Word: alberta
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...Alberta Hunter is better than ever...
When she made her debut as a singer, she was, in a word-her own word-"lousy." But that was at the beginning of the century. Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, Edward VII was King and she was ten or so. In the years since then, Alberta Hunter's voice has got better, and better and better still. Two weeks ago, when she started a four-month stand at Greenwich Village's jazz club the Cookery, it may have been the best ever. Or, as she puts it in Workin' Man, a song she wrote...
...else alive who can sing like Hunter. The second she steps on a stage, it becomes a time machine, and her audience is transported to an era most people know only from scratchy records, the age of the great blues singers: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and, of course, Alberta Hunter. So small and fragile that she looks as if she would be tossed head over heels by the giant hoop earrings she always wears, Hunter never belts out a song. Instead, she unwraps it, slowly and artfully. Her voice is deeper and more mellow than it was 50 years...
Fortunately, she started out with sophisticated and very tough audiences. Born in Memphis, where her mother was a maid in a whorehouse and her father a Pullman porter, she always knew she wanted to sing. When Alberta was still a child, she ran away to Chicago, where, she had heard, singers could make $10 a week. She was helped by a friend of the family and, after making a pest of herself, was finally given a chance to sing at Dago Frank's, a saloon where prostitutes and pimps hung...
From the dusty high plains of Montana to the fertile corn belt in eastern Iowa, workmen by the thousands have completed another and bigger project, the Northern Border Pipeline. The line reaches 823 miles from the Canadian border at Alberta to the Midwestern U.S., and by November will be transporting 975 million cu. ft. of fuel per day, or enough to heat 1.4 million homes in the dead of winter. Construction of the $1.1 billion system began in the spring of 1981, and has required on occasion as many as 5,000 hardhats and other workers, laboring at nine different...