One of the moments that sticks most in my memory is seeing a mother holding a newborn baby—her eighth child—watching her oldest daughter, the daughter she dropped out of high school in order to have, prepare to graduate. “This is a special day for her, but it is a special day for me too,” the mom said. And then, just before the graduation ceremony, her mother came up to me and said, “I have three grandchildren graduating today.”

The grandmother grew up in Granger but, she said, “I was never able to get an education.” She wanted very much to finish school but, she said, “When my father died, all my dreams were gone.” Her father died when she was eleven, which is when she began her life in the fields picking potatoes, apples, cherries, and hops. Only two of her children graduated from high school, but she is hoping and praying that all sixteen of her grandchildren not only graduate but go to college. This spring the oldest three graduated.

Her grandchildren were lucky enough to go to a high school where the faculty believe that their students are capable of great things, the least of which is that they should graduate from high school. The faculty have worked hard to improve instruction, establish a nice atmosphere, and make sure that any student who needs help gets it. But, as Richard Esparza (pictured here), the principal who led the improvements, says, “it begins with the belief system”—that is, everyone in schools like Granger needs to believe that their students are capable of achieving.

There’s a big story to be told about Granger, but to get a little sense of it, here’s an op-ed piece I wrote that was published in the June 29 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 

You can also read a story about it in my book, It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007).

Information, Please!

Its master of ceremonies was the warm and witty Clifton Fadiman (right), literary editor of the New Yorker magazine and a longtime member of Britannica’s Board of Editors. His amusing three-member panel of savants routinely included Franklin P. Adams, the popular newspaper columnist, Shakespeare expert, and member of the fashionable Algonquin Round Table of New York writers; John Kieran, the amazing Bronx-accented sportswriter, linguist and Latinist, botanist and bird-lover, and master reciter of Western poetry; and Oscar Levant, pianist, composer, actor, raconteur, and all-around wit. Fadiman and his brain trust would often be joined by a special guest panelist, usually a famous writer, political leader, or Hollywood star. Throughout World War II, the popular show broadcast from cities across the United States, selling millions of dollars of War Bonds in the process.

The program was also hailed for its integrity, as explained in the PBS documentary “The American Experience: The Rise of TV Quiz Shows“:

One of the most popular and intelligent shows was “Information, Please,” which called on the audience to send in questions to stump a panel of experts. The show aired for 14 years, until its finale in 1952, and was noteworthy not only for its success, but for its integrity. At the time, radio programs made their way on air in two ways. They were underwritten by big name sponsors, who were expected to be involved with the show, or they were funded by individual producers, making them self-sufficient. Dan Golenpaul, the producer for “Information, Please,” earned kudos when he fired the Reynolds Tobacco Company, which had run a series of untruthful commercials and also demanded that panelists on the show smoke its cigarettes.

The opportunity to win a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for stumping the experts was an offer instituted shortly after the program went on the air, and it was an immediate hit with the public.  Within weeks of advertising the offer, mail to the radio show skyrocketed from 6,000 letters a week to more than 20,000.  Britannica salesmen, however, did encounter one problem: some prospective customers were now delaying their purchase of the encyclopedia because they hoped to win a set by appearing on the show.  To combat this, Britannica promised full cash refunds if, within three months, any purchaser of a print set won an Information, Please! prize, and this promise was maintained throughout Britannica’s long affiliation with the program.  Exactly 1,366 sets of the encyclopedia were given away to listeners of the show.

The Britannica Blog is proud to highlight one of these broadcasts each Friday.  So, “Wake Up!”—as the show’s announcer would say at the start of each broadcast. “It’s Time to Stump the Experts!”

Click here and enjoy the show!

Today’s special guest: Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (right).

*          *          *

For thousands of other classic radio broadcasts, visit Ken Varga’s ”Old Time Radio Network Library,” where he offers links to more than 12,000 free shows.

That’s the story of country, but only in part. Country music has traceable folk origins, but, like all folk music, it comes from everywhere, a magpie borrowing from every style it comes into contact with: Tin Pan Alley, the blues, jazz, polka, classical—and, particularly in recent years, the most syrupy of bubblegum pop.

