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Sid Caesar, RIP
I'm struck by one detail in the obituaries for comedic actor Sid Caesar. He got married in 1943 to Florence Levy, and he stayed married to her until her death in 2010 -- 67 years on their way to together forever, as Paul Harvey used to say. Not a whiff...
San Antonio Roses
It was the song that took Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys "from hamburgers to steaks." In 1938, they took a fiddle tune called "Spanish Two Step" and ran the melody backwards; the result was a popular instrumental. ("Jazz violinist Joe Venuti, for example, told Wills and members of the...
A quiet, white Christmas
When I left work on Thursday at about 3, high winds were firing tiny ice darts (sleet, officially) into my exposed skin, as I cleared the car windows as quickly as I could. I stayed off the expressways and mentally charted a zigzag route home, avoiding any significant up- or...
Belfast writer wishes Bob wouldn't holler
Belfast hosted a songwriters' festival recently, which featured musicians from Belfast's American sister city, Nashville. (That's an apt pairing. Belfast is the buckle of the Bible Belt of Europe, the most religious region in the UK. Nashville is HQ for the Southern Baptist Convention. And Tennessee was settled by Ulster...
Happy Birthday, Bob Wills
An edited version of this column was published in the March 1 - 7, 2007, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Posted April 11, 2024. Happy Birthday, Bob By Michael D. Bates It looked like a typical scene in an...
Father's Day notes
This draft was started a couple of days after Father's Day, but I never got around to finishing it. In lieu of something more substantive tonight, here it is: We celebrated Father's Day by taking my dad and mom to lunch at Mexicali Border Café at Main and Brady downtown....
78s online
Basic Hip Digital Oddio, home of the Space Age Pop Music webcast and the Online Guide to Whistling Records, is spending 2005 celebrating records for children from the golden age -- the mid '40s to the early '50s. Kiddie Records Weekly presents a classic kids' album each week, from the...
Better than a poke in the eye
We've been ringing in the new year watching Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard racing through hospital corridors, in the original "Men in Black". There's nothing like the merry cackles of an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, already giddy for being allowed to stay up late, watching classic slapstick. Oh,...
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