The Beiderbecke Affair

‘I don’t see color’

Several days ago I patched together a few thoughts on race-mixing. The writer Steven Augustine posted a series of comments, arguing that race is in need of a “re-think,” that the term “race” itself is racist, and, finally, that my sister considering herself to be “black” is the product of “proto-Nazi nonsense . . . It’s Eugenics, pure and simple.”

Whew.

A reader responded to Augustine’s thoughts via e-mail:

The argument that “race does not exist as a natural category” makes me SO MAD in part, because it was at the cent of the anthropology curriculum at my college, and made me feel SO stuck (if “culture doesn’t exist, then what the hell are we studying?!) and finally pushed me over the edge. Steve: NOT HELPFUL. But thank you for your comments.

I have a couple thoughts. In Making Whiteness (1998), University of Virginia history professor Grace Hale writes that “identities are slippery, ambiguous, and individual things.” So any discussion of race (or “race,” if you prefer) is necessarily going to be charged because we’re talking about how we identify ourselves. When my sister describes herself and her husband as “the only two black people in a church full of whites,” it hardly matters whether the latest biology asserts that race doesn’t exist. It does for her!

However, Augustine is correct to point out that this identity is on one level arbitrary—all things being equal, she could just as easily identify herself as white. He is also correct to suggest that this identity has, in a way, been forced upon her by history. After all, all things are not equal. In the United States of America, people with dark skin are not and never have been considered white.

Nor, let’s face it, have they necessarily wanted to be.

Central to Hale’s argument is that “racial making,” as she puts it, goes both ways. The idea of whiteness began as a denial of racial identity, but in the years between Reconstruction and the Second World War, an entire infrastructure of white identity was built. And its foundation, of course, was segregation. If whiteness started out as the denial of race, it ended as the denial of blackness.

It’s sad. It’s unfair. But it’s the world we live in, and I welcome the discussion. In the meantime, playing color blind—or arguing that race doesn’t exist—won’t get us very far. Wouldn’t well all like to be like Stephen Colbert, who famously said, “Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me sir”?

Yesterday’s New York Times, for instance, highlights a report on transracial foster care and adoption. Multiracial families don’t produce psychological or social problems in kids, according to the report, but “these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different.”

“The idea of being color-blind is great, and we’d all like to get there,” Adam Pertman, executive director of the Adoption Institute, told the Times. “But the reality is that we live in a very race-conscious society, and that needs to be addressed. We can’t simply pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and leave it up to the child to cope.”

Hear, hear. (Although this strikes me as not necessary at all.) Oh, and as for the issue of eugenics—Virginia has a fascinating role to play in that history. More soon . . .

IMAGE: Anti-miscegenation propaganda

A Modest Salute

My grandfather, Ray Wolfe, was 21 years old in 1917, a farmer from tiny Lost Nation, Iowa, who was drafted into the Navy as the United States prepared for war with Germany. He didn’t go overseas—he was stationed at the Great Lakes, instead—but he served. I admire that.

My sister Bridget served, as well. She was not quite 23 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and, as a newly commissioned officer, she volunteered to go. She also served in Bosnia and, most recently, during the initial invasion of Iraq. She volunteered for this last tour, as well, and I admire that even more.

My grandfather’s brother Melvin was a Marine in the 1920s and 1930s who saw action in Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Shanghai. My grandmother had twin brothers who fought in Europe during the Great War. A cousin was decorated at Pearl Harbor, and an older, more distant relative may have been an Iowa cavalryman in the Civil War.

My mom’s oldest brother fought in Europe during the Second World War, and I have a cousin who just joined the Marines.

Today’s a day for sunshine and brats. But I’ll be thinking of them and their service, too.

PREVIOUSLY: A great picture of Ray and his family

IMAGE: My grandfather’s World War I draft card

It's a Complicated Story (Part 2)

. . . by which I mean race in America.* I know, this is hardly a penetrating insight, but it’s on the mind regardless, what with Barack Obama reminding us that he has “brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” and some guy in Georgia responding by creating T-shirts that liken the candidate to Curious George. “This is not 1941 in Alabama,” the dude told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when confronted with the suggestion that comparing a black man to a monkey might be racist, “so get over it.”

