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Song . . .Will a moon so bright ever arise again? SU DONGPO (SU SHI) (1036-1101)
He was a renaissance man, who in addition to a political career was an innovator and master of poetry, prose, calligraphy, and painting. He was among the founders of the important Southern Song style of painting. He felt that poems and paintings should be spontaneous as running water, yet rooted in an objective rendering of emotions in the world. WITHERING ON THE VINE
Today the final TV set made in England is due to roll off the production line at Toshiba's factory in Plymouth. When John Logie Baird (August 13, 1888 – June 14, 1946) a Scottish engineer demonstrated his first television set to the world in 1926, a reporter from the Times wrote: "The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred, but substantiated the claim that through the 'televisor', as Mr Baird has named his apparatus, it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face." From those cautious beginnings, Britain was to lead the world. The closing of the Plymouth factory will leave the nation without one of its historical, life-changing industries, a technology,in mono chrome and colour, that the country invented. The names of Bush, Ferguson and Pye relegated to old copies of "Wireless World." It follows in a long line of British enterprise, invention and production that consecutive governments have allowed to wither and perish. I mention just three:
1. The cotton mills of Lancashire, birthplace of the Industrial revolution, silent for 40 years are now either museums or expensive apartments lived in by the pseudo rich. The industy a victim of cheap, slave labour in Asia.
2. Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce came from very different backgrounds, with very different educations, until they met at the Midland Hotel in Manchester in 1904 and joined forces to build and sell motor cars. Two years later, the partnership had produced the Rolls Royce Silver Ghost: a car acclaimed as the "best in the world." The British army saved the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, re establishing car production. Short of light transport, in September 1945 the British Army placed a vital order for 20,000. The first few hundred cars went to personnel from the occupying forces, and to the German Post Office. So the wheel of fortune turned. Rolls-Royce Motors (1973–2003), since 2003, has been known as Bentley Motors Limited, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group. Today the remainder of car production in Britain is owned by USA and Japan.
3. The Motorcycle industry was born in Birmingham. Between 1905 and 1965 the names of Norton, AJS, Matchless, Francis-Barnet, Ariel and Triumph were world famous. BSA for example had 72 factories, employing staff in their thousands and was a massive export earner for the nation. Japanese reverse engineering ie taking apart an object to see how it works in order to duplicate [steal] the technology and the use of cheap labour, saw the demise of motorcycle production in Britain.
War hero assassinated August 1979.History has a way of linking events many years apart. I read today that Edward Kennedy had died on the 30th anniversary 0f the assassination of Lord Mountbatten. Lord Louis Mountbatten British admiral and statesman , the Queen's cousin and WW2 hero, was killed by a bomb blast on his boat in Ireland. One of the earl's twin grandsons, Nicholas, 14, and Paul Maxwell, 15, a local boy, also died in the explosion. His biographer, recounts his naval service in Norway, India and Burma between 1939 - 1945, noting : “Remember, in spite of everything, he was a great man." This act of terrorism at Mullaghmore was followed hours later by the massacre of 18 British soldiers, killed in two booby-trap bomb explosions near Warrenpoint.
Kennedy will not be mourned in England where he is most remembered being involved in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, leaving her to die in a submerged car, having been unfaithful to his pregnant wife. He also supported noraid [which contributed cash to the ira terrorists in Britain and provided them with arms, one example being a large consignment of arms stolen from Camp Lejeune, NC in 1979]. This american money of course bought armaments from President Gadaffi who donated enough weapons to arm the equivalent of three infantry battalions. Kennedy was condescending, and a loser with no morals. He will not be missed in Britain unlike the thousands left dead and injured in the wake of the terrorists whom he supported.
AUGUST HARVEST
"Blessed be the Harvest,
******************** "Once upon a Lammas Night When corn rigs are bonny,
tourists.
A coach, full of American tourists arrive at Runnymede. They gather around the Robin, the guide, who explains, 'This is the spot where the Barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta.' A Texan at the front of the group asks, 'When did that happen?' '1215,' answers Robin the guide. The man looks at his watch and says, 'Gee, hey everybody – we just missed it by a half hour.' Reap as ye sow . . . . !