Country has also long been a big business as much as an art form, with recording corporations such as Columbia, Sony, and RCA capturing a large share of the country market and, in the bargain, often treating performers as hired hands who are told what to play and when. Easy-listening, string-drenched pop country was one result, and the “outlaw” sound of the 1970s the predictable reaction, giving rise—and, in some instances, second careers—to such roots-inclined players as Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver, and Ray Wylie Hubbard. Some of the artists who stayed within the system, such as George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Vince Gill, managed to maintain a small degree of independence; others, such as Randy Travis, did not, illustrating along the way that country becomes something other than country when it goes chasing after a buck and becomes product rather than art.

But that is what happened once the big labels began to manufacture stars and songs. By the beginning of the 1980s, when the film Urban Cowboy took over where disco left off, country was thoroughly tamed and commercialized, the charts full of mere pop singers by another name. The genre, Colin Escott writes in his book Lost Highway, “had finally won its mass audience, but what had it lost? Its strangeness and its soul, perhaps.” In a field dominated by Garth Brooks, who might as well have been Michael Jackson; by pinups like Faith Hill and Shania Twain; by Clear Channel radio and songs written by committee, the soul indeed left the body. And audiences responded by fleeing in droves, reducing country’s share of music sales from 18.7 percent in 1993 to 10.5 percent in 2000.

Yet something wonderful happened in the latter year, when the quirky Joel and Ethan Coen film O Brother, Where Art Thou? introduced a new audience to the likes of Ralph Stanley and the Carter Family. Stanley sang his haunting “O Death” at the 2002 Grammy Awards, freshly signed to a major label that had earlier dropped him for being old-fashioned, while Johnny Cash and Steve Earle released new albums and other country rebels and outcasts came in from the cold.

Dolly Parton, a safely commercial but brilliant singer and songwriter, even released a bluegrass album, which must have made her record-company handlers crazy.

Listeners returned, and new ones arrived—only now they were listening to Americana, community-radio, and public-radio stations whose playlists were open to old-timers such as Cash, Jennings, and Merle Haggard, as well as younger voices such as Kelly Willis, Robbie Fulks, Victoria Williams, Gillian Welch, Rosie Flores, Dave Alvin, Tom Russell, and Lucinda Williams and a host of “alt-country” bands such as the Drive-By Truckers, Son Volt, and Uncle Tupelo.

Quintessentially American but popular in such seemingly unlikely venues as Japan and Finland, country music continues to change with the times, as it always has; it’s just a little harder to find the real thing on the airwaves these days. When you hear the wail of a pedal steel or a mountaineer’s yodel, you’re on the right track.

Happy trails!

In another slice of the electorate, there are some angry evangelical voters (also mostly white), who have noted that the current Bush Administration, of which they were supportive and helped to elect, has used them for electoral advantage without fulfilling many promises. These same voters are not enthusiastic about the pending nomination of Senator McCain as the Republican standard bearer. They were much more excited about the candidacy of Governor Mike Huckabee. Senator Barack Obama and his campaign are doing significant outreach within the evangelical community to entice some of these disgruntled evangelical voters to move towards Obama.

Five months out from Election Day it is hard to know exactly what voters will do—especially voters who are considered in some ways “undecided”—but there is some interesting research about the potential for shifting among angry or disgruntled voters.

Scholars studying political psychology have concluded that the angry voter is a potentially swing voter. According to many of these scholars (George Marcus, Ted Brader, W. Russell Neuman, Michael Mackuen, etc.), enthusiastic voters are more likely to continue their established habit and vote for the same individual or party that they previously voted for or supported. Whereas the voter who has become anxious or angry during the political process—anxious because of some of the issues that have been raised or the way in which they have been raised; angry because they are unsatisfied with their options or they do not like the current state of affairs or the direction that the country or party is following, etc.—is more open to considering other options, options outside of their normal habit. Marcus, Neuman and Mackuen explain (in Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment) that “anxious voters are more open minded for having set aside their dispositions.”

Thus, in both the Obama and McCain camps, there are efforts to present acceptable options to these potentially swing voters, since they are, right now, more open to persuasion. At the same time, both camps are working on keeping these potentially defecting voters in their camp. According to the research, the best way to either attract these voters or to keep them on your side is to identify “solutions, interests, and the discussion of goals and the best means to achieve [those goals.]” 

The two campaigns have their work cut out for them—but if one side or the other can figure out how to keep their defecting voters with them, and can attract these potentially swing voters, that is likely the winning strategy.

