Lou Sang Quotes

Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, became legendary as organizer and speaker. She sang hymns; she walked picket lines with her familiar limp (as a child she contracted polio). She roused people to excitement at mass meetings: "I'm sick an' tired o' bein' sick an' tired!

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

And we’d all jump around like we’s dancing.  One time we didn’t hear Pappy coming, and he walked in right while we’s jumping and sanging.  He had a awful mighty big temper.  He grabbed his horse whip and started hitting Mammy.” Maggie gasped and grabbed Betty Lou’s hand as Grandpa continued his story.  “Johnny and Jimmy took the whip away from Pappy.  Johnny ran out to the chopping block and cut it up in pieces with the ax.  They was scared to come back in the house, so they hid out in the woods for days till they saw Pappy hitch up the buggy and start off.  Then they come in and told Mammy they’s going to leave.  She helped pack up their clothes in bundles and fixed some food, and they left.  That’s the last I ever seen them.  Mammy never played the mandolin again.  I thought she’d probably burnt it up or something.” “How old was you then?” Jeannie asked. “I’s about six, I guess.  Johnny and Jimmy was about fifteen or sixteen.  Mammy knowed they needed to leave because Pappy had such a temper, he’d probably killed them.  But after that, she never would sing no more.

He was born Feb. 10, 1893, in New York’s Lower East Side. At 17 he learned to play the piano, beginning his musical career in the beer gardens of old Coney Island, picking out tunes for $25 a week. In Terry Walsh’s club he played while a waiter named Eddie Cantor sang. By 1916 he had assembled a small Dixieland combo for the Club Alamo in Harlem. There he met Eddie Jackson, who was to become his partner. In 1923 he and Jackson opened the Club Durant and acquired a third partner, Lou Clayton. The club thrived, but the partners ran afoul of the law, and the business was closed by Prohibition agents. But Clayton, Jackson, and Durante arrived on Broadway in 1928.