of the quickest artists ever, he handled all that 17th century lace with verve and accuracy, alla prima, very few corrections. It was a privilege to be in the same room where he did that.

Hals did this painting in this building in about three hours. If you look closely at the original, you can see the almost incredible rapidity of the brushstrokes.

22 March 2003 Iduna Drachten Netherlands

Some of these towns were so destroyed in World War Two that they are brand new and even strip mallish today.

Hengelo is almost due east of Amsterdam, close to Enschede.

23 March 2003 Kleine Kunst Hengelo Netherlands “Kleine Kunst” means “little art.”

Now we drive far south to Velden am Wörthersee, Austria.

25 March 2003 Bluesiana Rock Café Velden am Wörthersee Austria Gúðrun Kofler (center above) has brought us here to her place many times now.

Velden is way down in the south of Austria between Villach and Klagenfurt, very close to Italy and Slovenia.

In old Germany the catchphrase was Kinder Küche Kirche (Children Kitchen Church). Here it’s Konzert Keller Kofler, something like: Concert Cellar Kofler, Gudrun’s surname.

Chad can not only bowl, he can also rock and roll.

We had fun. I apologized for George W. Bush, but otherwise we had a wonderful night.

Monika Pabst ! ”Papst,” exactly the same pronunciation, means “pope,” and I think she would make a great pope.

Glenn Halvarsson, sommelier for the Swedish tap water tour.

Chad Quist. One of the all time great guitar players. Clean, intelligent and always interesting.

Austrians are light, witty, schpritzy like Mozart’s music.

An example of their sense of humor may be found down the street at the Stehbar (stand bar). You think a US bar would advertise this way ?

My friend Ali

26 March 2003 Planet Music Vienna

28 March 2003 Colos-saal Aschaffenburg Germany The name of the club is a Wortspiel, a pun. Koloss (Colossus) is a giant, and Saal is an auditorium (like French Salle). And the whole thing is colossal.

29 March 2003 Alter Gasometer Zwickau Germany The old gasmeter or the old gas company. I like the reuse of these buildings. This one is a beauty.

“East” Germany was under Soviet domination for a long time and there was not a lot of money under Communist rule, so, paradoxically, many places were left “unimproved” and as they were in the 1930s. Indeed, Prague in many places looks much as it did in Mozart’s time, which is why they filmed extended portions of Amadeus in Prague instead of in Vienna. Communism had the inadvertent virtue of preserving an older way of life.

When I stay in an old hotel room in eastern Germany, I think a lot about the lives lived there under Communism. The faded walls, ancient appliances and creaky floors speak to me of all the people who simply tried to make it through those parlous times.

The “cookwash.” Laundromats are great places for guitar playing. Somehow they filter out the mistakes. It’s like singing in the shower.

The Sword of the East. Don’t get me wrong. There were a lot of beautiful ideas in Communism. The rights of women, for example, were recognized under that system, and in old Soviet films you see women engineers on locomotives, women doctors, a real gender equality only beginning to be seen in the West now.

Communism, though, had the misfortune to be directed by human beings and we all know how selfish and venal they can be, and how even a little power can pervert the finest ideals.

So, in the former East Germany, I see much evidence of the wreckage of hope and ambition and comfort. This can be dispiriting.

The times, though, as someone once noted, are a changin’. All of these old buildings and old lives have a new lease now. Suddenly former East Germany is hip. The people in the DDR were “hillbillies” not so long ago. Now they are “authentic” and preserved from the olden times. This is a familiar scenario. Social regentrification, I suppose you could call it, and it’s worth a lot more than nothing.

It’s just that, when I am in those old hotel rooms late at night, I think of the ones who didn’t make it, the ones who died shortly before the Wall came down and thus lived their entire lives in desperate hope, cramped conformity and, sometimes, in terror.

We are the people.

Vacation in the DDR, the Orwellian named Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Now that it’s over, everyone wants to reëxperience life under Communism. The Ford in the East Germany of that time was called the Trabant (the Trabi) and now everyone wants to have one and especially that little tent that was erected on top of the car. It’s so chic, don’t you know ?

