Word: ballading
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...superannuated fable about peewees at the poor farm, a mixture of practical jokery, youthful fixations and hokum melodrama. Caustic little Miss Withers is most successful when, as the black sheep of an orphan asylum, she steals Thanksgiving turkeys from a grocer's truck, chants superbly a ballad called Then Came the Indians...
...tune Oh! Susanna as a national theme song. In the course of six days at Cleveland, bands at the Republican National Convention played Oh! Susanna 1,800 times by official count. Into a class with The Sidewalks of New York and California, Here I Come passed the old banjo ballad written by Stephen Foster nearly 100 years ago and first sung into U. S. tradition by the gold-rushing Forty-Niners...
Died, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 62, famed British poet, critic, novelist, militant Roman Catholic controversialist; of heart disease; at "Top Meadow" at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Proud of his romantic poetry (The Wild Knight, The Ballad of the White Horse), he was best known for the books in which he defended his conversion to Catholicism (Heretics, Orthodoxy), his novels (The Man Who Was Thursday), his biography of Charles Dickens, his "Father Brown" detective fiction, his sparkling editorship of G. K.'s Weekly. So close was he to his good friend Hilaire Belloc that their violently medieval, anticapitalist, anti-materialist philosophy earned...
...until last month. Then it began to make news aplenty. Budapest police, investigating the suicide of a shoemaker named Joseph Keller, found that Keller had left a note in which he quoted lyrics from Composer Seress' poignant Szomorú Vasárnap. Further inquiry revealed that the lugubrious ballad had persuaded 17 other impressionable Magyars to take their lives. Two shot their brains out while hearing a gypsy band play the piece, others killed themselves listening to recorded versions, several leaped into the Danube clutching the sheet music. The Budapest police banned Gloomy Sunday...
...point of the performance: shrill Gracie Barrie singing I've Got To Get Hot, a ballad about a choir singer turned crooner which includes the following tristich: I've squelched my ideals, Now I belch at my meals...