Word: ballads
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...well as in dozens of movie houses in California, was a 45-minute documentary, Justice and Caryl Chessman, scripted by a sometime San Quentin inmate (forgery), and bent to the cause of clemency for Chessman. On jukeboxes across the land, an imitation folk song called The Ballad of Caryl Chessman was mournfully urging, "Let him live, let him live, let him live...
...trying to interrupt. The whole was something less than the sum of its brilliant parts. Pleasant surprises of the evening were Frederick Jacobi's Yeibichai: Variations for Orchestra on an American Indian Theme, which employed some interestingly experimental orchestral effects, and Lamar Stringfield's Symphonic Ballad, "The Legend of John Henry," which used the traditional folk song ("John Henry said to his captain, 'A man ain't nothing but a man' ") in a skillful series of fragments, developed after the course of the legendary hero's life...
Click of Corks. The close-cropped, woolly head and the sleek white Fifth Avenue gown come from different worlds, but the combination has a charm and grace of its own. In a ballad, she maintains the clean, classic phrasing of a church singer, she can be roguish in a West Indian ditty about a naughty flea, and she can make a chilling lament of A Warrior's Retreat Song-"Jikele maweni ndiyahamba/Jikele maweni indiyahamba," which she says suggests, "We've had it, we can't make it." Memory brings back the "Back of the Moon," a black...
...doing Gilbert's spoof of English attitudes, notably those toward the Orient which did so much to produce the Far-Eastern mess of the 19th Century. The chorus, which can really sing this time, is at all times a source of delight, whether they be joining in the sentimental ballad, or kicking around an imaginary chopped-off head...
Adults plant a child's garden of verse. Juvenile satire nourishes it. What British children did to The Ballad of Davy Crockett in 1956 should make Walt Disney shudder. Not a vestige remained of the 17 official verses. New versions ranged from "Born on a table top in Joe's café,/ The dirtiest place in the U.S.A." to "Born on a rooftop in Battersea/ Joined the Teds when he was only three...