Happy Independence Day!

I finished watching HBO’s John Adams miniseries this past week, having read the David McCullough best-seller on which it’s based. The miniseries was very well done, although it stuck with Adams and his story rather than portraying the events America was experiencing at the time. Paul Giamatti’s performance as Adams made the patriot very human, and the film showed that Abigail Adams (Laura Linney) was her husband’s best friend and counsel. Characters so well known to history students wander in and out of the tale: Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Adams, and John Quincy Adams among them. At …

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Condensed Milk

My Dad told me a great story this weekend. When he and his brother were kids (late 1920s), they would visit a nearby neighbor, an old pioneer living in a shack in the woods, who was excited to have their help to set his bear trap. The trap was so huge that the man couldn’t stand on each toothed side and set the trigger in the middle. So he’d have the kids stand on one side while he stood on the other and set the trap. Apparently, nothing fatal occurred to any two-legged mammal as a result. As a reward, …

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Country Music Reclamation Project: Sing Me Back Home

Merle Haggard used his experience as a prison inmate to create some of country music’s best story songs — Mama Tried, I’m A Lonesome Fugitive, Branded Man — which may have made his 1957 arrest for armed robbery worth the while. At his best, Haggard deftly combined a crime writer’s stark depictions of criminal life with the pathos he hoped his real-life experience would generate. Sing Me Back Home was the title song to his 1968 LP. By that point, Haggard had had a remarkable run, with (From Now On, All My Friends are Going to be) Strangers, Sing a …

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