Sports, History, and Culture

Randall Stephens

With the Super Bowl and the Puppy Bowl over, and the barrage of clever and not-so-clever ads that went with the former, I've been thinking about the history of sports. I admit, I know little to nothing about the subject. (I do know that a class on the history of sports would probably populate.)

I am fascinated by how recreation has changed over the centuries. Has it become less violent, less like hand-to-hand combat? Of course, we do have ultimate fighting in are era, and their are all sorts of ways to die in a high-speed Nascar race, but it strikes me that common sports are less violent than they were in previous ages. A man does not need to train an animal to kill another animal to show that he is a force to be reckoned with.

Is it natural that sports should become more humane? Would dog fighting or bear baiting have struck late antebellum Americans as being as cruel and debased as most Americans think those are today? Ideas about propriety and impropriety appear to have dominated conversations about recreation for centuries.

There are still class and cultural connotations to sports in our age, much as there were hundreds of years ago. (One of my favorite Onion articles in recent years revealed that "a professional wrestling 'fan' has written a shocking new book that claims wrestling fans are actually paid actors.") But were class and cultural markers much stronger 150 or 200 years ago?

What do sports tell us about the people who have enjoyed them? How long have sports been woven into consumer culture? What can we know about western history be looking at the way men and women "recreated." (I hear that those who work in the subfield of cricket studies have some interesting things to say about empire and global culture.)

Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (Yale, 1999) explores some of these topics. On sport in 17th-century England, he writes:

The gentry enjoyed the sport of their deer parks, their bowls and tennis; communal sports tested men's physical prowess and endurance, absorbing competitive vigor. Local tradition was deeply founded in this respect. In Wiltshire football was entrenched in the downlands, while bat-and-ball games like stoolball and trapball flourished in the vales of the north. East Anglian villages had their 'camping' grounds with their own indigenous and popular team games. There was something for everyone at the Whitsun Cotswold games, held annually from around 1611 on Dover's Hill, a marvelous green amphitheater outside Chipping Camden which is now owned by the National Trust. There was hunting and horse-racing for the nobility and gentry and the old sports, like wrestling, singlestick fighting and shin-kicking, for the country populace. The games were a veritable celebration of manhood which, at least until the 1640s, attracted people of all social ranks from miles around. (94-95)

An observer of late-17th-century England, Guy Miège said a little about sports in his country. Notice the praise for bloodsports and the comment about foot-ball's popularity among the lower sort.
Guy Miège, The New State Of England Under Their Majesties K. William and Q. Mary: In Three Parts (London, 1691), 39-40.

Writing History and the Crisis in Punditry

Heather Cox Richardson

Participating in the discussion over the media’s role in the tragedy in Tucson, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi makes the point that media figures get their market share by offering their audience a certain kind of emotional charge, reassuring them that they are better than “the other.”

Where entertainers will go for inspiration now that that dog-whistle kind of performance is suspect, he doesn’t have a firm idea.

It seems to me that historians have, at this point, a great opening to jump into the public conversation. My friend and literary agent, Lisa Adams, is always reminding me that readers want to feel smarter after they invest time reading something. If, indeed, there is a market for making people feel superior, why can’t we invest our energies in making people feel smarter with good facts and argument, presented accessibly?

There is an unfortunate tendency among academics to suggest that anything written for a popular audience must be “dumbed down.” This is wrong. On the contrary, pieces written for non-academics must be smarter than anything we consume within the academy. Untrained historians will not accept a book that uses theory as shorthand in place of an explanation for how something actually happened (but they will happily accept theoretical constructs if they are proven). They will not endure poor writing, or incomplete explanations. Indeed, rather than dumbing down our arguments, it seems to me that writing for a non-academic audience often forces academic historians to give up the jargon and shortcuts that allow them to advance arguments their facts don’t prove.

At a time when there is a vacuum in the public arena waiting to be filled by writers who can offer a new kind of intellectual rush, historians have a unique opportunity to step up to the plate.

And it might just be good for us.

Amateurs, Professionals, and Popular Histories

Dan Allosso

As I look at the historiographical “tree” I drew, it strikes me that the books on it have all been chosen by historians. I wonder what it would look like, if it included books that were especially important at imparting historical ideas to the general public?

