Word: balladeers
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...well, Powell has long been the unchallenged master of the jazz ballad. The extraordinary virtuosity and spine-chilling passion that gained him that title years ago were only flickeringly evident at his Birdland opening. But his audience vociferously agreed that he was still a master, his performance a giant step up from limbo...
...music most of yesterday's headlines: Too Many Martyrs (about Medgar Evers), Talking Cuban Crisis and even the Automation Song. The songs most likely to last are poetic if heavy protests like Knock on the Door, an indictment of Soviet terror, and Lou Marsh, a ballad about a social worker murdered in Spanish Harlem...
...deathbed in a Bangkok hospital, Thailand's Premier Sarit Thanarat held his comely wife in his arms and sang to her the old Thai ballad that begins: "The love of 100 mistresses could not be compared to the love one has for his own wife." Sarit may have been altogether too modest. After his death last December (of cirrhosis and other ailments of hard living), Bangkok papers carried the names of more than a hundred women who claimed publicly to have enjoyed his favors and hoped to get a piece of his estate. Among an inner circle...
...outset, the girls begin to yip like Chippewas and throw their skirts in the air while the orchestra saws out some Offenbach, and they kick up their legs in what can be precisely described as the can't-can't. Georges Ulmer, the man who wrote the ballad Pigalle and who acts as M.C., tells a joke: "The Folies-Bergère is an old institution, nearly 100 years old. Of course, lately we have changed some of the girls." He does not say which ones, and without radioactive carbon it is absolutely impossible to tell...
...reworked some of these materials to create some of his most famous poems. One such poem with a bawdy original is Comin' Thro' the Rye, in which a much earthier verb appears in the line: "Gin a body kiss a body/ Need a body cry." Another ballad, John Anderson, My Jo, is known to every schoolboy as a touching tribute to the strength of marital affection in old age: its source, doubtless known to every schoolboy in all Scotland, turns out to be a ballad where the old wife mocks the decline of her old husband...