True enough. It’s not 1941 in Alabama. The same guy, though, once created a sign that read, “I wish Hillary had married O.J.,” which suggests that fears of miscegenation have never really gone away. After all, what is O.J. Simpson if not, for some people at least, a kind of Nat Turner, a symbol of the black man rising up not just to murder whites, but white women? Virginian William Styron won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel in which the legendary slave-cum-preacher-cum-rebel is sexually attracted to a white woman whom he then murders. African Americans loudly protested.

Sure, he could have loved Margaret Whitehead, the actor Ossie Davis said at the time, but that’s not the point.

What I am disturbed about is that this is one of the areas about which I fear my country can be immediately psychotic and destructive. I have only to think back in the last hundred years to the more than 3,500 black men lynched in the South, the rationale of such activities being that these men constituted a threat to white womanhood . . . Are we that clear of our horror at the thought of a black male lusting after white flesh?

Not according to Cinque Henderson, an African American who wrote in The New Republic this week that “had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would’ve never gotten off the ground with black people.” Regardless of whether he’s right, what’s interesting is the idea that the fear and skepticism of race-mixing is not limited to whites. Notice how Davis talks about “our horror.” Does his pronoun refer to Americans or just African Americans? He’s not clear, and perhaps that’s the point.

In his 2003 book Mulatto America, Stephan Talty argues that Native Americans were willing, at least at first, to mingle culturally with newly arrived whites. For obvious reasons, however, “the merging of black and white was more contentious.” As early as 1691, Virginia expressed its own skepticism of the idea by banning interracial marriage.

Still, Talty notes that “the ferocious responses to unions of black men and white women that have become a cliché of southern ‘honor’—the lynchings, the castrations, the pathological obsession with black rapists—date mostly from the Civil War period and onward; the institutionalized terror that ruled the South after the war was not the rule.” In fact, he claims that whites often looked out for their black neighbors who might have been unfairly accused, and that, in the end, it was white women and not black men “who bore the brunt of the society’s disapproval when they strayed from their assigned beds.”

Of course, interracial marriages weren’t always the union of black men and white women. Richard Loving was white, his wife Mildred black. When Mildred died this month, she left behind the legacy of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court decision (handed down in 1967, the same year Styron’s novel was published) that banned discrimination in marriage based on race. She was also part of another legacy in Virginia, the “secret” mixing of the races. That provocative adjective “secret” comes courtesy of the New York Times, which wrote on Wednesday about the history of miscegenation in Mildred Loving’s hometown, tiny Central Point, Virginia.

Mixed-race folks have a history of settling there, apparently, making it difficult sometimes to tell the difference between black and white. But then that’s what nosy neighbors and Jim Crow laws were for. “Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied,” according to the Times. “But when [locals] ventured beyond Caroline County—where no one knew them—many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to ‘pass’ as white.” They could use any movie theater or bathroom or lunch counter they pleased. They could even serve alongside whites in the Army.

“The community developed a system for protecting racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families,” the Times continues. “When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.”

Then there were people like Mildred Loving, whose heart forgot to play by the rules, making it impossible for her neighbors to look the other way. Somebody called the sheriff and he rousted her and her new white husband out of bed at two in the morning.

It’s a complicated story, and rarely do these things have happy endings. When my adopted sister—biological mother black, biological father white—married her husband—white mother, black father, then deceased—she remarked that they were the only two black people in a church full of whites. Her voice hinted at both a kind of sadness and something else. Was it victory? I don’t think so. That’s too simple an emotion for Miscegenation Nation.

* This is the second time I’ve posted this image, but only the first time I’ve elaborated.

ELSEWHERE: Cross posted here.

IMAGE: Me and my sis

Mr. Lincoln and the Picketts

I took Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974) off the shelf on Friday and idly opened to the foreword. I’ve always loved how it includes dramatic biographical sketches of the major players at Gettysburg (Longstreet, for instance, is “bearded, blue-eyed, ominous, slow-talking, crude,” while J.E.B. Stuart is a “laughing banjo player” and Jubal Early a “dark, cold, icy man, bitter, alone”). A fact about George Pickett, of Pickett’s Charge fame, caught my eye:

“Received an appointment to West Point through the good offices of Abraham Lincoln, a personal friend, and no one now can insult Abe Lincoln in Pickett’s presence, although Lincoln is not only the enemy but the absolute utterest enemy of all.”