How quickly we forget and how easy to remember the “good old days,” which, of course, never were good. Nostalgia for neuralgia.

Brezhnev and Honneker, the East German leader, certainly seemed to be feeling the love, but there wasn’t a lot of trickle down. There never is. There never will be.

31 March 2003 Objekt 5 Halle Germany

1 April 2003 Musiktheater Rex Lorsch Germany

Sylvia Bartolotti tells me that Sto sotto ‘n treno (I’m under a train) is a way of saying, I feel as if I’ve been run over by a train, or I have a horrible hangover.

2 April 2003 Rockfabrik Ludwigsburg Germany

It’s funny to me, because Rock in German means skirt, and Fabrik could be cloth, but it really means Rock Factory. Rock und Blouse could be a skirt and blouse, or it could be Rock and Blues.

4 April 2003 Fismo Einsiedeln Switzerland My hotel room was right across from this monastery.

Fismo is an acronym: Fédération Internationale des Sports Mécaniques Originaux.

The CH = Confoederatio Helvetica The Helvetic Confederation. In his book De Bello Gallico The Gallic War, Julius Caesar used the word Helvetica for what is now Switzerland. So, the abbreviation for Switzerland on license plates and elsewhere is CH.

6 April 2003 Albani Music Club Winterthur Switzerland

My niece Emily Bullis Rollins came to see me in Winterthur. We had such a good time. I wish I would have had her sing a jazz standard or two. Cry me a river? Next time, Emily?

Cathy Richardson sang with us in Texas and

Joel Hoekstra played guitar, two hot Chicagoans. I have raved about Joel elsewhere. He’s a good human being and probably the best guitarist I have ever known. He plays in White Snake now.

9 May 2003 Wildflower Arts & Music Festival Richardson Texas, or Wichowdson, as Cathy pronounces it.

28 June 2003 Jenner By The Sea California

17 July 2003 Point Breeze Webster Massachusetts

18 July 2003 Ocean Beach Park New London Connecticut

19 July 2003 Vetrock Mason Field North Attleboro Massachusetts

Elise Piliwale midtown Manhattan.

27 July 2003 Central Park Summer Stage New York City Nina Simone’s daughter Simone and Elise.

Diane Lotny and Rob Clores. There is something special about Diane. She has a big brain and a lot of talent.

Ashley Kahn and friends.

This is where we met the beautiful and talented Sophia Ramos. Sophia sang Ball & Chain and she stopped the show.

Couple Number One : Carrie and Rob Clores.

There was an embarrassment of riches that day: Annisette, Baby Jane Dexter, Chan Marshall, Christine Ohlman, Caron Wheeler, Diane Lotny, Genya Ravan, Judith Owen, Kate Pierson, Lene Lovich, Little Queenie, Milini Khan, N’Dea Davenport, Phoebe Snow and Simone.

Judith Owen.

Kate Pierson was her usual charming self.

Miz Happiness and Joy, Milini Khan.

Brad Campbell and Snooky Flowers came, and we pretended we were the Kozmic Blues Band with Rob Clores and Maury Baker, the original drummer.

Milini Khan belongs to Chaka, and Simone belongs to Nina, so we had some royal princesses there.

Liz Payne Getz and Elise Wainani Piliwale.

Phoebe Snow came by and sang Piece of My Heart. It was so good to see her… and hear her.

Diane Lotny, Kate Pierson and Elise Piliwale.

Chan Marshall.

Chan sang Down On Me.

Cat Power

Ry Cooder came to Central Park because he was playing with some Okinawan musicians.

18 September 2003 Sky Church Experimental Music Project Seattle

19 September 2003 The Kenworthy Performing Arts Center Moscow Idaho

Lynn Asher has been on my mind a lot lately.

20 September 2003 First Orcas Island Music Festival Orcas Island Washington

San Francisco that a way.

