This one goes back half a millennium. It's been sung in Gothic cathedrals and country churches. These days it's a favorite with Bluegrass groups. There are many, many different versions, but always at the heart is this story:
Joseph and Mary walked through an orchard green They saw berries and saw cherries fair to be seen As Joseph and Mary walked in the wood They saw cherries and berries red as any blood
Oh, then bespoke Mary so meek and so mild "Pluck me one cherry for I am with child" Oh, then bespoke Joseph with words unkind "Let him pluck thee a cherry that brought thee with child"
Oh, then bespoke the babe within his mother's womb "Bow down you tall tree and give my mother some" Then bowed down the cherry tree to his mother's hand Then she cried "See, Joseph, I have cherries at command"
A wonderful little story, barely a hundred words. Always embedded in standard doctrinal lessons, no doubt to allay any misgivings the parish priest or minister might have, but a nice, funny little story about human nature. A joke, in fact.
Its scant three verses are full of humorous tropes. Not refined humor, either, but earthy, farm-and-village stuff:
The old man who marries a young wife
Pregnant women with odd food cravings
“Cherry” as slang for virginity
The jealous husband who thinks he's been cuckolded
And that old favorite, “Be careful what you wish for . . .”
Nor is the story itself particularly refined:
Mary picks the breeziest, most flippant way to tell Joseph the news: “Get me a cherry, honey – I'm pregnant.”
Joseph replies with sharp sarcasm: “Whoever got you pregnant can get you your damn cherry.”
Jesus thinks, “Whoa, dude – that's how you talk to my mother? Watch this!”
God, no doubt chuckling in His beard, delivers the punchline.
And Mary can't resist a last little dig: “Oh, look, Joseph – cherries!”
So every character in the story, including God, is a wise-ass. Which means that every character in the story, including God, is acting distinctly human.
The Electric
Prunes released Mass in F Minor in 1968. It didn't
attract a lot of attention. It got a little bump when the film Easy
Rider used the Kyrie for
the acid-dropping
scene, then it sank into relative obscurity. I liked it then,
and still do. I'm a sucker for the West Coast Psychedelic sound.
I like
that they decided to do it straight, take it seriously, without irony; to just compose a mass for their time and place. Old wine in new bottles, to twist the parable.
Doing
this post, it occurred to me to wonder how that one little snippet of
Greek, the Kyrie,
wound up in the Latin Mass. I did some research . . . and I'm still
wondering. The answer seems to be, "Well, that's just the way it
happened."
Lately I have sort of become addicted to Pandora. I might have posted about this before. In fact I know I posted that video about Three Dog Night before. Anyhoo I use Pandora all the time. I put it on while I am cooking or writing or just sitting around. It soothes me and lets me relax as I multitask. I had always had music on in the background to smooth off the rough edges.
I wanted to put Three Dog Night on because I had been nostalgic as usual. Listening to them makes me think of the old days of the 1960's when I used to listen to top 40 on WABC AM radio. That was long before the free form hippie dippy FM radio like WNEW and WPLJ became the "cool" radio to listen too later in the decade. WABC played the same twenty songs over and over. Three Dog Night. Grand Funk Railroad. Cher. The Monkees. And these guys:
They had all the old DJ's spinning the hits. Dan Ingram. Dan Daniel. Of course Cousin Brucie. He was so famous he had a guy who sold beer at Yankee Stadium who copied him and called himself Cousin Brewski. They were the soundtrack of your life.
What is funny is when I programed a station with Three Dog Night I didn't get any of those bands. Instead I got Led Zeppelin and the Jefferson Airplane. If I wanted that I would have programed that. Instead I guess they lump everything together in the genre of "classic rock." I wanted easy listening frothy bubble gum rock and I got that stuff. What a pain in the ass. I didn't want to think about getting a Stairway to Heaven. I just wanted to be a Day Dream Believer.
When we were growing up, Dad said we couldn't go barefoot until May 29, his mother's birthday. I thought it was an arbitrary, fun rule he'd come up with, and only in the last few years found out it was a rule in his family when he was growing up.
"Thirteen" is a song by the American rock band Big Star. Rolling Stone describes it "one of rock's most beautiful celebrations of adolescence", and rated it #406 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. It was written by Alex Chilton and Chris Bell.
Bill Janovitz of Buffalo Tom writes in his Allmusic review of the song, "There are few songs that capture the aching innocence of adolescence as well" and calls it a "perfect melancholy ballad". The song encompasses folk and pop characteristics with its use of simple lyrics and the acoustic guitar.
The song was originally featured on the 1972 album #1 Record. It was never released as a single by Big Star.
The site of the first telephone exchange was granted a designation as a National Historic Landmark on 23 April 1965. However it was withdrawn in 1973 in order to demolish the building and construct a parking garage.