It’s not that I didn’t believe Shaara, but I decided to go in search of confirmation. What I found was Pickett and His Men, a 1913 book by Pickett’s widow, LaSalle Corbell. Shaara happens to mention her as “a girl half [Pickett's] age, a schoolgirl from Lynchburg . . . to whom he has vowed ne’er to touch liquor.” She confirms the Pickett-Lincoln connection and adds this juicy anecdote concerning a knock on the door that came shortly after Richmond fell on April 2, 1865:

“Is this George Pickett’s place?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, “but he is not here.”

“I know that, ma’am,” he replied, “but I just wanted to see the place. I am Abraham Lincoln.”

“The President!” I gasped.

The stranger shook his head and said:

“No, ma’am; no, ma’am; just Abraham Lincoln, George’s old friend.”

Lincoln proceeds to kiss Pickett’s baby while “an expression of rapt, almost divine tenderness and love lighted up the sad face.”

“I had sometimes wondered at the General’s reverential way of speaking of President Lincoln,” Corbell wrote, “but as I looked up at his honest, earnest face and felt the warm clasp of his great, strong hand, I marvelled no more that all who knew him should love him.”

Whew. That’s pretty strong stuff from a Confederate general’s wife. It’s not that I didn’t believe her exactly, but I decided once again to go in search of confirmation. The newspapers of the day did not cover Lincoln’s visit in great detail. “The Richmond papers are, with one exception, non est,” the New York Times reported. As for what sort of folks the president might have been talking to, here is the Times again:

“It is asserted that two or three of the most prominent citizens sought and obtained an interview with Mr. Lincoln during his short stay here. I have been requested not to mention their names.”

Such was Mr. Lincoln’s reputation in the Confederate capital. As it turns out, however, LaSalle Corbell’s reputation would suffer its own blows. Along with Pickett and His Men, she also published in 1913 a collection of letters between herself and the General, and this is where we come full circle:

“In the ensuing decades, the published George Pickett letters became part of the canon of American Civil War literature,” write three scholars in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing (2001). “Numerous historians cited them, and excerpts appeared in anthologies and collections. Michael Shaara mined them for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns highlighted them in his 1990 television documentary The Civil War.”

The upshot? She made them all up. Oh, and she probably plagiarized much of Pickett and His Men, too.

Citing the work of University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher, the authors note that “Gallagher contended that the tone of the published Pickett letters was too flowery and sentimental for the general to have written, and that they appeared to resemble LaSalle Pickett’s many Lost Cause writings. General Pickett had more knowledge than he possibly could have had at the time the letters were written, and his use of ‘black dialect’ was also suspect.”

But did Lincoln pucker up and kiss Pickett’s baby in Richmond? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.

IMAGE: A Library of Congress image of Mrs. Pickett

Surpassing Fine

I was sitting on my front porch the other morning reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was a beautiful morning—clear, warm, breezy—and with my coffee and a decent view of the Blue Ridge, I was in heaven. So it seemed appropriate that I stumbled onto this passage, in which a traveling salesman visits Turner’s master and gushes on the beauty of a Virginia spring.

“No, sir, Mr. Turner,” he was saying, “they is no spring like it in this great land of ours. They is nothing what approaches the full springtide when it hits Virginia. And, sir, they is good reason for this. I have traveled all up and down the seaboard, from the furtherest upper ranges of New England to the hottest part of Georgia, and I know whereof I speak. What makes the Virginia spring surpassing fine? Sir, it is simply this. It is simply that, whereas in more southern climes, the temperature is always so humid that spring comes as no surprise, and whereas in more northerly climes the winter becomes so prolonged that they is no spring at all hardly, but runs smack into summer—why, in Virginia, sir, it is unique! It is ideal! Nature has conspired so that spring comes in a sudden warm rush! Alone in the Virginia latitude, sir, is spring like the embrace of a mother’s arms!”

Another ode to Virginia spring can be found in this 1913 recording (via):

• When It’s Springtime in Virginia – Owen J. McCormack [Mp3]

There’s nothing on the web about McCormack, but it sure sounds like he’s crooning with a Scottish brogue. The sheet music cover, meanwhile, can be found here.

PREVIOUSLY: “And this is precisely what Styron attempts to do in the book: project himself into the mind of a notorious black preacher and murderer . . .”