25 September 2003 Justin Herman Plaza San Francisco

4 October 2003 The Landmark Hotel bathroom sink, room 105 Los Angeles Photo: Howard Sounes

Yes. We remember her all the time.

12 October 2003 Avalon Ballroom San Francisco

Wishing her well. Lynn and Lauren

Wendy Rich sleep learning.

6 November 2003 Skihuette Oberwangen Switzerland

Oberwangen is very close to Bern. We often play also in Rubigen (in the lower righthand corner of this map).

Hazel Scott and Lena Horne

7 November 2003 The Krone Bar Einsiedeln Switzerland

8 November 2003 Baden Halle 36 Baden Baden was a famous spa. Dostoyefsky set a novel there, Der Spieler, The Gambler. This word “Messe” can mean “a mass” or a “tradefair.” You see it a lot with city names. ”Messe” can merely mean “town center” or something to that effect, since the fair, and the mass, were usually held in the center of town.

9 November 2003 Albani Music Club Winterthur Switzerland Lovely people here.

Wendy Rich Glenn Halvarsson Glenn is Swedish, don’t you know? In fact, he’s a big Swedish meatball.

Sound checks. I love them so much. (That’s an example of irony.) During this one, which was actually pleasant, we performed Blue Bossa and Cry Me A River, which Wendy Rich sang to perfection. The jazz ballad is really her strong point.

Wendy with that dazzling smile.

11 November 2003 Hirsch Nürnberg Germany To some, this town Nürnberg connotes trials of World War Two gangsters.

To me, Nürnberg is the home of Albrecht Dürer.

I visited Dürers house in Nürnberg, and pulled this print on his own press upstairs. Big thrill for an artist.

Dürer was very successful. He was as well known in his time as, say, Vincent Van Gogh is now. Dürer’s art was instantly understood and very popular.

I love his work too, and have made many copies of it.

Photo: Baron Wolman

Bielefeld

13 November 2003 Das Movie Bielefeld Germany

Bielefeld doesn’t exist! For some reason, internet users in Germany write this a lot. I know it exists. I’ve played there a couple of times.

Michael Spörke published the German edition of his book Big Brother and the Holding Company, Die Band, die Janis Joplin berühmt machte, in 2003 or so.

Elaine Mayes took this interesting photograph.

14 November 2003 Alte Mälzerei Regensburg Malz = malt, so this could mean Old Maltery, a brewery.

The Cotton Club Zug Switzerland

Zug is a little south of Zürich. Zug means a train or a column (of, say, marching soldiers) or a procession, so it’s an odd name for a town.

30 December 2003 Sudsy Malone’s Cincinnati Ohio

Steve Ashman and friends

31 December 2003 The Rose Medina Ohio

See you next week !

Sam Andrew

__________________________________________________

I Homologate This Message.

Posted on June 9, 2013 by J L tagged.

Homologate: agree with, approve, approbate, sanction, authorize, warrant, countenance, ratify, confirm, confess, acknowledge.

Janis homologated these images.

To render valid by some subsequent act.

A marriage contract, though defective in legal solemnities, is held to be homologated by the subsequent marriage of the parties.

Homologate is derived from the Greek homologeo (ὁμολογέω) for “I agree”, which is generally used in English to signify the granting of approval by an official.

The homologating body may be a court of law, a government department, or an academic or professional body, any of which would normally work from a set of strict rules or standards to determine whether such approval should be given.

The word may be considered very roughly synonymous with accreditation, and in fact in French and Spanish may be used with regard to academic degrees.

Certification is another possible synonym. To homologate is the infinitive.

Products must often be homologated by some public agency to assure that they meet standards for such things as safety and environmental impact.

A court action may also sometimes be homologated by a judicial authority before it can proceed, and the term has a precise legal meaning in the judicial codes of some countries, especially in Scotland.

The equivalent process of testing and certification for conformance to technical standards is usually known as Type Approval in English-language jurisdictions.