In the beginning God covered the earth with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach, with green, yellow and red vegetables of all kinds so Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives. Then using God's bountiful gifts, Satan created Dairy Ice Cream and Magnums. And Satan said "You want hot fudge with that? And Man said "Yes!"And Woman said "I'll have one too with chocolate chips". And lo they gained 10 pounds. And God created the healthy yoghurt that Woman might keep the figure that Man found so fair. And Satan brought forth white flour from the wheat and sugar from the cane and combined them. And Woman went from size 12 to size 14. So God said "Try my fresh green salad". And Satan presented Blue Cheese dressing and garlic croutons on the side. And Man and Woman unfastened their belts following the repast. God then said "I have sent you healthy vegetables and olive oil in which to cook them". And Satan brought forth deep fried coconut king prawns, butter-dipped lobster chunks and chicken fried steak, so big it needed its own platter. And Man's cholesterol went through the roof. God then brought forth running shoes so that his Children might lose those extra pounds. And Satan came forth with a cable TV with remote control so Man would not have to toil changing the channels. And Man and Woman laughed and cried before the flickering light and started wearing stretch jogging suits. God sighed ......... And created quadruple by-pass surgery.
And then ............ Satan chuckled and created Medicare. THIS IS FACT NOT MYTH = = = = = =
251 MILLION YEARS AGO, at the end of the Permian period, life on Earth was almost completely wiped out by an environmental catastrophe of a magnitude never seen before or since. All over the world complex ecosystems were destroyed. In the sea, coral reefs, fishes, shellfish, trilobites, plankton, and many other groups disappeared. On land, the sabre-toothed gorgonopsian reptiles and their rhinoceros-sized prey, the dinocephalians and pareiasaurs, were wiped out forever. Only 5 per cent of species survived the catastrophe, and for the next 500,000 years life itself teetered on the brink of oblivion. What terrible event could have wrought such havoc? Two theories have been proposed - the impact of a huge meteorite or comet over 10 kilometres in diameter, or a massive and prolonged volcanic eruption. Up to now the evidence has been equivocal. But the data has been accumulating over the past 10 years, and the picture is now clear enough to say with some certainty what happened. An impact might seem a tempting model. A massive catastrophe demands an extraordinary explanation - something unexpected, something from outer space. And we know that impacts can cause mass extinctions. It seems that the dinosaurs and many other groups of animals and plants were wiped out 65 million years ago by the impact of a huge meteorite in modern day Mexico. The crater has been found, there is good evidence for the shock wave, and for the fallout rocks and dust all round the world.In February 2001, a team of scientists claimed they had found clear evidence that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian was also caused by a meteorite impact. Luanne Becker of the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues from NASA and other institutions announced in a paper in Science (vol 291, p 1530) that they had found extraterrestrial helium and argon in rocks from the Permo-Triassic boundary in China and Japan. The gases were trapped inside the fullerenes or buckyballs that are often associated with impact debris. When Becker and her team looked closely at the helium and argon they found isotope ratios like nothing else on Earth, but similar to those found in meteorites. On this basis they argued that the fullerenes - and their entrapped gases - must have come from an impact.The claim was splashed all over the press. On 23 February 2001, The New York Times reported "Meteor crash led to extinctions in era before dinosaurs". The Times said, "Asteroid collision left the world almost lifeless".But later in 2001, several learned journals published critiques in which other geochemists tried and failed to replicate Becker's results. Other samples from the same boundary bed in China apparently contained no buckyballs, argon or helium, and a Japanese geologist, Yukio Isozaki of the University of Tokyo, pointed out that the Japanese sample came from a rock formation that didn't even include the Permian-Triassic boundary. But Becker and her team still stand by their results. They repeated their analyses from the Chinese samples, and confirmed the helium result. They also have support from an independent source. In September 2001, Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University in Japan reported that sediment grains from Permo-Triassic boundary sections in China show evidence of compression by impact, as well as geochemical shifts indicative of a huge impact - though his data is far from conclusive. All in all, the evidence for an impact at the Permo-Triassic boundary is limited when compared with the mass of evidence for an asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous: the