Whether the maid kept her job, we do not know. But by all accounts, Merian Cooper was a man who seemed bent on racking up the life experiences of any dozen lesser souls, and yet treated his slower-moving brethren with due courtesy—the occasional communist or suspected fellow traveler aside.

Cooper’s life might make a film to put the Indiana Jones franchise to shame. He came from a Southern family that admired martial courage above all else; an ancestor had fought alongside the Polish cavalryman Kazimierz Pulaski in the Revolutionary War, and an old Confederate colonel who lived down the street told tales of fighting against Apaches and Yankees and Abyssinians, the last “the best soldier in the whole round world.”

Those tales proved influential. After service as an ace pilot in World War I—and spending time in a prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped—Cooper went off to volunteer for service with the Polish air force against the invading Bolsheviks. He was again captured and removed to the Soviet Union, where an American journalist who just also happened to be a spy helped his cause. That spy, Marguerite Harrison, was eventually caught—denounced to the Soviets by none other than Louise Bryant, to whom Diane Keaton lent such angelic visage in Warren Beatty’s film Reds.

Again Cooper escaped, and now he was ready for real adventure. He did a stint as a writer for the New York Times but, as Mark Vaz writes in his biography Living Dangerously, he “had other goals than to live out his life as an eyewitness and scribe to the ‘dingy horror’ of the news trade.” His head full of visions of a favorite novel, A. W. Mason’s Four Feathers, he made off for Abyssinia, met with the emperor, headed for the Andaman Islands and Borneo, and learned his way around a camera. Now in the company of budding filmmaker Ernest Shoedsack and Ms. Harrison, who had managed to get out of Russia, Cooper traveled to the Iranian desert to make what might be thought of as the first Discovery Channel film, a documentary of nomadic life called Grass.

The film, now on the National Film Registry, was a hit, as was a successor called Chang, its elephant stampede providing stock footage for many a jungle film to come. Then, after shooting his beloved Four Feathers, starring a young Fay Wray, Cooper showed a newly jobless producer named David O. Selznick a strange and immodest script for a film with a filmmaker hero who journeys off to the wilds and returns with the biggest ape the world had ever seen.

The film that resulted was King Kong, and with it all Hollywood was Cooper’s.

He made hay with that 1933 movie, which took filmgoers’ minds off the Great Depression and transported them into a world the likes of which they had never seen. With the capital thus accrued, he made other films as well, teaming up with John Ford as producer for a 20-year run of classics including The Lost Patrol, Fort Apache, and The Quiet Man and with Schoedsack for another strange gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young, which gave a technician named Ray Harryhausen (who turned 88 last Sunday, and to whom we send birthday greetings) his first big break. Somehow, along the way, Cooper stole time enough to help found studios, production houses, and even a couple of airlines while roaming the war zones of the world.

Was Carl Denham, the showman lead of King Kong, Merian Cooper’s alter ego? Toward the end of his life, Cooper set to work on an autobiography that answered the question; he called it I’m King Kong. Seventy-five years after the birth of that great film, Merian Cooper, a filmmaker unlike any other, deserves remembrance and homage.

Watch the original trailer to King Kong below.

Whether the maid kept her job, we do not know. But by all accounts, Merian Cooper was a man who seemed bent on racking up the life experiences of any dozen lesser souls, and yet treated his slower-moving brethren with due courtesy—the occasional communist or suspected fellow traveler aside.

Cooper’s life might make a film to put the Indiana Jones franchise to shame. He came from a Southern family that admired martial courage above all else; an ancestor had fought alongside the Polish cavalryman Kazimierz Pulaski in the Revolutionary War, and an old Confederate colonel who lived down the street told tales of fighting against Apaches and Yankees and Abyssinians, the last “the best soldier in the whole round world.”

Those tales proved influential. After service as an ace pilot in World War I—and spending time in a prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped—Cooper went off to volunteer for service with the Polish air force against the invading Bolsheviks. He was again captured and removed to the Soviet Union, where an American journalist who just also happened to be a spy helped his cause. That spy, Marguerite Harrison, was eventually caught—denounced to the Soviets by none other than Louise Bryant, to whom Diane Keaton lent such angelic visage in Warren Beatty’s film Reds.