Another example of the use of homologate pertains to the biological sciences, where it may describe the similarities used to assign organisms to the same family or taxon, similarities they have jointly inherited from a common ancestor.

So, dear reader, what would this organization, Girls Together Outrageously (GTOs) have to do with the word “homologate?”

In racing, a vehicle must be homologated by the sanctioning body to race in a given league, such as World Superbikes, International Level Kart Racing or other sportscar racing series.

Where a racing class requires that the vehicles raced be production vehicles only slightly adapted for racing, manufacturers typically produce a limited run of such vehicles for public sale so that they can legitimately race them in the class.

These vehicles are commonly called “homologation specials.”

The term homologation is also applicable in the Olympic Games, in venue certifications, prior to the start of competition.

An issue was raised at Cesena Pariol—the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton track used for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino (Turin) —over its safety in luge.

This delayed homologation of the track from January 2005 to October 2005 in order to achieve safe runs during luge competitions.

A judge must homologate the plea bargain between the district attorney and the defense.

Gran Turismo Omologato is the origin of the acronym GTO.

“We’ve major issues which appear to be discussed in the press. Decisions are made and then we’re asked to homologate these decisions.”

“What was needed was a more streamlined street car to homologate for racing.”

Now the same amazing race technology is available in fully homologated form for use on the road by drivers who know what satisfaction means.

This protective front headlight grill for use off-road is not homologated for on-road use.

Homologation is the certification of a product or specification to indicate that it meets regulatory standards.

There are companies that specialize in helping manufacturers achieve regulatory compliance.

These homologating companies have services that might include the explanation and interpretation of standards and specifications.

There may be homologatory assistance in plant facility audit and approval, testing and certification of materials, product design consulting, and translation of manuals, legal mandates and other written material.

My friend Melina has a beautiful collection of black and white photographs of blues players and she has tacitly homologated my use of them from time to time, just as she may use any image that I have.

I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know why I enjoyed it, and I don’t know why I will do it again. What do you want? It’s a birthday.

Reason itself is fallible and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

We started out as opportunistic renegades. By now, we’ve lasted long enough to become American Original Respectable Renegades.

I want it to go on, but I want us to go out on top. Well, so much for that. OK, then, go out on the bottom, yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.

I don’t miss the rat race, but occasionally I miss the rats.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal, or even inability, to be compromised.

The element of surprise is what I look for when I am playing.

We all come into the world not knowing who we are.

Women get the work done, with lesser play of ego.

If anyone thinks I am wrong, I am inclined to agree with her.

You know what would be interesting to see? A film about an Al Qaeda follower from her own point of view, how she became that, what her ambitions are, her name, her family, her petty dislikes, her secret wishes. This would show us more than a thousand state documents.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

If you want to change your life, change your mind.

Don’t be afraid of failure. Be afraid of succeeding too early.

God limited the intelligence of humanity, but not the stupidity.

One sure way to please a tigress is to let her eat you.

The biggest risk in life is not taking any risks.

A bad temper is a sign of weakness.

They had several car crashes in that film, but none of them killed the right people.

When you see old photographs, it’s lovely to remember being young, but even better to know that you grew up.

Every now and then do something that you think you are really bad at.

Some white people hate black people, and some white people love black people, some black people hate white people, and some black people love white people. So you see it’s not an issue of black and white, it’s an issue of Lovers and Haters.

I like to do interviews where I see that the questioner is pondering his next line while I am answering his last… NOT!

I’m definitely not a shopper. I totally hate the process of researching and then haggling for the price. I wish I could just snap my fingers and it would be there. I would pay extra for that, actually, and, in fact, I suppose I do pay extra for that. Actually, I would pay extra for not having the thing at all.

My family were Democrats. In fact, if one of us children was acting up and being stubborn, my father would say, “Stop acting like a damned Republican.”

Music is irrational. The better it is, the madder it is.

Life is a song, so sing along. Life is a game, it’s never the same. Make it your goal to nourish your soul.

This looks totally posed. They’re probably his cousins.