The other day, Lisa responded to Chris’ post with a comment about appreciating older scholarship, and the “parents/grandparents” element of our intellectual lineage. I’ve been thinking about that, as I’ve been reading professional historiographies (John Higham, Peter Novick, Ian Tyrell) this week, along with assessments of the influence and popularity of books: Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947) and Cowley & Smith’s Books that Changed Our Minds (1939). Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith's book, dedicated to Charles Beard, consists of a series of essays on authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry. While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled had written books that did influence large groups of Americans. Carl Becker, for instance, nominated William Graham Sumner's A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (1907), “which impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,” and Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If ' (1911), which “confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.” (quoting Becker’s letter, 6) Beard said “Brooks Adams’s two books are thumping,” which the editors took to mean The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and Theory of Social Revolutions (1913). Both Becker and Beard recommended Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (1923).

Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!); An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Theory of the Leisure Class got an equal number of votes. Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for their body of work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Autobiographies included Henry Adams’, Theodore Dreiser’s, Joseph Freeman’s, Robert M. La Follette’s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which is called “the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.” (12)

Several of Cowley and Smith’s picks also appear in the lists of popular, “amateur” history I’m compiling from Higham, Novick, and Tyrell, which focuses more on the question of whether or not an author was academic, and how he (yes, 99% of the time, he) fit in the growth of the profession, but nevertheless offer some guidance regarding popularity. For example, former Senator and amateur historian Albert Beveridge’s Lincoln (1928) earned $51,000 in royalties in its first six months (Higham 75). H.G. Wells’ Outline of History (1920) was “issued by a hesitant publisher at an exorbitant price . . . it sold one and a half million copies--one copy for every twenty homes in the country--within twelve years.” (Higham 74) Although the multi-volume set is global in scope, it deals extensively with American history and perhaps contextualizes it in a way that resonated with readers. Volume Four begins with back-to-back photos of Lincoln at Antietam and Bismarck at Versailles. Novick compares sales of Wells’ Outline with J. Franklin Jameson’s American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), which sold less than a thousand, and John D. Hicks’ Populist Revolt (1931), which “took seventeen years to sell fifteen hundred copies.” (Novick 193) Allan Nevins, always interested in popular history, said that Mark Sullivan’s Our Times (1926) had “probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.” (Tyrell 49)

Cowley & Smith mention that Robert Lynd responded to their survey on the most influential books, with authors like Alfred Adler, John Dewey, William James, Veblen, Thomas Huxley, and with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. These suggestions, the editors noted, were much different from the “books taken from the Middletown public library in 1935,” which Lynd described in Middletown (Chapter 17) and Middletown in Transition (Chapter 7). Those chapters probably deserve a closer look, alongside the titles I’ve pulled together on reader response theory and interpretive communities.

See also:

Waldo Frank, Our America

Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Herbert Croly, Promise of American Life

Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money

Joseph Krutch, The Modern Temper (said to be “very influential in the colleges,” 13)

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Graham Wallas, The Great Society

John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes

James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Yuletide Roundup

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"Queen's Speech: history of the royal Christmas broadcast," Telegraph, December 24, 2010

The Queen's grandfather King George V delivered the first royal Christmas broadcast live on the radio from Sandringham more than 75 years ago.

He had reigned since 1910, but it was not until 1932 that he gave his first festive speech.

He was unsure about using the relatively untried medium of the wireless, but eventually agreed and read a message composed by author Rudyard Kipling.>>>

Adam Goodheart, "Ghosts of a Christmas Past," New York Times, December 23, 2010

The Yuletide season was an unquiet time throughout the nation on the brink of the Civil War – and not just among black Americans. Judging from period newspapers, Christmas 150 years ago was just as politicized as it is now, if not more so. With the nation splitting in half (South Carolina had seceded on Dec. 20), each side of the Mason-Dixon Line tried to claim the holiday as its own.>>>

"A look back at big Christmas snows in D.C.," Washington Post, December 24, 2010

The largest storm on Dec. 24 or 25 was one which ended, and dropped most of its snow on, Christmas Eve in 1966. This storm was among a select group in a case study done by Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini for their book Northeast Snowstorms. The storm center tracked from central Texas and across the Southern United States along the southern edge of an Artic high pressure dipping into the northern tier.>>>

Suzy Khimm, "Deck the Halls With Partisan Warfare," Mother Jones, December 24, 2010

Though revived by the rise of Christian fundamentalists, the purported "war on Christmas" goes way back in American history. Industrialist Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, blamed Jews for stifling Christmas carolers and school-based religious demonstrations, notes Time magazine. "The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas...shows the venom and directness of [their] attack," Ford writes in 1921.>>>

"Durham University the history of Christmas carols," BBC, 23 December, 2010

Did you know that Christmas carols were not sung in churches until the 19th Century?