What Would Willie Do

“He’s an interesting guy, but just about impossible to pin down.” That’s Jonathan Yardley on the now 75-year-old Willie Nelson. Yardley reviewed the new Nelson biography by Joe Nick Patoski in the Washington Post last weekend and found the book, if not Nelson, lacking.

It’s possible that someday a true biography of him will be written, one that discriminates between what is and is not important in his life, that resists the temptations of list-making and tries to dig into the innermost core of this admittedly highly elusive man. Patoski’s book will be an invaluable resource for the person who writes that biography, and not merely because it contains so much ill-digested information. Patoski knows a lot about Nelson’s music and writes about it with sympathy and understanding. If he doesn’t discriminate among factoids, he does discriminate among Nelson’s songs and recordings, and at times his insights are keen. Certainly he is right to pinpoint “Spirit,” Nelson’s superb album of 1996, as a “dramatic shift” in Nelson’s career, taking him back to the simple roots of country music and emphasizing his remarkable guitar playing as well as the “distinctive” piano of his sister Bobbie. “Spirit” is nothing less than a small American masterpiece.

Boy, do I agree about Spirit. Here’s a taste.

• Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave – Willie Nelson [Mp3]

And here’s one of my all-time favorites, a tribute to Nelson that treats him as he deserves to be treated: as a messiah.

• What Would Willie Do – Bruce Robison [Mp3]

IMAGE: Willie Nelson, Luck Ranch, Spicewood, Texas, 2001 by Annie Leibovitz

On the Voice of Nat Turner

The Civil War is the order of the day at work and, consequently, I am trying to get started on some Civil War reading of my own. At the moment, that includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (whew, this is going to take me all summer!) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, brutally murdering several dozen white men, women, and children before he himself was captured and hanged. Styron’s book, which is a fictionalized treatment of Turner’s actual confession, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. But over the years, it has generated almost as much controversy as praise. (The author, who died in 2006, was once nearly reduced to tears over the subject.) When friends learn that I am reading the book, they ask not whether I like it but whether I think it’s racist.

No way am I going to try to answer that—a fool’s errand if ever there was one—but I was struck by something I read in the New York Times’ original review of the novel (which ran in two parts, October 3–4, 1967). The “burden” of Styron’s book, the reviewer wrote, “was not a matter simply of slavery, monstrous as that was, but [of] white Americans’ inability to acknowledge the presence of Negroes as people, or to project themselves into any individual Negro’s mind.”

This is precisely what Styron attempts to do in the book: project himself into the mind of a notorious black preacher and murderer, a complicated man surely, but someone about whom we know very little. For instance, it’s always been up for debate among historians whether the confessions actually contain Turner’s own words. As a result, perhaps, the question of voice and identity is alive throughout Styron’s novel.

Echoing those historians who cocked an eyebrow at the sometimes elevated language of the historical confessions, the Times’ reviewer questions “the authenticity of Turner’s inner voice” in the novel, which is told in the first person from Turner’s point of view. “Turner speaks in dialect,” the Times points out. “But he thinks, recalls, recounts in a voice that many readers will think can only be Mr. Styron’s, it is so cultivated, literate, sensitive, and modern.”

But I wonder if that wasn’t Styron’s whole point. Styron’s Turner, after all, is literate and intelligent, and to the complications of communication he is extraordinarily sensitive. He notices how his interlocutor speaks to him in jail in “sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-n– tones” but subsequently addresses the court with “eloquence and authority.” He notices that “when a strange white man adopts this florid, familiar manner, and when his listener is black,” trouble is bound to follow. And he notices that for a slave addressing a white man a middle ground is possible between demeaning servility and dangerous backtalk. (”You just got to learn, man,” he scolds his friend. “You got to learn the difference.”)

Of course, these issues are fraught today as they were in 1967 as they were in 1831. Was it a fool’s errand for Styron to take them on? I’m only a quarter the way through, but I don’t think so.

IMAGE: “Discovery of Nat Turner” from 1881. The author of this article points out that, “in stark contrast to descriptions of Turner’s capture in the southern media, here Turner is portrayed in a heroic light: upright, armed, prepared to meet his fate. The dueling images of Turner—as cowardly fanatic or heroic rebel—both drew on cultural assumptions that equated virtue with worthiness to be free.”