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Neither success nor failure is ever final.

The best command of the language is often shown by saying nothing.

To make your dream come true, you need to be wide awake.

Bad politicians are elected by good people who don’t vote.

Look up. When you’re flat on your back, look up.

Don’t worry about what is going to happen. It’s bad enough worrying about what is happening now.

Everybody doesn’t have to get every joke. People really appreciate not being condescended to.

If you have health, friends and enough money to pay the rent and eat, you have a lot.

Legends are all about the past and have nothing to do with the present.

You can’t think clearly when your fists are clenched.

I often play language learning CDs in my car, and I’ve noticed that when I become angry at another driver, I don’t learn anything at all from the CDs. I have to listen to that spot over again. This in itself is educational.

I’m the L word. Liberal.

It’s not so much the taxes we pay as it is the feeling that someone is picking our pockets without our knowing why.

As long as there is one pretty woman on stage, the theatre will live.

When you’re wrong, admit it. When you’re right, be quite. (Or quiet, whichever is best.)

A door is what a cat is always on the wrong side of.

Am I a late bloomer or an early rotter?

Most people would rather be right than be reasonable.

You cannot move others unless you too are moved.

Remorse or reminiscence?

The fruits of our private study should appear in our public behavior.

Sometimes I look at the stars for so long that they seem to move and dance in the sky.

My father seemed to me to know everything, all about the artists in the Renaissance, all about the carburetor under the hood, all about the rocks and how they came to be that way, all about the plants and their histories. If he couldn’t afford something, he would simply make it with his own hands.

Labels are for medicine bottles. Labels are for clothes. Labels aren’t for people.

Whoever said, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,” probably lost.

People want to matter. Help them to do that and show them that they do.

For the caterpillar it’s the end of the world. For the butterfly it’s her birthday.

My wife. She makes life come to life.

A professional musician is an amateur who didn’t stop.

If you want something in your life, act as if it’s already there.

Living to the highest standard you know leads to happiness.

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.

Learning when to leave is not a negligible part of one’s education.

I have been in the twilight of my career for longer than most people have had careers.

Actually, I’ve been in the twilight of my career for longer than many people have lived.

Music has given me soul.

Talented people are the easiest to get along with.

The simpler it is, the more beautiful it can become.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

When you walk into a party, you don’t see someone’s brain right away, although it doesn’t take long to see her soul.

No matter what you do, you can’t live in the past.

I wake up at five every day, even if I went to bed at three. I’m blaming it on my cats.

The optimist says we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that may be true.

Write the kind of song you would like to hear.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

You begin growing your wisdom teeth the first time you bite off more than you can chew.

People worry more about what they can’t see than what they can.

It is better to create than to learn.

Picture you upon my knee, just tea for two and two for tea.

My ambition is to do a good job. I never plan anything.

Life is accepting what is and working with that, or, as my mother put it, you work with what you got.

Everyone has a story that is worth telling and, if told right, it can be a beautiful song.

Self consciousness, shyness, timidity are all forms of egotism and that’s all right.

People believe quickly what they wish to be true.

You take the truth and you put a little curlicue on the end.

Every language has its own song.

James Gurley.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach competence and confidence.

I used to be afraid of being normal even though nothing is normal.

Films have the power to change people’s minds. A film can make you a better person. In fact, a film should make you a better person.

Good old days? What good old days? People who wish for the old days have very selective memories.

Life is much shorter than it seemed at first.

For at least a hundred and fifty years, America’s best ambassador has been her music.

Being a musician is just a job, but it can be an interesting job.

I was always shy, timid, introverted, whatever you want to call it, and mortally afraid of going onstage. I bet that is true of many, many performers.

I wrote Flower in the Sun in a bathroom in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. It was the only place I could find any privacy.

I try to live by the Golden Rule. Most of the time that works.

We’re not disgruntled. We’re actually fairly gruntled and couth.

Anybody can succeed, anybody can play, but you’ve got to work hard to do it.