iridium anomaly (a worldwide spike in the abundance of iridium, an element derived from meteorite impacts); shocked quartz (grains showing evidence of high-pressure modification); glassy spherules (melt particles derived from sedimentary rocks); and above all an enormous crater of the correct age. The discovery of a Permian equivalent of any of these could confirm the impact theory at any moment. But for now, most geologists do not accept the impact model for the crisis at the end of the Permian. Instead, their attention has focused on Earth-bound processes. The idea is that massive volcanic eruptions, sustained over half-a-million years or more, caused catastrophic environmental deterioration - poison gas, global warming, stripping of soils and plants from the landscape, eruption of gases from their frozen locations deep in the oceans, and mass deoxygenation. The evidence for this version of events is compelling compared with the impact hypothesis.First and foremost, the end of the Permian was indeed characterised by huge volcanic eruptions. The remains of these are preserved in the Siberian Traps, a vast accumulation of basalt lavas some 3 million cubic kilometres in volume and covering 3.9 million square kilometres of what is now eastern Russia. Precise dating of the Siberian Traps shows that they span the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic, with the eruptions beginning perhaps 500,000 years before. The Siberian Traps were not formed by explosive eruptions from classic cone-shaped volcanoes. More commonly, basalt is erupted through fissures, long cracks in the ground, as happens on Iceland today. Such eruptions last for a long time, and the lava bubbles up in huge volumes, spreading sideways from the fissure. They are accompanied by prodigious outpourings of gases, mostly carbon dioxide. The effect of these gases was devastating. The full story of the havoc they wrought is written in the sedimentary rocks that span the Permo-Triassic boundary. Until the 1990s, geologists had to rely on incomplete or hard-to-date sections in northern Italy, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Reputedly excellent sections in southern China were not available to overseas geologists, mainly for political reasons.Nothing daunted, British geologists Tony Hallam of the University of Birmingham and Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds obtained a modest travel grant from the Royal Society, and went to China in 1991. What they found amazed them: the rock record was complete, and it told the story of the crisis millimetre-by-millimetre as they worked their way through the rocks from bottom to top. Hallam and Wignall focused on sections around the Meishan township. Working up through the succession, the last rocks deposited in the Permian were limestones containing diverse and abundant fossils, such as foraminiferans (microscopic shelled protozoans), brachiopods (lamp shells), and conodonts (jaw elements from primitive fish-like vertebrates). Rarer fossils include cephalopods (coiled molluscs that are distant relatives of the modern squid and octopus), sea urchins, starfish and small crustaceans called ostracods, all typical of warm, shallow seas. Near the top, there is extensive burrowing in the limestones, indicating conditions of full oxygenation. Clearly, life at this time was diverse and abundant. Then, suddenly, everything changes. The thick, burrowed limestones disappear, and with them the abundant fossils. The limestone is capped by a mineral-rich layer containing lots of pyrite - a classic marker of very low atmospheric oxygen. On top of this are three layers of limestone, mudstone and clay, encompassing about half a million years. These layers, numbered as beds 25, 26 and 27 in the Chinese system, tell how the crisis unfolded, so let's look at them in more detail. The oldest layer, bed 25, is a thin band of pale-coloured clay 5 centimetres thick in which fossils are very rare, just a few foraminiferans and conodonts. Under the microscope, this clay contains small iron-rich pellets and decayed pieces of quartz that indicate it was formed from an acidic "tuff", an amalgam of volcanic fragments and ash from an explosive volcanic eruption - presumably the Siberian Traps.The next bed up, number 26, consists of 7 centimetres of dark, organic-rich limey mudstone in which fossils are slightly more abundant - there are brachiopods, clams and cephalopods. Based on the relatively diverse fossils, and on geochemical evidence, oxygen levels during deposition of bed 26 were low but not anoxic.Together, beds 25 and 26 form a distinctive dark-on-light marker band that has been detected elsewhere in China, which is useful for geologists who wish to make correlations from location to location. This "ash band" has been detected so far in 12 provinces throughout China, covering at least a million square kilometres. Whatever created it was extremely far-reaching. Bed 27 indicates some degree of environmental recovery. The 17-centimetre-thick layer of limestone is full of burrows, so bottom conditions were not especially low in oxygen. The lower part of the bed contains occasional Permian brachiopod fossils near the