Look High

Lonely days indeed

Donna Summer, we’ll all ways feel love

RIP, Chuck

Photo: Avie Schneider

RIP Earl Scruggs: The Story Of ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’

More than any other work, Earl Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” established the banjo as the star instrument in bluegrass music. That song is still perhaps best known as the accompanying theme for a pair of roving gangsters in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde.” A bright and quick tune written by a quiet North Carolina country musician that introduced American bluegrass to new audiences around the world.

Earl Scruggs is probably the best-known banjo picker in the world. And even people who don’t know his name know was is called the Scruggs style of playing when they hear it, a crackling, syncopated style in which the player uses the thumb and two fingers fitted with plastic and metal picks to play chords, melody and cascading rolls of notes.

Scruggs recalls that a crisp finger picking style with thumb and forefinger or a thumb and two fingers—similar to classical guitar playing—was the most common way to play the five-string banjo in his western North Carolina hometown. Scruggs remembers when he was four years old going to his uncle’s home and hearing a blind banjo picker named Mack Woolbright.

“He’d sit in the rocking chair, and he’d pick some and it was just amazing,” Scruggs recalls. “I couldn’t imagine—he was the first, what I call a good banjo player.”

Scruggs was hooked. His father—who had recently died—had owned a banjo, and Earl started to play it even before he was big enough to hold it. He started with just the thumb and forefinger, but one day when he was about 10 years old, something new happened.

“Well, my brother and I had been into a fuss with each other,” he remembers, “and I’d gone into a room by myself, and I had the banjo in there. And I was, I guess, pouting. And all of a sudden, I realized I was picking with three fingers. And that excited me to no end. I was playing a tune called ‘Reuben.’ I had the banjo run down in D tuning, playing that. I went running out of the room and there was my brother—so sudden—I came out saying, ‘I got it. I got it. I got it.’” (Paul Brown / The NPR 100 Most Important American Music Works of the 20th Century)

Photo: Tom Pich/National Endowment for the Arts

Stan Stearns dies; captured immortal image at JFK’s funeral

“One exposure on a roll of 36 exposures,” Stan Stearns marveled decades later. The young news photographer, in one instinctive click, captured one of the most poignant and reproduced images of the past half-century: little John F. Kennedy Jr., grief-stricken, saluting his father’s coffin as it rolled by on a caisson. (WaPo)

A bizarre story behind the photo

Hey, hey we’re the Monkees… RIP, Davy Jones

John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean. (NYT)

misscheriebijou:

My childhood was spent dancing, singing and trying to (poorly) match the notes that Whitney hit flawlessly. As a little girl in my bedroom with a ponytail on the side of my head, I thought I was Whitney. It doesn’t matter what takes you from this world, but the memories you created within others, while you were here.

A Life Like An Opera

Janice Voss, Veteran Astronaut, Dies At 55

Astronaut Janice Voss, a veteran of five spaceflights and a former science director for a NASA exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, has died after a battle with cancer.

Chosen by NASA for the astronaut corps in January 1990, Voss served as mission specialist on five space shuttle missions, including the only repeat flight in the shuttle program’s 30-year history. She flew with the first commercial laboratory, rendezvoused with Russia’s Mir space station and helped create the most complete digital topographic map of the Earth.

Voss and her crewmates worked around the clock in two shifts to map more than 47 million square miles of the Earth’s land surface. (Space.com - msnbc.com)

Etta James, RIP

timelightbox:

Eve Arnold: April 12, 1912—January 4, 2012.

“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”—Eve Arnold. See more here.

For Hitchens, In Life And Death, An Unaware Cosmos

—“She says, ‘This is an excellent thing and proof of the glory of God… And I sat there in my little corduroy shorts, and I thought, that’s absolute nonsense.”

—He produced a documentary about Mother Teresa called Hell’s Angel and a book in 1995, The Missionary Position…

—The disease marked a new stage in Hitchens’ public atheism… “Under no persuasion could I be made to believe that a human sacrifice several thousand years ago vicariously redeems me from sin. Nothing could persuade me that that was true — or moral, by the way. It’s white noise to me.” (NPR)

Photo: Twelve

bbook:

RIP Jerry Robinson, creator of the Joker

Harley tears.

George Harrison: Feb. 5, 1943 – Nov. 29, 2001

(Source: ladiesandgentlementhebeatles)