I’m a skilled professional musician. Whether or not I have any talent is beside the point. Main thing is to do the job well.

I read many, many books, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

Many people who are brutally honest are more brutal than honest.

At 53 I got the girl! Now she’s almost 53.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard, as Edmund Kean observed on his deathbed.

Comedy is not only hard to act, but hard to write. As Michael Caine noted, you get one comedy script for every twenty dramas.

Comedy is underrepresented in every actor’s résumé because comedy is very difficult.

English is clipped in speech. Texan is clopped in speech.

Be like a duck, always oily calm on the surface and furiously paddling underneath.

I admire other musicians but I would never think of competing with them. What we do is so different. I compete with myself. I have had so many great guitarists play and sit in with Big Brother over the years. More guitar players have performed with Big Brother than musicians on any other instrument. Even singers, and that’s saying something.

The Jack Benny philosophy: I feel like 39. At 39 you’re old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with that knowledge. So I’m staying at 39. It sounds so much better than 40, doesn’t it? It sounds better than 71 too, which is what I really am, and very happy to be 71 too.

Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk much.

Count your money. I’m not going to retire, so I don’t have to worry about that part, but you always need about three times as much money as you think you are going to need.

The first star I saw was Lash La Rue, and I thought, that’s what I want to do, be Lash La Rue.

If you see money as the solution for every problem, then money is the problem.

You get paid the same for a bad gig as for a good one.

My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.

To an engineer it’s “good enough for government work.” To an artist there’s no such thing as good enough.

There are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world.

I sang before I talked, before I had a memory. When my memory began, I was already singing.

I’m a huge shoe person. I only wear shoes that are truly enormous.

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

Success is important only to the extent that it puts one in a position to do more things one likes to do but it’s even more important because it can allow you to help people who truly deserve help.

Music is a process which is successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

If you approach a song as though it were something that always went a certain way, that’s what you get. Maybe best to approach a song as though you never heard it before.

We all make mistakes. Best to look at them closely, confront them honestly and learn from them.

Are we not all desperate in one way or another?

I have been the victim of heartless and, worse, pointless malice delivered by stupid people who truly believed that they had something to say.

Giving a phenomenon a name does not explain it.

Even the most malignant gods would not continue to inflict life upon humanity, time without end.

Don’t rush into adulthood. It is not really all that much fun.

The only real failure is one you don’t learn from.

The most important things in life aren’t things.

Promise a lot, and then give more.

Learning is an avenue to happiness, ever open to those who are deprived of honors or wealth.

The worst thing is to get involved with people who aren’t passionate about what they’re doing.

A little nonsense now and then is good for women and good for men.

I wish I could understand why the electoral college is necessary.

The greatest peril to the soul is an answered prayer.

I don’t have everything I want, but I have a lot that I am grateful for.

You can sell out if you want to, but just because you did doesn’t mean they’re going to keep their end of the bargain.

In film there’s just one chance to make something decent. In the theatre, you get to do it over and over.

Don’t worry about being modern. That’s something you can’t avoid.

A miracle can happen at any time.

Don’t be silly and don’t waste your time.

I appreciate the love and respect behind such an award, but I can’t help thinking about people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Geeshie Wiley, Ishmon Bracey, Kid Bailey, Arthur Crudup, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Booker White, Furry Lewis, T-Bone Walker and Ike Turner, so I am going to write about them next week.

Thank you for being here.

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The Chinese Written Language

Posted on May 29, 2013 by J L tagged.

The Chinese very early saw that a sophisticated, loose and elegant style of writing was a clear sign of intellectual prowess and ethical refinement.

The written language has changed very little from its origins more than three thousand years ago. There are several characters here that are written the same way they are today.

All of the countries around China, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, Singapore, saw her as the Middle Country, the giant in their midst, so that even today China may be written as the “center.” Center country.

See how the line is drawn through the center of the rectangle on the left?

There are other ways to write “China” but this is the one that is easiest and most often used.