base. Near the top, the conodont Hindeodus parvus appears for the first time: this is the globally accepted marker for the beginning of the Triassic period. (Geological boundaries are marked by the appearance of fossils, not their disappearance. The major event happened at the base of bed 25, but no significant new species appeared until the middle of bed 27.) What does it all mean? One of the stories the Meishan section tells is of a dramatic extinction event. In the late 1990s, Jin Yugan and his colleagues from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, and Doug Erwin from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, undertook a huge sampling programme. They found that at the base of bed 25, 116 marine species suddenly disappeared, representing 94 per cent of the total. Then, in the following 500,000 years stretching to the top of bed 27, new species appear then disappear with alarming speed. Overall a further 45 species dropped out, one at a time. Clearly something terrible happened at the base of bed 25 and its ramifications continued for half a million years. But what exactly happened? Fortunately, the Meishan rock section, and other sections elsewhere, contain a record of environmental changes through the Permo-Triassic crisis, in the form of isotopes of oxygen and carbon. Both elements have two stable, naturally occurring isotopes whose ratios fluctuate depending on environmental conditions. The isotope ratios are locked into the skeletons of organisms during their lifetimes, so careful recordings from the shells of bivalves or foraminiferans, for example, can give a detailed picture of atmospheric and oceanic conditions through time. Oxygen isotopes are used as a palaeothermometer. Oxygen occurs in two forms, oxygen-16 and oxygen-18. These are incorporated into the calcite skeletons of marine creatures at different rates depending on the water temperature, more oxygen-18 at low temperatures, and more oxygen-16 at high. At the base of bed 25, the main mass extinction level, there was a sudden shift in the oxygen isotope ratios indicating a worldwide rise in temperature of 6 °C. This may not sound much, but it would have a profound effect on the world's ecology. Climatologists have been getting very excited recently about a half-a-degree rise in global temperatures.The carbon isotopes suggest what might have caused the temperature increase. They show a massive shift towards the light isotope, carbon-12, exactly at the time of the big extinction. Pulses of carbon-12 in the geological record are usually indicative of a volcanic eruption or a large die-off (plants, animals and bacteria concentrate carbon-12 in their bodies and release it when they die). Both certainly happened at the end of the Permian. But the carbon-12 pulse is far too big to be explained by these mechanisms alone. Calculations of global carbon budgets have suggested that, even if every plant, animal, and microbe died and was buried, altogether they would only account for about one-fifth of the observed carbon shift. The Siberian Traps would have added another fifth. Where did the remaining three-fifths come from? The extra carbon-12 was probably buried, frozen deep under the oceans in the form of gas hydrates. These are extraordinary accumulations of carbon-12-rich methane locked up in cages of ice at very high pressure. If the atmosphere and oceans warm up sufficiently, these gas reserves can suddenly melt and release their contents in a catastrophic way. The explosion of gas through the surface of the oceans has been termed a "methane burp". A very large methane burp at the end of the Permian could have produced enough carbon-12 to make up the deficit. The cause of the burp was probably global warming triggered by huge releases of CO2 from the Siberian Traps. Methane is a greenhouse gas too, so a big burp raises global temperatures even further. Normally, long-term global processes act to bring greenhouse gas levels down. This kind of negative feedback keeps the Earth in equilibrium. But what happens if the release of methane is so huge and fast that normal feedback processes are overwhelmed? Then you have a "runaway greenhouse". This is a positive feedback system: excess carbon in the atmosphere causes warming, the warming triggers the release of more methane from gas hydrates, this in turn causes yet more warming, which leads to the release of more methane and so on. As temperatures rise, species start to go extinct. Plants and plankton die off and oxygen levels plummet. This is what seems to have happened 251 million years ago. The effects were profound and long-lasting. In the Meishan section, the Permo-Triassic boundary in bed 27 is followed by a succession of dark limestones and shales containing sparse fossils. This seems to represent a post-apocalyptic world, in which CO2 levels were still very high and the oceans and atmosphere were starved of oxygen. The 6 per cent of species that survived the initial onslaught were struggling. Normal recovery processes had not yet kicked in. When oxygen levels fall, plants and photosynthesising plankton in the sea normally replenish it by absorbing excess CO2 and generating oxygen. After the crash at the end of the Permian, perhaps oxygen levels had been driven so low, and so much of plant life had been killed, that this was impossible. The surviving species were a very poor sample of what had lived before: thin-shelled molluscs that required very little food and swam languidly over the black, deoxygenated muds, and the "living fossil" Lingula in its shallow burrows. Near the end of the Permian period, each region of the world had its own fauna and flora. Afterwards, the survivors became cosmopolitan. It took 20 or 30 million years for coral reefs to re-establish themselves, and for the forests to regrow. In some settings, it took 50 million years or more for full ecosystem complexity to recover. 13th AUGUST 1966