Again Cooper escaped, and now he was ready for real adventure. He did a stint as a writer for the New York Times but, as Mark Vaz writes in his biography Living Dangerously, he “had other goals than to live out his life as an eyewitness and scribe to the ‘dingy horror’ of the news trade.” His head full of visions of a favorite novel, A. W. Mason’s Four Feathers, he made off for Abyssinia, met with the emperor, headed for the Andaman Islands and Borneo, and learned his way around a camera. Now in the company of budding filmmaker Ernest Shoedsack and Ms. Harrison, who had managed to get out of Russia, Cooper traveled to the Iranian desert to make what might be thought of as the first Discovery Channel film, a documentary of nomadic life called Grass.

The film, now on the National Film Registry, was a hit, as was a successor called Chang, its elephant stampede providing stock footage for many a jungle film to come. Then, after shooting his beloved Four Feathers, starring a young Fay Wray, Cooper showed a newly jobless producer named David O. Selznick a strange and immodest script for a film with a filmmaker hero who journeys off to the wilds and returns with the biggest ape the world had ever seen.

The film that resulted was King Kong, and with it all Hollywood was Cooper’s.

He made hay with that 1933 movie, which took filmgoers’ minds off the Great Depression and transported them into a world the likes of which they had never seen. With the capital thus accrued, he made other films as well, teaming up with John Ford as producer for a 20-year run of classics including The Lost Patrol, Fort Apache, and The Quiet Man and with Schoedsack for another strange gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young, which gave a technician named Ray Harryhausen (who turned 88 last Sunday, and to whom we send birthday greetings) his first big break. Somehow, along the way, Cooper stole time enough to help found studios, production houses, and even a couple of airlines while roaming the war zones of the world.

Was Carl Denham, the showman lead of King Kong, Merian Cooper’s alter ego? Toward the end of his life, Cooper set to work on an autobiography that answered the question; he called it I’m King Kong. Seventy-five years after the birth of that great film, Merian Cooper, a filmmaker unlike any other, deserves remembrance and homage.

Watch the original trailer to King Kong below.

Songs, I mean. I’m no true student of music, not even of popular music, so what follows is the result of my own inconsistent observations. I’ll be happy to be better informed by commenters.

It’s a commonplace to think of the early 20^th century as the glory days of the popular song. Created for the musical comedy and variety stages, nurtured by such impresarios as Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, and later disciplined by the procrustean 78 rpm phonograph record, the American popular song went forth to conquer much of the world. The men, and a few women, who wrote the music and words became and remain – or do they remain? – household names: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, and all the rest.

World War II must be unique among the wars of humanity, recalled almost as much for the music of those years as for the actual business of fighting. Or does it seem so only because it is still within living memory, along with having had the benefit of mass produced recordings? Discuss.

But it seems as though sometime in the 1950s the golden age of songwriting came to a quiet close. There were still songwriters of talent and taste, but they were certainly fewer and farther between and often they seem to have been favored by small cliques of admirers rather than by the generality. I’m thinking of the likes of Leonard Cohen here.

Was it rock ‘n’ roll and the triumph of the drumset? Maybe. But what about jazz? Since the late 1920s jazz musicians had grown to favor popular songs, finding infinite ways to play in and around familiar melodies. But in the immediate postwar years jazz began to turn away from the pops in favor of unorthodox harmonies and structures. Many bebop pieces, and a great many more jazz “songs” since that time, consist of a riff rather than a melody, the riff serving as a starting and ending figure, while in between the emphasis was on increasingly free solo work.

You may have had occasion to hear an elevator-music rendition of some classic rock song and noticed how the arranger struggled and failed to keep it interesting through three choruses. It makes for painful listening. The great majority of pop songs of the last fifty years have to be heard in the original or not at all. Not so with the best of the Beatles. Surely one of the primary reasons that the Beatles hold such an eminent place among contemporary popular musicians is that they, meaning chiefly John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had a strong sense of melody and wrote songs that could be played, sung, and listened to with pleasure by others.

Current music I hardly know at all, and what I hear grates. But this is hardly different from my parents’ reaction to rock ‘n’ roll in the ‘50s (although Mom did think Ricky Nelson was kinda cute). So I’m in no position to make a knowledgeable judgment of it. But, if I’m not mistaken, melody continues to be a rara avis.

