Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The C&W star is cosmopolitan, taking the world’s time zones as his own.
Alan Jackson meets Margarittaville:
I’m gettin’ paid by the hour, an’ older by the minute.
My boss just pushed me over the limit.
I’d like to call him somethin’,
I think I’ll just call it a day.
Pour me somethin’ tall an’ strong,
Make it a “Hurricane” before I go insane.
It’s only half-past twelve but I don’t care.
It’s five o’clock somewhere.
(“It’s five o’clock somewhere“)
Weekly Wit & Wisdom from Country & Western:
Thank you for a life that I’d call happy
Overlooking all that we’ve been through
When it comes to loving I’ve been lucky
Everything I am I owe to you
The speeches from Camelot were riveting, even on a small black and white screen, as Richard Burton recited them, sitting in a quiet spotlight beside Dick Cavett. Julie Andrews seemed made to show us what England and youth and the lusty month of May were all about. But holding his own with them was the darkly handsome Robert Goulet – born in Massachusetts but of French Canadian stock and apparently perfectly cast. Indeed, to many of us who never set foot in a Broadway theater, Robert Goulet remained Lancelot. The mere shadows of what these three must have been in person, they could still ground the stage of Ed Sullivan and the other great variety shows of the fifties and sixties. But if Burton’s quiet reading deepened the shadows on Cavett, Goulet’s voice filled the speakers on our old tv sets that were only capable of hinting at his power.
Forty years later, his voiceovers endear him to our grand children. And older, we laugh with him, as Goulet‘s loose humor enriched commercials for ESPN and Emerald Nuts. The romantic lead matured and he charmed with the quirky humor of his guest spot on Police Squad! and then Naked Gun with fellow Canadian Leslie Neilson. At 73, that great baritone has died, waiting on a lung transplant. But to many of my generation he remains the dashing and seductive knight, his eyes following Burton, betraying the complexity of admiration and the difficulty of restraint.
YouTube houses Goulet’s moving rendition of another of the great classics of the high water decade in musical theater -the “Soliloquy” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.
(And perhaps the juxtaposition of Porter Wagoner and Robert Goulet, of T. H. White and Dolly Parton, of Zucker and Hee Haw! might hint at the rich hybrids that grew from Albion’s seed planted on our shore.)
The old gospel songs seem right on occasions like this; here is Wagoner with the Willis Brothers doing I’ll Fly Away.
After eighty years, fifty of them on the Grand Ole Opry, Porter Wagoner has died. Tom Spaulding eulogizes: “He lived the life, sang about the life, and he went down swinging.” That life was full of hits; this year’s album, Wagonmaster is reviewed here. CMT notes that: “Porter Wagoner, the Thin Man from the West Plains, is a case of an artist often ahead of his time who has always appeared hopelessly behind the times.” And here’s Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.”
For this (and so much else) I’m indebted to the husband I found in the days of Dripping Springs. He introduced me to the music of those tough old singers who perform – writing, singing, playing – until they die because they want to – and because they have to. Impelled by whatever lies in that hard stubborn core within, they have to be who they are – in Nudie suits, maybe, but always, really, themselves: authentic sounds and authentic words clothed in sequins and huge belt buckles.
I’ll be hanging around the house, doing some cleaning and practicing my hip hop tunes…