Few days are linked to historic, nation shattering , events. Here is a brief summary of today's date in 1966 where in China plans were announced "for a new leap forward" after the first meeting in four years of the CPCC. The blueprint unveiled by the committee shows Peking's determination to spread the words of leader Mao Zedong and purge all those "who have followed the path of capitalism". The Central Party said that anti-socialist right-wingers should receive "severe punishment" - but they should also be given a chance to repent and begin a new life. Thirty-five million copies of "The Selected Works of Mao Zedong" were printed and distributed nationwide. ‘Red Guards’ were mobilised; these were bands of radical students who were ordered to destroy the four "olds" in the country, customs, habits, culture and thinking. Colleges were shut so they could concentrate on revolution but the Red Guards began to terrorise almost anyone who stood for authority, attacking teachers and even parents, many of whom were tortured or beaten to death. Altogether some three million people were denounced and tens of thousands died in prison. At the same time Mao removed many of his opponents from within the party and retook absolute control of the party hierarchy. The revolution ended officially only with Mao's death in 1976. Mao's widow Jian Qing, Wang Hongwen, Yao Wenyuan, and Zhang Chunqiao all active proponents, [Perhaps even instigators] of the Cultural Revolution were arrested. By the end of 1978 Deng Xiaoping assumed the title of Premier of China and Chairman of the CCP until 1982. In 1980 the “Gang of Four” were put on trial charged with attempting to overthrow the government, they were sentence to death, which was later commuted to long-term imprisonment.
Was it disappointment ?A Russian tourist caused a security alert last week, when she threw a mug, purchased from the museum gift shop, at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre museum, Paris. The gallery was full of visitors when the woman hurled an empty terracotta mug at the world-famous painting which bounced off the portrait's bullet-proof glass and landed on the floor, smashing into pieces. Following a psychological examination doctors are trying to assess whether she is a sufferer of Stendhal Syndrome: a medical condition that prompts sane individuals to lose control of their actions suddenly and defame a work of art. Believe me if she found the exhibit through the miles of corridors and stairways she was far from being unstable and maybe threw the missile in disappointment. If ever a profession justified its pathetic existence it is psychiatry. Invent an unspellable name and then fool millions of people into a lifetime of drug use!! If these people had any credibility they would all be out of a job – fuelled by success. Like the witchdoctors of old they attempt to mystify us all except the multinational drug companies who, along with their shareholders, are the only beneficiaries. I bet they even have a name for my condition: An inherent dislike of ‘trick cyclists’ gained from personal experience. The Vet
A woman brought a very limp chicken into a veterinary surgery. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest. After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, "I'm so sorry, Cuddles has passed away." The distressed owner wailed, "Are you sure? "Yes, I am sure. The chicken is dead," he replied. "How can you be so sure?" she protested. "I mean, you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something." The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room, and returned a few moments later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the chicken's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the chicken from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head. The vet patted the dog and took it out, and returned a few moments later with a beautiful cat. The cat jumped up on the table and also sniffed delicately at the bird. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead chicken." Then the vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill which he handed to the woman. The chicken's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "£250!", she cried, "£250 just to tell me my chicken is dead?!!" The vet shrugged. "I'm sorry. If you'd taken my word for it, the bill would have been only £50, but what with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan ...." Ahhh. Soooo!
