Word: ballades
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hillbilly ballad The Martins and the Coys is a burlesque of backwoods feuding which will delight lovers of radio rurality and of Paul Webb's mountaineer cartoons, and offend those who think such caricature as insulting as the hush-mah-mouf kind of comic contempt for Negroes. All the Cats Join In is a jukebox setting of Benny Goodman's record, in which orgiastic hepcats and bobby-soxers, mad on chocolate malteds, tear all over the place, paced and sustained by the sketching of a deft, rapid pencil. It will satisfy the young and the benign, sicken those...
...Atom Bomb ("Hear the squawking friends of Hearst, they think we ought to use it first"); Lee Hays, son of an Arkansas preacher, told of his Rankin Tree ("It poisoned my potatoes, it poisoned my squash . . ."), and a pretty young union maiden named Eleanor Young did a slightly bawdy ballad about Mary Lee of the Bourgeoisie ("I've married Joe of the C.I.O."). Other topics: the Western Union strike, Churchill and Franco, housing ("I spend my days in Central Park and my nights on the I.R.T...
This barroom-ballad of a tale concerns Delia Green (Ruby Hill), a loose and lovely charmer who chucks a saloonkeeper for a whirlwind jockey called Little Augie (Harold Nicholas). The saloonkeeper gets plugged by a discarded flame, but thinking that Augie fired the shot, puts a dying-breath curse on him. Augie's luck changes and, hoping to lift the jinx, Delia leaves him. But his luck soon returns, and so does the lady...
Housman's emotions were not only split between the great and the puerile; their range was remarkably narrow and primitive. His natural meter was quite as primitive-chiefly ballad stanzas (with some beautiful original variants on them), and the four-beat couplets which are the basic pulse of English poetry. But his subtle variety and mastery of tone, developed upon those few simple emotions and within that narrow range of key, are as remarkable as anything short of Mozart's minuets. Only the greatest poets had a better musical ear, a subtler handling of meter...
Concluded Gould: "Ratings have come to fulfill the sinister function of being the absolute critical standard for radio programing. It is as though a Rembrandt, a Beethoven symphony, a burlesque comic, a Tin Pan Alley ballad, a Keats sonnet and a pulp-magazine serial all were to be weighed on the same scales. That would seem too much even for radio...