That is one of the many interesting facts about Christmas carols shared by expert Professor Jeremy Dibble from Durham University.

He recently appeared as an expert on the Songs of Praise 'Edwardian Christmas' programme on BBC One in December.

Jeremy believes that the carol-singing tradition is getting stronger.>>>

Elvis and the American Dream

Heather Cox Richardson

Forty years ago today, Elvis Presley showed up at the gates of the White House with two bodyguards and handed the guards a letter addressed to President Nixon. He said he knew the president was busy, but was hoping he could say a quick hello and present the president with a gift.

One can only imagine the flurry of astonished commentary in the White House when news arrived that Elvis wanted to drop in for a chat. An aide skimmed Elvis’s letter and sent a quick memo to Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman. “The thrust of Presley’s letter is that he wants to become a ‘Federal agent at large’ to work against the drug problem. . . . Drug culture types, the hippie elements, the SDS, and the Black Panthers are people with whom he can communicate since he is not part of the establishment.” The aide warned that it would be a bad idea to push Elvis off on the Vice President, since “it will take very little of the President’s time and it can be extremely beneficial for the President to build some rapport with Presley.”

While the aide was right that Presley wanted a federal badge, the thrust of his letter was not that he could talk to members of the counterculture. The gist of his note was that, more than anything, he wanted legitimacy. Elvis wanted to achieve the American Dream—not to be rich and famous (although he certainly was), but to be respectable.

Elvis had been an enormously talented young man with pretty moderate ambitions, in part because his horizons were so limited that he couldn’t see beyond stability and respectability. He wanted to take care of his parents; he wanted a job and a nice house. When his career took off, he bought Graceland, and decorated it in the fanciest way he could imagine—not with fine antiques and expensive art, but with a wall of mirrors and a carpeted ceiling.

Elvis seemed to be the epitome of the American dream. And perhaps he was, but not in the way that concept is usually used. As Elvis’s career went upward, his control over his success sloped inversely downward. Elvis’s life made it clear that even a man with such superlative talent could never rise to security without an education and connections. He took his financial advice from his father, a man who went to jail for altering a $4 check. He took career advice from a manager who was taking 50% of his earnings by the time the singer died (the going rate was 10%) and who pushed him constantly to make more and more money. By 1970, Elvis’s talent had become a commodity over which he had little control. Rather than enabling him to achieve the American dream, his ability was destroying him. His grueling schedule had him increasingly dependent on prescription drugs, and his marriage was falling apart.

What Elvis wrote to Nixon was that he craved solid middle-class respectability. “I . . . admire you and have great respect for your office,” he wrote. Countercultural figures might call the president and his advisors “the establishment,” but “I call it American and I love it.” “I can and I will be of any service that I can to help the country out,” Elvis wrote. He and President Nixon had something in common, and the singer made sure to point it out: “I was nominated this coming year one of America’s Ten Most Outstanding Young Men,” “I believe that you, Sir, were one of the Top Ten Outstanding Men of America also.”

Well over a hundred of Elvis’s records had gone gold, platinum, or multi-platinum, but when Elvis met with President Nixon at 12:30, he felt obliged to explain to the president who he was. And he didn’t focus on his music; he focused on the law, respectability, family, government. The first thing the singer did was to show the president his collection of police badges. He gave President Nixon some Presley family photos and a commemorative WWII Colt 45, and warned him that the Beatles had been fomenting anti-Americanism.

Then, as the White House notes from the meeting relate:

“Presley indicated to the President in a very emotional manner that he was ‘on your side.’ Presley kept repeating that he wanted to be helpful, that he wanted to restore some respect for the flag which was being lost. He mentioned that he was just a poor boy from Tennessee who had gotten a lot from his country, which in some way he wanted repay. . . . At the conclusion of the meeting, Presley again told the President how much he supported him, and then, in a surprising, spontaneous gesture, put his left arm around the President and hugged him.”