This morning I had the fortune or misfortune , depending on your degree of indoctrination, of reading a piece about creationism. This small Christian cult denounces the theories of Darwin and Einstein as well as other countless “mindless morons” like chaff to the wind. Should I accept their theory this planet came into existence at the blink of a celestial eye, a mere 6,000 years ago. Complete with a full panoply of humans, animals and plants. Then horror of horror someone sinned – nothing specific here but did Adam have his way with a goat? Did Eve pig herself out on strawberries? But whatever, chaos ensued and there was a flood, many species are wiped out, the ones not in the ark I guess. Now I turn to the oldest recorded history of man on this planet – guess where that was – Babylon? No. Palastine? No. South America? No. It was in China. Yes folks Adam and Eve are Chinese. The Emperor Qin’s reign began 6,000 years ago. Qin the founder of china, imperial leader, son of all the gods, builder of the ‘great wall’. Was, I muse, the original sin anything to do with him walling up tens of thousands of people in the foundations of the wall? Was this act so evil in Adam and Eves eyes that they left this “Garden of Eden” and moved, with there progeny, north, east, south and west? Thus multiplying the seed of mankind throughout the world after a catastrophic world wide flood. We do not need supposition or theory to accept the existence of a civilisation in China 6,000 years ago – it is there in writing! Many centuries before the Babylonians gave the likes of Moses the ability to write. Therefore logic tells us that, as the first humans on the planet, Adam and Eve must be Chinese ! Q E D. Happy weekend. ************** THE WORM by Philip Appleman Eyeless in Palastine, earless in Britain,
lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button,
deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit:
nobody gave the worm much credit
till Darwin looked a little closer
at this spaghetti-torsoed loser.
Look, he said, a worm can feel
and taste and touch and learn and smell;
and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers,
and love can turn them into hustlers,
and as to work, their labors are mythic,
small devotees of the Protestant Ethic:
they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland,
south to the rain forests, north to Iceland,
fifty thousand to every acre
guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor,
churning the soil and making it fertile,
earning the thanks of every mortal:
proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms—
his whole existence depends on worms.
So, History, no longer let
the worm’s be an ignoble lot
unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
Moral: even a worm can turn.
JUSTICE WHEREFORE ART THEE ?A Wisconsin man accused of killing his 11-year-old diabetic daughter by praying instead of seeking medical care has been found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide. He should have rushed the girl to a hospital because she could not walk, talk, eat or drink. Instead, the child died on the floor of the family's rural home as people surrounded her and prayed. These people, or accomplices, have a heavy burden on their consciences. Neumann testified that "God promises in the Bible to heal." I am not seeking a theological discussion here but I thought god made the rules and man promised to obey them. From a very rusty memory the childs father has broken at least 2 moral imperatives - " You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your Gods" and "Thou shall not kill." By "stealing" his daughter's life he should therefore forfeit his own. Instead he will be kept a short while at the expense of the american taxpayer - whatever happened to justice ?
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUNRecently, well this morning actually, the hero in a story I am trying to write refused to ‘speak’ to me. I was bored and knew I had a joke awaiting transfer to my “Jokes” file so having done that and put it in a blog – assuming ‘cos I was bored everyone else was, I put in in my blog. Close to that another item awaited despatch to a subject file namely the song “The House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals [c1966]. This single record I must admit far outpoints any other rock record I have heard. The rendition, the words create an atmosphere of sheer perfection.
