Like everyone else I liked and admired Dolly Parton and featured her in four posts over the years.
This is Train Train from her bluegrass period backed by the great pickers at Union Station with Allison Krauss singing backup. You can also hear her transform Stairway to Heaven into a gospel hymn with her adding lyrics at the end, and perform a lovely version of Neil Young's After The Gold Rush with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.
Today I learned that in 2020 the University of Texas School of Journalism and Media established the Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts. What a travesty and what a disgrace for journalism. Read Promoting Disinformation to find out why.
As Ernie Banks would say. So let's do two baseball posts today.
Just realized Albert Belle turns 60 today. Was reminded coming across this video (below) titled "Albert Belle Was The Most Un-Hinged Baseball Player of All-Time" by sportswriter Jeff Pearlman. While a reminder of the craziness of Albert at times (just watch his assault on second baseman Fernando Vina), the title and language are somewhat overhyped as everything seems to be in recent years. It's worth a watch and has an unexpected and relatively happy ending. Turns out Albert and his family are neighbors of ours in Scottsdale.
Belle was an incredible hitter. He only played ten full seasons (1991-2000), retiring just after turning 34, but he could pound the ball. Over those ten years he averaged per season 38 doubles, 37 home runs, 120 rbi, with a .297 batting average. At the time he retired Albert had the 10th highest career slugging percentage in major league history.
He was capable of prolonged hot streaks, over the last 90 games of the strike-shortened 1994 season hitting .367, with a OBP of .447, while slugging .757 with 67 extra base hits and 90 rbi. During the 1995 season, Belle had 103 XBH. During the final 87 games of the 1998 season his splits were .389/.461/.799, including 63 XBH and 93 rbi. I remember how intimidating he could look at the plate.
As far as being the "most un-hinged" ballplayer, Albert has a lot of competition. Take Ty Cobb for example. In my review of Charles Leersehn's revisionist biography, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, I noted:
As Grantland Rice, a friend and admirer, wrote years later:
When I first met Cobb I found him to be an extremely peculiar soul, brooding and bubbling with violence, combative all the way, a streak, incidentally, he never lost.Throughout his career, though much less after he retired, he reacted quickly to any perceived insult. In commenting on his penchant for fighting Leerhsen writes:
. . . he provided such a dizzying array of examples to choose from - fights with complete strangers, fights with teammates, fights with rival players, fights with hotel employees, shopkeepers, and rowdy cranks [fans] . . .The author goes on to provide an account of his behavior over a short period during the 1916 season; fighting with Buck Herzog of the Giants both on and off the field; an incident in Comiskey Park when, angered by a called third strike, he threw his bat into the stands; flinging a handful of dirt into the face of a Senators pitcher; and being pulled out of stands in St Louis by teammates and police before he could pummel a heckler.
I also quoted Bill Veeck:
"Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils, like the Third Army bustling through Germany".
I read Eliot Asinoff's Eight Men Out many years ago and enjoyed John Sayles 1988 movie based on the book. Over the years, I've become aware of the many inaccuracies in both. Asinoff and Sayles were both sympathetic to the plight of the eight Chicago White Sox players who threw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, becoming known as the infamous Black Sox. In their telling, Charles Comiskey, the Sox owner, was the bad guy who drove the players to take payoffs from gamblers.
Several years ago, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) published Eight Myths about the Black Sox, along with an exhaustive appendix of the significant, and not so significant, errors and omissions in the book and movie.
To give you a flavor this is the first of the myths:
This is the central thesis of Eight Men Out: Charles Comiskey’s “ballplayers were
the best and were paid as poorly as the worst,” as Eliot Asinof wrote.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. We can’t climb into the heads
of the Black Sox to know exactly why they threw the World Series. But
the players themselves rarely claimed,
as Asinof did, that it was because of Comiskey’s low salaries or poor
treatment — and we now have accurate salary information to back that up.
Newly available organizational contract cards at the National Baseball Hall of Fame show that the White Sox’s Opening Day payroll of $88,461
was more than $11,500 higher than that of the National League champion
Reds, and several of the Black Sox players were among the highest-paid
at their positions. If they did feel resentment at their salaries under
the reserve-clause system, so did players from 15 other major-league
teams. The scandal was much more complex than disgruntled players trying to get back at the big, bad boss.
You can find the 8 Myths here and the detailed appendix here.
With the proliferation of sports gambling sites and their active promotion during the broadast of sporting events I fear we will eventually have another huge scandal like the Black Sox.