For a taste of how the southern media treated Turner’s capture, read this contemporary account from the Richmond Enquirer.

Crepuscule with Molly

In 1957, Thelonious Monk wrote the ballad “Crepuscule with Nellie” to honor his wonderful wife, who was then undergoing surgery for a thyroid ailment. (The tune is one of Monk’s dozen essentials, or so say the folks at Jazz.com, who love, as I do, his recently discovered Carnegie Hall recording with John Coltrane [Mp3].) The title, which translates to “Twilight with Nellie,” is intended to be all nice and cozy—or at least as nice and cozy as a Monk composition can get, Monk compositions being notorious, after all, for their jagged edges and sharp turns.

Which is why I love his decision to use the otherwise obscure word crepuscule. It may mean “twilight,” but its consonants are too jagged and sharp for anything that’s, you know, just pretty. Baudelaire dug this sort of ambiguity, too, and he began his poem “Le Crépuscule du soir” with a reference to the “charming, friendly evening of the criminal” (or “Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel”). You can find the rest here, but basically it reads like a stern warning to impatient lovers.

And that’s a theme running through this mix. I don’t think I meant for it to, but it works, I guess, since I put these songs together for Molly on the down-on-one-knee occasion of proposing to her. (She said yes.) So you’ll find below all the Carter, Monk, and Conway, all the joy, the pain, and the Betty Davis of love. I know it only too well, and impatient fool that I am, I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with Molly.

1.  Hello Darlin’ – Conway Twitty

This song starts out innocently enough. It’s charming, even, the way ol’ Conway, with his greased-back hair, comes on to an old love. But by the end, when he’s begging to touch her one last time, it gets all creepy. “Look up, darlin’, let me kiss you,” the man says, and who knows, maybe that sort of thing worked in 1970, when “Hello Darlin’” hit No. 1. Anyway, I kind of enjoy the creepiness. And hearing Conway (né Harold Lloyd Jenkins) sing takes me back to the days of AM radio and to a childhood immersed in Willie, Loretta, and Dolly, the Statler Brothers and George & Tammy. Ahhh, those are the ’70s that I remember . . .

2.  Love, Oh Crazy Love – June Carter with Carl Smith

This is a comedy act as much as it’s a song, as this vintage roll of YouTube suggests. June comes off like a possessed Muppet (to steal from Molly) while her first husband Carl, a.k.a. Mister Country, plays the pre-“Hee Haw” role of hayseed straight man. Keep your ears open for a political reference obscure even for 1954. Mugwump or mugwomp? Such are the questions of little kids and poets:

Mugwomp, she says clearly, I love the sound of mugwomp.
Swamp, hump, humpback, tug, slug, the pilfered sounds
roll in the wake of her tongue, slashed from their moorings.

3.  Sweet Sue, Just You – Freddy Valier’s String Swing Quartet

Here’s an American pop classic (penned by Will J. Harris and Victor Young) recorded by a Norwegian group in Oslo on December 5, 1938. Freddy Valier, it turns out, was born Fritjof Linnaae. The guitar, meanwhile, is heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt and comes from Robert Normann.

4.  Dinah (Take 1) – Thelonious Monk

Understandably, Thelonious Sphere Monk (Pulitzer Prize laureate, by the way) is best known for his own angular compositions, but the way he approached the standards—from Duke to “Dinah”—was never short of startling. On this number, he heavy-breathes his way through the 1925 ditty popularized by Fats Waller (that genius of joie de vivre) and immortalized by Satchmo’s mugging—yet somehow he makes it new again.

5.  Il fait si beau – Vincent Delerm

Since I don’t really speak French and have no idea what he’s saying (something about the weather, I think), I can only guess that a decent way to describe Delerm would be Charles Aznavour + sense of humor, or a chanson on wry, hold the cheese.

6.  Good Taste Tip (No. 1) – The Shangri-Las

Like Linda Lyndell coming up, the Shangri-Las were white girls trafficking (rather successfully) in ’60s R&B. Amy Winehouse might be the modern-day equivalent, although one suspects that she won’t ever cut radio spots on how to impress a man. Wouldn’t it be awesome, though, if she did?