The Animals recording was made in just one take, during an American tour as the backing group to the legendary Chuck Berry. It was an immediate success and became the band's first big hit, reaching No 1 in the British charts in July 1964. The song went onto be released in America and in August, it topped their singles charts for 3 weeks. That made them the first British group after the Beatles to top the American charts. The group, from Newcastle upon Tyne,comprising Eric Burdon vocals, Chas Chandler bass, Alan Price keyboards, John Steele drums & Hilton Valentine guitar only arranged the version of the song, the history of which stretches from New Orleans, the largest city in Louisiana, to rural medieval England. Burdon has said he thought the chord sequance was "Certainly not American" and that its key suggested it was a derivation of English church music. He later recalled, "I thought it was incredible that women could have such power over men to make them part with their hard earned money in exchange for sex." The song's origins are somewhat curious. The original melody resembles an arrangement of "Matty Groves" a traditional English ballard, but the lyrics appear to have ties to the hills of the american south. Historical sources, including Alan Lomax, point to the ballards origins of classical betrayal and revenge to at least the 17th century ( printed versions appear by 1641, although the song is quoted in a 1611 stage success, "Knight of a burning Pedestal.") In folklore circles the song is considered a variant of "Little Musgrave [Matty Groves] and the Lady Barnard." The earliest published version of "Matty Groves" dates from 1658, but it is believed the song was being printed on broadsheet, possibly as early as 1607. The English version of the tune tells the story of a nobleman's wife seducing Matty Groves, a servant of the master of the house. After catching the lovers in his bed, the nobleman kills Matty and when the Lady chooses dead Matty to her husband, the husband stabs her in the heart. As with many traditional folk tune, the detais vary, but those pointe exist in virtually every rendition of the tune. When the song crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the early pioneer days, Cecil Sharp found many variants thoughout Appalachia. It is toned down somewhat into the folk tune "Shady Grove" which depicts the american frontier life or a gratification of infidelity, depending on the version. In 1943 English composer Benjamin Britton used this folk tune as the basis of a choral work, "The Ballard of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard." In the late 18th and most of the 19th Century, New Orleans was a growing port city, located at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and merchants and sailors who were far away from home were constantly streaming in and out. It is possible that the "House of the Rising Sun" is a metaphor for either the slave pens of the plantation, the plantation house, or the plantation itself, which were the subjects and themes of many traditional blues songs. The phrase "House of the Rising Sun" is understood as a euphemism for a brothel, but it is not known whether or not the house described in the lyrics was an actual or fictitious place. One theory speculates the song is about a daughter who killed her father, an alcoholic gambler who had beaten his wife. Therefore, the House of the Rising Sun may be a jail-house, from which one would be the first person to see the sun rise. Dave van Ronk claimed in his autobiography that he had seen pictures of the old New Orleans Prison for Women, the entrance to which was decorated with a rising sun design. In 1862, during the American Civil War, the Confederate Army in New Orleans surrendered the city and it fell into Union occupation, thus leaving many northern homesick soldiers in want of comfort and entertainment. The guidebook, ‘Bizarre New Orleans’, asserts that the House of the Rising Sun actually existed between 1862 and about 1874 and was run by a Madam Marianne Le Soleil Levant whose name translates from French as "the rising sun". In 1937, Alan Lomax taped a 16-year-old miner’s daughter, Georgia Turner, performing the song in Kentucky: There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. If I had listened what Mama said, I'd be at home today. Go tell my baby sister never do like I have done My mother she's a tailor, she sewed these new blue jeans. The only thing a drunkard needs is a suitcase and a trunk. Fills his glasses to the brim, passes them around. One foot is on the platform and the other one on the train. Going back to New Orleans ,my race is almost run..
The earliest recorded version dates back to 1932 by Clarence 'Tom' Ashley as 'Rising Sun Blues', and it was recorded again in 1934 by The Callahan Brothers as 'Rounder's Luck'. In the 1940s and 1950s, the song went through numerous incarnations, by such notable singers as Josh White, Huddie 'Leadbelly' Ledbetter, Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. Following the definitive Animals version in the 1960s both Joan Baez and Bob Dylan made recordings. The gender of the singer is interchangeable. Earlier versions of the song are often sung from the female perspective, a woman who followed a drunk or a gambler to New Orleans and became a prostitute in the House of the Rising Sun. The Animals version was sung from a perspective of a male, warning about gambling and drinking. Herridge said he thought that 18th and 19th century folk singers in Appalachian regions gave "House of the Rising Sun" a New Orleans flavour because they considered the city an emblem of sin. Did such an establishment exist, to paraphrase Freud: “sometimes lyrics are just lyrics." The Animal’s version: There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy and God I know I'm one. My mother was a tailor, sewed my new blue jeans. My father was a gambling man down in New Orleans. Now the only thing a gambler needs is a suitcase and a trunk. And the only time he's satisfied is when he's on a drunk. Oh mother, tell your children not to do what I have done, spend your lives in sin and misery in the House of the Rising Sun. Well, I got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train. I'm goin' back to New Orleans to wear that ball and chain
the end
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