Minor Wisdom

For marathon runners, a little Howlin’ Wolf

Tomorrow morning, the Rock & Roll Mardi Gras Marathon passes by my front porch on Magazine Street. So in tribute to those hardy souls, here’s an appropriate number by Howlin’ Wolf. Somebody bring that man his running shoes.

Gallows Pole — Alvin Youngblood Hart

Here’s a contemporary blues performer who hasn’t strayed from his roots: Alvin Youngblood Hart, performing Gallows Pole. He reminds me a little of R.L. Burnside.

Seeing isn’t believing, and the nose doesn’t know

Two items of note:

• Stephanie Allen reports at Idealawg: “In experiments carried out by Edinburgh University, people looking at pictures often failed to detect deliberate alterations, such as objects becoming bigger or disappearing. Professor John Henderson of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences said: ‘We think our eyes show us the world in sharp detail all the time, but in fact this is not the case.’” (Quoting Telegraph.co.uk.)
• At Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina reports that wine aficionados can be fooled by odorless, tasteless food coloring. Drop a little in a white wine to make it look red, and they think they’re sniffing and tasting red wine. It seems the nose doesn’t know so much after all.

A musical project for Lent

I realize it’s jumping the gun to start thinking about Lent before Mardi Gras passes. With that out of the way...

To help myself accomplish a musical goal I’ve set, I’m announcing it here: by Good Friday, I will post a decent recording of O Sacred Head Surrounded on guitar.

To accomplish this goal, I started with music and guitar chords in Ritual Song, and created this tablature, designed to play most of the melody notes off the chords. Creating the tablature was fun, but for someone like me, without a musical education, it was a challenge. Fortunately I had a cheat sheet. Creating the tablature was a matter of finding the spots for each note of the melody (there were usually at least two practical choices), locating the spots where the notes in the accompanying chord could be played, and finding a combination that I could realistically learn to play.

Another consideration: My guitar teacher, Vincent, has been preaching voice-leading to me. In practical terms, that means reducing the amount of work it takes to move from one chord to the next. In musical terms, it means that some element or elements from one chord carry forward to the next. For example, an F-major chord contains the notes F, A, and C. The A-minor chord contains the notes A, C, and E. If you invert one chord or the other, you’ll see that they’re only one note apart: change the F in F-major to an E, and you have an A-minor. Which means that, if you’re plucking three strings to produce an F-major, you need to move just one finger by just one fret to change the F-major to an A-minor. So in creating the tablature, I looked for stuff like that. The idea was to analyze each chord, figure out what notes it has in common with the preceding and following chords, and see whether I could minimize the effort in moving from one chord to the next.

Anyway, that’s what I tried to do in coming up with created the tablature. If you play guitar, do me a favor: download it, give it a whirl, and let me know how it might be improved.

The people's MVP: Drew Brees teaches fans the Saints’ pregame chant

I’m only about the 112th NOLA blogger to post this video, but it’s so cool that I want to share it with any of you who doesn’t follow the other NOLA blogs.

First some background: Before every Saints game this year, the team would gather at one end zone, where quarterback Drew Brees would lead them in a pregame chant. Fast forward to this past Tuesday, after the Saints’ Super Bowl Victory parade. Drew and his offensive line headed for Lucy’s in the Warehouse District, where Drew treated the house to a round of champagne and taught everyone the secret-before-now chant. If you were wondering why New Orleans is so in love with this guy—now you have a clue.

Must-see TV tonight: In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement

Tonight on PBS at 8 p.m. EST, 7 p.m. CST:

President and Mrs. Obama will host “In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement” in honor of Black History Month, and the evening will feature songs from the Civil Rights Movement performed by top entertainers, as well as readings from famous Civil Rights speeches and writings. Artists include Yolanda Adams, Joan Baez, Natalie Cole, Bob Dylan, Jennifer Hudson, John Mellencamp, Smokey Robinson, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Howard University Choir and The Freedom Singers, featuring Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Rutha Harris, Charles Neblett and Toshi Reagon. Morgan Freeman will be a guest speaker.

(Hat tip to Francis Beckwith at Southern Appeal.) For Orleanians, the show will be broadcast on WYES and WYES-HD.

I don’t see Mavis Staples or the Staples Singers on the PBS blurb. Regardless, here’s
Freedom Highway, a little something to get you in the mood for tonight’s show.

Apparently it’s pronounced “fluhr duh LEES”

The New York Times has an interesting article about the history—and pronunciation—of the Saints’ emblem, the fleur-de-lis. Among the things I didn’t know: in France, the s is not silent.

Who-Dat Nation or Who-Dat World?

I’m not against the phrase Who-Dat Nation to describe Saints fans everywhere. But the phrase is a touch unoriginal — I think Raider Nation pre-dates it. More importantly, the word nation fails to describe this phenomenon. It’s world-wide. The Times of London has taken up the Who-Dat cause. And today I received a congratulatory e-mail from a friend in Abu Dhabi, who relished BBC Radio’s “fantastic report about the [Saints' Super Bowl] win.”

So why refer to this phenomenon as Who-Dat Nation. Seems to me that Who-Dat World would be more fitting.

Some history of “who dat”

My friend George “Loki” Williams posted this clip from a 1937 cartoon. This is not the origin of the “Who Dat” catch phrase adopted by Saints fans, which probably predates this clip. But it damn sure sinks the NFL’s recent misbegotten (and more recently withdrawn) claim to own the phrase.

Good wishes from a Browns fan

My on-line pal Peter Friedman, unapologetic Cleveland Browns fan, explains why he’ll be pulling for the Saints this Sunday:

No self-respecting Browns fan could root for a team that fled the city it belongs to in the middle of the night. And no self-respecting Browns fan could help but feel the Saints fans are among the few who can appreciate our loyalty.

To which all Saints and Browns fans say, “Amen.”