Is the pop song dead? And if it is, what killed it? I have a nasty suspicion that the answer may be “art,” as in what it is that virtually every individual musical performer now evidently believes he or she is doing.

Songs, I mean. I’m no true student of music, not even of popular music, so what follows is the result of my own inconsistent observations. I’ll be happy to be better informed by commenters.

It’s a commonplace to think of the early 20^th century as the glory days of the popular song. Created for the musical comedy and variety stages, nurtured by such impresarios as Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, and later disciplined by the procrustean 78 rpm phonograph record, the American popular song went forth to conquer much of the world. The men, and a few women, who wrote the music and words became and remain – or do they remain? – household names: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, and all the rest.

World War II must be unique among the wars of humanity, recalled almost as much for the music of those years as for the actual business of fighting. Or does it seem so only because it is still within living memory, along with having had the benefit of mass produced recordings? Discuss.

But it seems as though sometime in the 1950s the golden age of songwriting came to a quiet close. There were still songwriters of talent and taste, but they were certainly fewer and farther between and often they seem to have been favored by small cliques of admirers rather than by the generality. I’m thinking of the likes of Leonard Cohen here.

Was it rock ‘n’ roll and the triumph of the drumset? Maybe. But what about jazz? Since the late 1920s jazz musicians had grown to favor popular songs, finding infinite ways to play in and around familiar melodies. But in the immediate postwar years jazz began to turn away from the pops in favor of unorthodox harmonies and structures. Many bebop pieces, and a great many more jazz “songs” since that time, consist of a riff rather than a melody, the riff serving as a starting and ending figure, while in between the emphasis was on increasingly free solo work.

You may have had occasion to hear an elevator-music rendition of some classic rock song and noticed how the arranger struggled and failed to keep it interesting through three choruses. It makes for painful listening. The great majority of pop songs of the last fifty years have to be heard in the original or not at all. Not so with the best of the Beatles. Surely one of the primary reasons that the Beatles hold such an eminent place among contemporary popular musicians is that they, meaning chiefly John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had a strong sense of melody and wrote songs that could be played, sung, and listened to with pleasure by others.

Current music I hardly know at all, and what I hear grates. But this is hardly different from my parents’ reaction to rock ‘n’ roll in the ‘50s (although Mom did think Ricky Nelson was kinda cute). So I’m in no position to make a knowledgeable judgment of it. But, if I’m not mistaken, melody continues to be a rara avis.

Is the pop song dead? And if it is, what killed it? I have a nasty suspicion that the answer may be “art,” as in what it is that virtually every individual musical performer now evidently believes he or she is doing.

It is a truism in national campaigns that the most deadly attack is the one that goes unanswered.  Clinton understood this, and in his first presidential campaign his organization made it a point to respond immediately and comprehensively to every charge made by the Bush campaign.  Bush’s charges were never able to gain serious traction, and Clinton was able to focus most of his efforts on offense rather than defense and rebuttal.  It was smart, and it worked.

Obama seems to be taking this to the next level, establishing a venue where supporters can post examples of rumors, innuendoes, and charges that are making their way around the political world–either overtly as part of news stories or more covertly through the mysterious ways of cyber space.  Obama’s campaign has pledged to offer the “truth” along with “the smear,” and indeed has already done so regarding charges made by Rush Limbaugh that there is a tape showing Michelle Obama using the word “whitey” in church; that Barack Obama is hiding his birth certificate; that he is a Muslim; and so on. 

This is unprecedented, as no campaign that I know of has ever been so bold about publishing both the charges and the rebuttal. Visitors to the site can read all about the “lies,” as well as the “truth,” and can click on the “spread the truth” link which allows them to forward both to any email addresses they choose–and to do so with the assurance that the campaign doesn’t store or use those addresses.  Visitors to the site can contribute evidence of charges, thus allowing the campaign to use the net awareness of its supporters to keep track of rumors.

It seems to me to be a brilliant tactic.  It is consistent with his “new kind of politics” claims; it allows for—and indeed depends upon—voter participation; it enables his campaign to label all such charges as “smears,” and to rebut them. The only potential downside is that it risks spreading the rumors even while denying them (AdWatch is susceptible to the same problem).  But even then, it seems to be the bet possible response to the viral rumors that can spread with devastating effect over the net. 

It will be interesting to see if and how fast this tactic gets picked up by other candidates.