Nixon’s people managed to get Presley a special badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The badge was a symbol of what Elvis wanted, but it couldn’t give him the middle-class respectability that was at the center of his American dream. It couldn’t buy him the economic understanding that would enable him to rearrange his business affairs, or admission to a professional culture of lawyers and agents whose knowledge would protect him from his parasitic manager.

Ironically, it also couldn’t stop Elvis from dying of drugs only seven years later, sad proof that all the talent in the world could not produce success if it were not protected by education and connections.

Counting Flowers on the Wall

Randall Stephens

The Associated Press site has a "Today in History" page. History Today regularly features it-happened-on-this-day posts on its blog. The History Channel, the purveyor of pop and trivia history for the masses, has something similar. (I wonder if they feature the days on which ancient aliens completed the construction of pyramids or the dates on which Nostradamus's predictions came true.)

A fun twist on the theme comes from a computer scientist trained at the University of Cambridge. In an interview, William Tunstall-Pedoe tells All Things Considered that after he had run 300 millions facts through a program he had come to the conclusion that April 11, 1954, was "extremely notable for having almost nothing happen."

A little from the transcript of the interview:

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: It's not that nothing happened. It's that it was spectacularly unnotable in terms of the events that happened that day. So it was the most boring day in recent history.

SIEGEL: Well, perhaps someone in our audience knows of something that happened on April 11th, 1954, that might lead some revision of this judgment.

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: I'm totally up to the challenge.

SIEGEL: You're up to the challenge.

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: Up to the challenge, yeah. A lot of people have tried already in the last few days. So but yes, absolutely.

SIEGEL: There was, I think, an exhibition baseball game between the then-New York Giants and Cleveland Indians, who would go on to play in the World Series later that year.

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: And you think that counts as...

Listen to the full story here.

Oral History and Iconic Red Desk Objects

Heather Cox Richardson

Morgan’s post on oral history struck a chord. (Among other things, he observes how valuable information is lost from one generation to the next.) I was shocked, recently, when talking to a high school student about her National History Day project, to learn that she had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the US and the USSR.

Indeed, why should she have? She was born after the end of the Cold War, and knows the USSR only from history books, most of which are too general to mention the hotline.

But in the 1960 and 1970s, everyone knew the story of the Red Telephone. It was such common knowledge that no one, apparently, has bothered to make a point of passing it down.

The significance of that loss goes far beyond understanding the mechanics of the connection. Indeed, the actual hotline was not a red telephone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype machine at the Pentagon. (The history of the hotline is told wonderfully here, by Webster Stone, now producer and executive of the American Film Company.)

The mechanics of the line are far less important than the cultural context it evoked. Imagine watching TV or films from the era of the Cold War without the knowledge of what a red telephone meant. Everyone who lived during that time understood that when a red phone sat on a desk, it was not a fashion accessory. It was a symbol of an enormously important link on which hung the fate of the world. (See this clip of a 1967 episode of Batman, for instance.)

But to a more recent generation, it’s just a red telephone.

For younger readers who don’t see why this matters, think of a red Swingline stapler. It’s a key prop from the black comedy Office Space. It represents the stifling bureaucracy of the modern office, cut into cubicles staffed with faceless paper pushers. (This is also the film that gave us “Didn’t you get the memo?”) To a certain generation, a red stapler carries an indictment of the soul-crushing big business of the early twenty-first century. Ignorance of that meaning tears a critical understanding away from modern popular TV and film.

But will anyone bother to tell their children what a red stapler signifies?

It seems to me that such cultural context is one key aspect of history that is lost without oral history. People simply don’t write down what is common knowledge. It is more likely to get recorded in a passing comment made to an oral historian.

Pre-Holiday Stress Relief

Heather Cox Richardson

When I was in graduate school, the story circulated that one of our very few female professors had protested the scheduling of a committee meeting on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. “The next day is Thanksgiving,” she reportedly told the room full of male colleagues. She then asked: “Just who cooks in your house?”

We thought she was brilliant (and the meeting time got changed).