“Sun” was originally drawn as a circle with a dot in the middle, and it evolved into this character.

And this is moon.

Putting the sun and moon together made a brilliant light, so the meaning of this combination of sun and moon is “bright, enlightened” (ming).

You can see the word “ming” on this coin. The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was a brilliant time of exploration, new ideas.

This means “bright mirror still water.” It is a four character summary of a Chinese Taoist text used for meditation in Zen Buddhism to suggest a calm and clear state of mind. The first character is ming which can be mei in Japanese. Meikyoo shisui.

When ming is used in Japanese as a given name, it can be pronounced Akira and it is the “first” name of director Kurosawa Akira.

This character ben is a pictograph of a tree with the root emphasized. It means root, origin, source.

When the root character is put together with the character for sun, it means Japan, the origin of the sun because to the Chinese Japan was to the east and so was the land of the rising sun. In Japanese these characters are pronounced Nihon. Sun root.

Míng bái means “understand” or “clear.” The second character means “white, bright, clear.”

This is how the character for woman evolved.

And this is child. See how her arms are stretched out?

The Chinese write woman and child together to mean good (hao).

This is how you say “hello” in Chinese: Ni hao. You good?

If you put woman under a roof, the meaning is peace, tranquility.

If you put a child under a roof, the meaning is “letter,” because children learned their letters under a roof.

If you put a pig under a roof, the meaning is “family” or “home.”

Putting a woman next to a home is the Chinese way of writing “to marry a man.”

A woman with a broom is a wife.

The character for tree or wood is very straightforward.

A child under a tree is how Chinese write “plum.”

This character plum is pronounced LI (lee). It is the second most common surname in China, but the most common surname on planet Earth, because we have many Lees here and they have many, many Lees there.

Two trees are a wood and three trees mean “forest.”

When you see the sun rise through a tree, that means “east.”

The Chinese have simplified their written language so that the character to the left above is how “east” is written today. Traditionalists like me regret the passing of the old beautiful ways, but we have to recognize that this makes life simpler for a billion plus people. You do lose a sense of the etymology of the words, though. It is rather as if in English we would spell history histree thus losing the idea of “story.”

Tokyo means “east capital,” and the Japanese write it like this.

But the Chinese now write it like this.

You know what I mean? We lose a bit of history here.

“West” (xi) was originally a drawing of a nest because birds nest when the sun goes down. This still looks a bit like a bird in a nest, doesn’t it?

“Mountain” is a drawing of a mountain. Shang. Shan.

There is a province in China called Shanxi. Now you know why it is called that. Because it is a mountain in the west.

North East South West

The Japanese pronounce mountain “san” and their beautiful mountain is called Fujisan. ”Yama” is the native Japanese word for “mountain,” so they say Fujiyama or Fujisan, but never Fujiyamasan, as I said when I first went to Japan at age six. I was saying Mount Mount Fuji in effect. Rather like someone saying “We’re going to the El Sombrero tonight.”

When the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing there was trouble making a fit, because Chinese is an extremely analytical language and Japanese is as inflected as Latin, so the Japanese created no less than three different systems of writing so they could add endings and prefixes to Chinese words.

Adding to the complexity was the fact that the Japanese often adopted the Chinese word as well as the writing of it, so that there are many, many pairs like “yama” and “san” in Japanese. Almost every noun, it seems, has a native Japanese word and then a Chinese borrowed word for its name.

The character for child above is called zi in Chinese, as we have seen, but in Japanese it can be SHI, SU, ko, -go and most nouns have this many pronunciations.

This character, by the way, is the ending for women’s names which was very common until the advent of womens’ liberation. Women were called Yuriko, Yukiko, Hanako, Yoko, Chisuko, Tomiko, where the -ko was written with this character which means “child.” Now many women have dropped this -ko.

My friend Yukiko made this beautiful flower arrangement.

This character for heart is a fairly accurate anatomical drawing of the heart and it is pronounced xin in Chinese. In Japanese the pronunciation is SHIN, close enough to xin. The native word in Japanese for heart is kokoro and -gokoro in combinations.