In late December of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who would become famous for writing Democracy in America, was on a steamboat traveling down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. On December 27 Sam Houston and two Cherokee boarded the boat in Arkansas, soon meeting de Tocqueville, who was well aware of Houston's notoriety and recorded their conversation.
Houston is the most emblematic figure of that period in American history between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, as recounted previously, representing a constellation of beliefs that don't neatly fit into any of today's categories. The French traveler was meeting Sam at a low point in his life. In early 1829 he'd been the newly elected governor of Tennessee and was also newly married to Eliza Allen, when she suddenly left the governor's house in the middle of the night, and refusing Houston's entreaties to return. The distraught Houston resigned and fled to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) to join his Cherokee friends, with whom he'd already lived with for three years as a teenager.
Marrying Tiana Rogers, a Cherokee widow, Houston embarked on an epic drinking spree, earning the nickname "Big Drunk". Tocqueville met him when Sam was part of a Cherokee lobbying delegation off to Washington DC, where Houston had served in Congress and was a friend of President Andrew Jackson who'd been his political mentor.
Tocqueville wrote of Houston, “His figure is athletic; everything about him indicates physical and moral energy,” and after writing of his downfall , “Since then, he has lived in the midst of the wilderness, half European, half savage.” He then recorded much of their conversation in a Q&A format:
Q: Have the Indians a religion?
A: Some of them have no belief in the immortality of the soul. But generally the Indians believe in a God who punishes or rewards the deeds of this life in the other world.
Q: Have they any form of worship?
A: The Osages, who live on the frontier of Mexico, pray every morning to the rising sun. The Creeks have no worship. It is only in times of great calamity, or before undertaking some great enterprise, that they devote themselves to some public manifestations of worship.
Q: What sort of government have the Indians?
A: Generally a patriarchal government. Birth makes the chiefs. Among the tribes which contact with Europeans has made more enlightened, they are elected.
Q: What is the status of women among the Indians?
A: Complete servitude. The women have to do all the unpleasant tasks, and live in great degradation.
In response to a question about the intelligence of Indians and blacks, Houston replied, according to this History Net article:
. . . that he believed both Indians and black people were as intelligent as whites, and he suggested that freedom spawns intelligence while slavery thwarts it. “The Indian is born free; he makes use of this freedom from his first steps in life,” Houston told Tocqueville. “Surrounded by dangers, pressed by necessities, and unable to count on anyone, his mind must be ever active to find means to ward off troubles and to maintain his existence. This necessity imposed on the Indian gives his intelligence a degree of development and ingenuity which are often wonderful.” Meanwhile, Houston added, the black man’s native intelligence is crippled by slavery: “The first notions of existence which he receives make him understand that he is the property of another, that care for his own future is no concern of his, and that the very power of thought is for him a useless gift of providence.”
As I've written elsewhere, Sam Houston was the greatest political defender of Indian rights in the pre-Civil War United States. While he was not an abolitionist, and owning slaves, he opposed the extension of slavery, and later secession. Sam was forced to resign as governor of Texas in 1861 when he refused to take an oath to the Confederacy, and freed his slaves when learning of the Emancipation Proclamation.
My favorite R.E.M. album, Lifes Rich Pageant(1), was released 40 years ago this summer, though my favorite song remains Driver 8 from their prior album, Fables of the Reconstruction. The band hailed from the same place as the B-52s, Athens, Georgia. Over its long recording career, R.E.M. had two distinct styles; songs on which you could not
understand Michael Stipe's lyrics and those on which you could (Losing My Religion and Everybody Hurts
are good examples of the latter). THC much preferred the former earlier style. R.E.M. were at their best when they featured jangling guitars, strong melodies, and Stipe's mumbling vocals buried into the mix. I find a lot of later REM either dreary or just too much.
Burying the vocals in the mix dominated the early R.E.M. records in the
1980s. It didn't mean that the listener couldn't make out any words in
the murk. Indeed, words and even phrases could be interpreted but there
were always passages when you simply could not make out what they were
saying. And, back then, there was no internet to quickly search out the lyrics. It also ensured that you often had no idea what the song was about, which in some cases may have been for the better. Lifes Rich Pageant is a transitional record in which Stipe's vocals occasionally emerge above the mix.
Here's one of the best cuts from the album, These Days, and you should also listen to Fall On Me, Cuyahoga, Hyena, and Swan Swan H.
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(1) Yes, I know it should be Life's but that how it appears on the cover of the album.