In honor of everyone stressing about the upcoming holiday, for whatever reason, I offer some classic moments in the popular culture of Thanksgiving:

There was the problem of commercial advertising, covered brilliantly by WKRP in Cincinnati, when the station manager decided to hold a turkey giveaway:

There’s the problem of politics, expertise, and celebrity. This was covered well by West Wing, when the President checks out the Butterball hotline:

And then there’s the problem of dissent in a democracy. This was covered, of course, in the all-time classic "Alice’s Restaurant." (Updated here. Would embed it here, but that's been disabled.)

Enjoy.

The Western Image, Continued

Heather Cox Richardson

The classic version of the American Western hero is Louis L’Amour’s Flint. Flint is a westerner, adopted by a gunslinger, then educated at fancy eastern schools. He plays the eastern game, becoming a rich businessman in the cutthroat world of industry. But his life has a twist. The secret to his eastern success is that he listens to the little guy, the cabbie who hears a stock tip, the waitress who learns about a business takeover. He values them and their hard work; he treats them as equals.

When an eastern doctor incorrectly diagnoses Flint with cancer, he chucks over his fame as a robber baron to go back to his roots. There, he sticks up for the small ranchers against the big guys, backed by the eastern system. He wins, of course. He’s better with cards, guns, and women than any easterner ever born. And he’s a lot smarter.

Does this image still appeal to Americans?

This TV show (below), appropriately named Outlaw, starts this week.

The Enduring Power of the Cowboy Image

Heather Cox Richardson

Many years ago, I had the good luck to hear Werner Sollors illustrate the importance of cultural understanding in interpreting popular history. He did it by describing what a Martian would guess about American life

if his only source of information was The Brady Bunch.

The Martian would assume that American humans in the 1960s reproduced by cloning, Sollors guessed, since it was clear that the adults had no sexual contact. Male clones were always brunette and females blonde. And a Martian could easily conclude that humans kept older members of the species set off from the others in the kitchen, like a sort of pet.

I remembered Sollors’s talk recently when I discovered the new Old Spice advertising campaign. The ads have certainly hit a popular chord; the videos have gotten more than 12 million hits and have boosted sales of Old Spice by more than 107%.

And the ad campaign shows, again, just how much cultural understanding you need to make sense of popular history. This particular image plays on age-old popular stereotypes of the American West, with their heroic men and devoted women. But without that cultural knowledge, what on earth would a Martian examining modern American life through this image conclude?

Their D-I-V-O-R-C-E: Mad Men, Infidelity, and Life in the 1960s

Randall J. Stephens

Some of us go around the world three times, divorce, remarry, divorce again, part with our children, make and waste a fortune, and coming back to our beginnings we find the same faces at the same windows, buy our cigarettes and newspapers from the same old man, say good morning to the same elevator operator, good night to the same desk clerk, to all those who seem, as Johnson did, driven into life by misfortune like nails into a floor.

-John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (Harper & Row, 1964)

The suburbs of New York City in the 1950s were a homogenous and extended community held together by common interests: children, sports, adultery, and lots of social drinking

-Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Personal Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter (Houghton Mifflin, 1984)

Frank could not escape the impression that she was asking him to get a divorce. Meanwhile, our advisory capacity in Vietnam was beginning to stink and the market was frightened, frightened yet excited by the expanding war. Basically business was uneasy with Kennedy; there was something unconvincing about him.

-John Updike, Couples (Ballantine Books, 1968)

Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E; becomes final today Me and little J-O-E will be goin' away I love you both and it will be pure H-E double L for me Oh, I wish that we could stop this D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E, recorded by Tammy Wynette (1968)

More heavy drinking, more chain smoking, more prefeminist barbarity, more impeccably dressed businessmen, and woman. Mad Men, season 4, is kicking off on Sunday night.

Benjamin Schwarz wrote an insightful, appropriately skeptical piece on the series in The Atlantic back in the fall. Among other things Schwarz wondered about some of the over-the-top boorishness on display, condescending social commentary, and the overall historical accuracy of this "megamovie."

Watching the program, which I'll admit I'm a big fan of, has amazed and perplexed me. (How did the production crew get the colors and the tone just right? Scenes often look like staged advertisements from LIFE or Look Magazine.) Mad Men's interiors--wood paneling, ab-ex paintings, and sleek modernist surfaces--is as nearly as cool as the set of a Jacques Tati flick. The "lush styling and art direction," wrote Schwarz, "which make the series eye candy for its (again) target audience, already in thrall to the so-called mid-century-modern aesthetic—-an appeal that’s now further fueled by the slimline suit/pencil skirt marketing tie-in with Banana Republic, that canny purveyor of upper-mass-market urbanity."