This is the old way of writing “love” in Chinese and the Japanese still write it this way. Note that heart is there in the middle of the character which is pronounced ai in Chinese.

In China they now write “love” this way, so it lost its heart.

Too bad.

Here are some “heart” words. This one is “think, recall,” pronounced SHI, omo(u) in Japanese.

“Bad, evil.” Pronunced AKU, waru(i) in Japanese.

“Breath.”

“Sad, sorrowful.” Pronounced bei in Chinese and HI, kanashii in Japanese. The top part of this character means “not,” so not heart = sad.

Grass or herb can be written this way. The line at the top of this character with two other lines through it is used in many words relating to plants. This is called “the grass radical.”

The character for young has the grass sign, probably because grass is spring and youth.

This kanji (kanji = han letter, Chinese letter) is gei which means “art(s),” especially the popular arts like music, weaving, origami, crafts.

A geisha is an art person.

This character also has the grass crown. This is “flower” which is KA or hana in Japanese. When I go to Hana on Maui, I always think of this character because there are so many flowers. The pronunciation is hua in Chinese. This was originally a man falling head over heels with the grass symbol added on top.

This is bamboo. Zhú.

Tea. Chá. You probably know the word chai. Same difference.

Cha iro is Japanese for tea color, brown.

At the top of this character is the “grass” radical and it is used to write this word: plant.

This is the grass radical combined with the character for music which makes the word “medicine.” Grass (herb) and music to mean medicine gives an insight into the Chinese view of healing at the time this character was formulated.

The Chinese write “brave” or “hero” this way to imply that the person is in the jungle (grass component) in a large space.

Because the pronunciation is “ying” they use this character to write England. Ying guó. Brave country. England is a brave country, but the ideogram seems chosen more for its sound than for meaning.

Characters are often chosen for their sounds, especially if they are complimentary.

“America” is called mei koku (beautiful country) in Japan and mei guo in China because those names sound like “America.” Mei guo ren is an American, a beautiful country person.

“Paris” was often written in China with two characters that sound like Pa ri and mean “greatly desire village.” There are a lot of puns and rebuses involved in writing of foreign names.

The character for “horse” evolved somewhat like this.

In Chinese this horse character is pronounced ma and in Japanese BA, uma.

Many of the characters for animals have four legs.

This horse radical is used to write to run, to gallop.

This is a station, like a railway station or a bus station. It dates from when horses were the main mode of transportation. Pronunciation is EKI. This is a useful word to be able to read if you live in Japan.

This will give you some idea of the stroke order involved in making these characters. The order of drawing the strokes is very well established. Learning it, I believe, was what led me to become an artist. The stroke order in Chinese writing is logical and well thought out.

In Chinese, fish have legs. Well, they did before the Chinese Communists simplified the written language and did away with legs altogether, replacing them with a single stroke. The Japanese and the people of Taiwan still write the character for fish with the legs.

It evolved in something like this manner.

In China now, “goldfish” is written like this. The character on the left means “gold.” The character on the right is how the Chinese write fish now. One stroke for the old four strokes. More efficient, more convenient, but something is lost.

This is the year of the goldfish.

Person is written like this.

So mermaid or merman is written like this. A person fish.

This is the character for eternity and it contains every kind of stroke used in Chinese calligraphy.

In Japanese for “I am happy,” you can say “Shiawase da.”

The first character on the left is called by the Japanese KOO, saiwa(i), sachi or shiawa(se). It means good fortune or happiness.

If you really want to express happiness, you write the character twice… double happiness.

You see this double happiness character everywhere, especially in San Francisco, because everyone wants to be doubly happy and fortunate.

Artists challenge themselves to see how loosely, elegantly and artistically they can make this word double happiness and yet still have it be understoo0d.

Can you still read the two happinesses here?

Of course this is a wonderful message for weddings and anniversaries because there are two characters for two people. Looks a bit like kissing, doesn’t it?