Happy Birthday, Bob

https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2024/05/24/may-24-in-music-history-happy-birthday-bob-dylan

It’s the birthday of Bob Dylan (books by this author), born Robert Zimmerman in 1941. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Hibbing, just off the road that ran all the way up from New Orleans and lent its name to his sixth album, 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited. He moved down to Minneapolis and studied art at the University of Minnesota, and though he’d started out his musical career with a rock ‘n’ roll band, he soon converted to folk, playing gigs at a coffeehouse, the 10 O’clock Scholar, in the Dinkytown neighborhood north of campus. Rock was catchy, but it wasn’t deep enough to satisfy him, and he later said: “I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” He left Dinkytown for New York and became the darling of Greenwich Village’s folk community.

By the mid-1960s, he’d gone electric, forsaking folk and returning to his rock roots. It wasn’t a popular move among his fans, and at a show in England they booed him and called him “Judas.” He responded by cranking the amps even louder, never one to worry about a rapport with his audience.

His lyrics evolved too, from protest songs into more literary undertakings, influenced by Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and John Keats (to say nothing of Dylan Thomas, who inspired Zimmerman’s name change). He’s been called one of America’s great contemporary poets, and his lyrics are studied in college poetry classes, stripped of the music. Boston University lecturer Kevin Barents directs students to consider the iambic and ballad meter on Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding.

Oxford professor Christopher Ricks puts him on a par with Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. He’s been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature every year since 1996. He wrote a volume of poetry and prose called Tarantula

in 1966 (published in 1971), even though he had famously proclaimed himself “a song-and-dance man” in 1965, when asked outright if he was a songwriter or a poet; The New Yorker published two of his poems from that period in 2008. Perhaps it’s best to draw the distinction where he did, in the liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem.”

He’s also kept up with his art, drawing and painting to fill the time when he’s on the road. Some critics compare his style to Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Matisse. Others say he is “spasmodically brilliant,” and one art history professor said he “paints like any other amateur.” The artist himself says, in his typically laconic style: “I just draw what’s interesting to me and then I paint it. Rows of houses, orchard acres, lines of tree trunks, could be anything. I can turn it into a life and death drama.”
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F05%252F24.html

Happy Birthday Jimmy

Many Georgians ‘back in the day’ said they would never live long enough to see a human walk on the moon. No Georgian thought they would ever live to see a native born Georgian become President of the United States of America.

Some Presidents leave office with a high approval rating but are not treated kindly by historians. For other Presidents it is the reverse. Jimmy Carter belongs in the latter category.

I have only met one POTUS and that was Jimmy Carter. He looked me in the eye and gripped my hand firmly. When Jimmy Carter shakes your hand you know it has been shook.

It’s the birthday of Jimmy Carter (books by this author), born in Plains, Georgia (1924), the first American president to be born in a hospital. He grew up in a house where everyone brought a book to the dinner table and then the family sat there together at dinner eating and reading in silence. He started selling boiled peanuts from a red wagon by the side of the road when he was six, around the same age that he started winning all sorts of prizes for being the top reader in his rural grade school.

He played basketball in high school, joined the Future Farmers of America club, and went off to the United States Naval Academy where he taught Sunday school to the officer’s kids and graduated 59th in his class of 820. While in the Navy he did graduate work in nuclear physics. Then, after his dad died, he left the Navy and took over the family peanut farming business. For awhile, he was a wealthy peanut farmer.

He became governor of Georgia, but he wasn’t very well known around the nation, and when he first threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic primaries of the 1976 presidential election, only 2 percent of Americans recognized his name. When he told his mom he was going to run for president, she replied, “President of what?”

He decided he would write a book to help the nation know who he was and where he was coming from and what he stood for — a candidate autobiography. He wrote it on the campaign trail, scribbling paragraphs on yellow notepads during airplane rides and in hotels. He took it to a bunch of small publishers in Georgia but they all rejected the manuscript. Finally he convinced a small press in Nashville that specialized in Southern Baptist books to publish his book. After he won the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries that book — Why Not the Best? (1975) — sold about a million copies. It has since been reissued.

Carter defeated Gerald Ford and took office during an energy crisis. He wore sweaters and told Americans to turn down the heat. In one of his last acts in office he signed a House Bill bailing out a failing American car company, the Chrysler Corporation.

When he got back to Georgia he found that his farm, which he placed in a blind trust upon election, was suddenly a million dollars in debt. He sold the farm and then, to make ends meet and save their home, he and Rosalynn each signed separate book contracts to write memoirs.

He sat down and wrote for eight to 10 hours a day, drawing on diaries he kept while in the Oval office, typewritten notes that amounted to 6,000 pages. When he could not stand sitting down at the typewriter anymore he went to his woodworking shop and made furniture — things like tables and chairs and cabinets. He ended up with more than 30 pieces of furniture in the time in took him to write that first post-presidential book, which was published in 1982 as Keeping Faith.

He’s now the author of about two dozen books, including An Hour Before Daylight: Memoirs of a Rural Boyhood (2001), Our Endangered Values (2005), Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006), A Remarkable Mother (2008), and Beyond the White House (2008).

He likes to fly-fish and ride his bicycle. He continues to teach Sunday school. He reads just about every new book written about the U.S. presidency. He adores poet Dylan Thomas and has read two dozen biographies about the man. He writes his own poetry now. In 2002 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He said:

“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-october-1-2021/

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