How about the behavior, attitudes, and values of the characters? How does America in the early 1960s compare to America in 2010? The latter seems to be one of the chief questions the program raises. (At least for me, as a nerdy historian.) See, for instance, this John McWhorter piece from The New Republic, "Mad Men In a Good Place: How Did People Sound in 1963?" September 1, 2009. (Did they sound different after 1964? I'm wondering if a Beatles episode might feature Fab Four music. Doubtful. Would cost a fortune.)

And what about the infidelity on parade? Lead ad man Don Draper is a whiskey-soaked, feral Don Juan. Couples on the show occasional make fools of themselves in drunken revelry. Many of the chief men and women have had shaky relationships, boozing it up and forgetting their vows. One agent sleeps in his office after his wife discovers his alcohol-fueled, one-night stand with a secretary. Nearly all of the main male characters are unfaithful. Divorce, though not easy to obtain, is an ever-present option.

So what did the divorce rate look like in the swinging sixties? Brown University historian James Patterson notes that a significant rise in divorce rates seriously affected American families from the mid-sixties on. "Divorce rates per 1,000 of population doubled--from 2.5 per 1,000 people in 1965 to a peak of between 5 and 5.3 per 1,000 between 1976 and 1985."[1] Indeed, the divorce rate rocketed up 100% from '63 to '75. The current rate is 3.5 per 1,000 population.

What about infidelity? Is that more difficult to measure? David Gudelunas observes that we can gauge some national opinions by looking at letters to advice columnists. "The most frequent complaint from women in the 1960s was their cheating husbands," notes Gudelunas.[2] Polls and social science research from the day could also reveal much.

All that is to say that the show has made me more and more curious about how even the recent past can look decidedly strange, remote through the eyes of the present. Fun stuff.

On Sunday night when episode one of season four airs, I'll have my trusty DVD recorder at the ready. (A device, by the way, of pure science fiction by the standards of 1964.)

[1] James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford University Press, 2005), 50.

[2] David Gudelunas, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education (Transaction, 2008), 112.

Island Records Turns 50 and Nick Drake

Randall Stephens

Island Records, one of the most influential labels in 20th-century pop music, is marking its golden anniversary. Chris Blackwell started recording Jamaican bands under that name in 1959. Over the decades the label's roster included such luminaries as Bob Marley, U2, Free, Traffic, Cat Stevens, Fairport Convention, and King Crimson. It's latest hitmaker is Amy Winehouse, the troubled retro-vulgarian with a voice. The BBC reports a series of anniversary concerts to celebrate the benchmark. MOJO, Uncut, and Q also feature material on Island's 50th.

MOJO's cover story on one of the label's legends, Nick Drake, enigmatic chamber folk phenom, is a treat. (Drake, who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974, has been the subject of myth for some time.) The MOJO piece recounts Drake's toff years at Cambridge and his work with legendary producer Joe Boyd in the heady days of the late 1960s. Chris Blackwell, too, reflects on his experience with Drake.

One of the best accounts of this era, and the flurry of artistic activity, is Boyd's very entertaining White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent's Tail, 2007). "His accent was at the aristocratic end of 'received pronunciation,'" Boyd writes of Drake. "Born in Burma, where his father was a doctor in the Colonial Service, he attended Marlborough and was now at Cambridge, reading English. I had met many public schoolboys (Chris Blackwell, for example) who seemed to have not an iota of doubt in their entire beings. Nick had the accent and the offhand mannerisms, but had somehow missed out on the confidence."

And on his abilities and creativity Boyd remarks: "One evening, Nick played me all his songs. Up close, the power of his fingers was astonishing, with each note ringing out loud - almost painfully so - and clear in the small room. I had listened closely to Robin Williamson, John Martyn, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Half-struck strings and blurred hammerings-on were an accepted part of their sound; none could match Nick's mastery of the instrument. After finishing one song, he would retune the guitar and proceed to play something equally complex in a totally different chord shape."

(A superb poetic documentary of Drake in context, A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake (2004), can be watched on youtube in three sections. Joe Boyd is featured as are Gabrielle Drake, Robert Kirby, and modfather and Island Records labelmate Paul Weller.)