7.  Anti-Love Song – Betty Davis

“Betty was too young and wild for the things I expected from a woman,” Miles Davis said about his wife of one year, née Betty Mabry. “[She] was a free spirit, she was raunchy and all that kind of shit.” Which is definitely true. So Miles divorced the model half his age, and this song, recorded a few years later in 1973, was her sweet revenge. It’s just oh so nasty, that voice of hers mean as a bass line, her persona a bitches’ brew of sex, funk, and soul.

8.  What a Man – Linda Lyndell

You may recognize “What a Man” as the basis for the 1993 hit by Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue. If you don’t, so much the better, because this 1968 Stax single far outshines the cheesy pop-rap mess it spawned. Still, Cheryl L. Keyes, author of the impressively titled article “Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance” (Journal of American Folklore, Summer 2000), calls the latter version “celebratory” and notes, rather stiffly, that “Salt-N-Pepa praise their significant others in the areas of friendship, romance, and parenting.” How nice. What Keyes fails to note, and what is perhaps ironic considering her paper’s focus, is that the original song was by a white woman crooning on one of the country’s most famous black labels. How’s that for empowerment? How’s that for creating space? Well, anyway, I just think it’s interesting. More interesting, anyway, and certainly less frightening, than seeing S-N-P do their “thang” on “Live with Regis and Kelly.” Ewww.

9.  Shoop – Salt-N-Pepa

Don’t mean to hate on Salt-N-Pepa—although they were the butt of a particularly funny joke in Baby Mama (a joke, it should be acknowledged, that implied only white squares like myself even listen to them anymore). So I’ll admit that I’ve always loved this song. I’m not proud.

10.  Kham Kham – Chérif Mbaw

Mbaw is a Senegalese singer, via Paris, who has toured with Amadou & Mariam and Tracy Chapman. He’s often compared to a young Youssou N’Dour, whose Etoile de Dakar revolutionized West African music back in the ’70s and ’80s. Such compliments can be a mixed blessing, of course, as this review suggests. Still, this is great, soulful stuff.

11.  Born Feeling – Sara Tavares

Speaking of which, here is Sara Tavares. A Portuguese singer whose parents are Cape Verdean immigrants, she started out playing African-American funk and soul but has since come back to her African roots. Hmmm . . . Portugal, Africa, America . . . that hits pretty much all the points of the West African slave trade, the hub of which was Cape Verde. Tavares isn’t obsessed with history, though. “I’d rather stand at the beginning of a new tradition of music of the diaspora,” she says on her website, “of young African immigrants in Europe who don't only look back.”

12.  Them There Eyes – Billie Holiday

This is one of Holiday’s classics, from 1939. The Village Voice describes it best:

With “Them There Eyes,” Billie lays on the rap: flirting with the boy who thinks he is taking the lead. She is by turns first-crush girlish (listen to the pouty way she sings, “My heart is jumpin’, you started something”) and wise in the ways of lovemaking: her “Aw baby!” and “You better watch out” are enough to make the sexual novice tremble with temptation, trepidation, and curiosity. She builds tension with the fast-paced “Ifellinlovewithyouthefirsttime-Ilookedinto” and then releases it with the prolonged “Them . . . there eyes.” The signs of the Lady to come are all there: perfect diction, a drop-dead sense of rhythm, behind-the-beat phrasing.

I would only argue that the Lady was not “to come” at this point. She was already there.

13.  Come Pick Me Up – Ryan Adams

“I wrote this today. It probably sucks.” Blah blah blah. Whatever, Ryan.

14.  Good Taste Tip (No. 2) – The Shangri-Las

The lady says, “Don’t be disappointed that it’s not an expensive bauble or the perfume you’ve been hoping for.” What? Bauble? I love how Mary wraps that Queens accent of hers around the word, but what does bauble mean? Merriam-Webster to the rescue: a trinket, something of trifling appeal. An “expensive” bauble would therefore seem unlikely, but not impossible. Anyway, it turns out that the word was more popular in Shakespeare’s time. A “fool’s bauble,” for instance, was a short stick with a head ornamented with asses’ ears, as in the old proverb, “If every fool should wear a bauble, fewel would be dear.” In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sneers at how “this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole,” a line that set critics like Henry Thomas Buckle abuzz: “The bauble used by fools was a phallus.” Oh my! Wait a minute . . . the Shangri-Las are dirty!

15.  Si tu reviens chez moi – Les 5 Gentlemen

This is bootleg French freakbeat (courtesy of Aquarium Drunkard) and it reeks of full-on rock ’n’ roll desperation. Which, of course, is what makes it so scarily compelling.

16.  Sparkle and Shine – Steve Earle

We saw Steve Earle in Charlottesville a few weeks ago, and he performed with his new wife Allison Moorer, who, let’s face it, is as hot as Earle is not. So I don’t blame him for writing this bauble in her honor, although it reminds me a bit of Lyle Lovett’s “I Love Everybody” [Mp3]. After Julia Roberts, Lovett was never quite the same. I wish better on Earle, who has always lived on the knife’s edge. I Feel Alright was perhaps his best album, and it couldn’t be further away from I Love Everybody.

17.  Bette Davis Eyes – Kim Carnes

We’ve been watching a lot of Bette Davis lately—All About Eve; Now, Voyager!; Jezebel—so I understand now what I didn’t get when this song was first a hit: that Bette Davis eyes are real, something to fear, covet, and respect. (In my opinion, the world needs more Bette Davises and Tallulah Bankheads.) What we have here is an acoustic update, but Carnes took the original to No. 1 in 1981, where it perched for nine weeks, becoming the year’s top song and the second most popular single of the entire decade behind (god help us) Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.” Okay, Carnes’ wasn’t actually the original. That honor goes to a 1974 recording by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who played in a blues band with Ry Cooder and toured with Van Morrison. She’s good people, in other words. (“When You Walk into the Room” [Mp3] is from 1964.)

18.  Both Sides Now – Allison Moorer

I’ve never listened to much Joni Mitchell, so when Moorer performed this the other night, it was new to me. The lyrics are haunting and beautiful (no surprise) and Moorer must have sung them well enough for me to notice and remember. Still, her voice is big; it’s built for full-throated gospel-country shouters and not this fey folkie stuff. “Total crap” is how our neighbor put it. “I just walked out and got some gelato.” I wouldn’t go that far, but I do prefer Miss Fortune (“Hey Jezebel” [Mp3]).

19.  Dickhead – Kate Nash

Nash is a Dublin-born Lily Allen knockoff who (also) sings in a knockoff Cockney accent and has been referred to as “a slutty Regina Spektor.” Which is all fine. I just like how she plays this so straight.

20.  Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) – The Delfonics

The Delfonics were a soul band from Philly that won a Grammy for this one in 1970. You might have thought that when New Kids on the Block charted with it in 1986 [Mp3] that would have killed the song dead forever. But Quentin Tarantino is something of a Resurrection Man (“Oh father, I should so like to be one when I’m quite growed up!”), making the song a clever point of reference in the unlikely romance between Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and her bail bondsman Max Cherry (played by the criminally underappreciated Robert Forster).

21.  You Were on My Mind – Jay & The Americans

This one started out in the hands of Ian & Sylvia [Mp3] (ick, honestly), became a huge hit in 1965 for the otherwise forgettable We Five (see them perform it on television), and finally found a decent home with Jay & The Americans, a pop vocal group about which there is little to say that’s interesting. Still, their rendition sounds like a perfect, shiny, unthreatening piece of ’60s art deco. Turn it up and scream, “I got troubles, oh-oh-oh, I got worries, oh-oh-oh!” and no more troubles, no more worries shall ye have.

22.  Sweet Sue, Just You  – The Mills Brothers

Speaking of great vocal groups, the Mills Brothers sang most of their instruments, too. (But I’ve already said that.)

23.  Dinah (Take 2) – Thelonious Monk

Bix Beiderbecke once said he never played a solo the same way twice because he never felt the same way twice. “That’s what I love about jazz,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?” Here’s a classic example of the improvisatory mindset, with Monk digging in to “Dinah” a second time and coming up with something different.

24.  Us – Regina Spektor

Spektor, meet Shelley and Baudelaire . . .

They made a statue of us
Our noses have begun to rust.
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
We’re living in a den of thieves,
Rummaging for answers in the pages.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Et l’homme impatient se change en bête fauve.

ADDITIONALLY: Download the complete mix in a zip file.

PREVIOUSLY: International Mix of Action; The Bix Mix; In the Lounge; My Sweet Hunk o’ Trash; Twins (The Cover Mix); The Lamplighter Mix; Move Along, No Green Here

IMAGE: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Blair Valley, California by William K. Waters