Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Candlelight flickered against the low ceiling of Washington's Showboat Lounge one night last week as a mild-mannered Virginian named Charlie Byrd started strumming the strings of his guitar. With bass and drum accompaniment, he played his own composition, Spanish Guitar Blues, went on to a hot-swinging number called Yoti Took Advantage of Me, and then pulled a 180° switch-two solo Bach gavottes, sedate Frescobaldi variations, Villa-Lobos' rolling Prelude in E Minor. At 33, Byrd is that rarity, a musician so versatile that he qualifies as one of the world...
...self-styled conservative. Byrd-refuses to follow the trend that is breaking down the barrier between classics and jazz, will not hop up a piece of serious music. "It's a wedding that loses the best of both," he says. "It destroys the fire of jazz-which should be hot-blooded and swing hard-and it makes inferior classical music." Byrd keeps the forms divorced, plays one, then the other. "The arrangement," says Showboat Manager Peter Lambros, "has been extremely profitable for both of us." With room for only 80 customers, the small cellar club grosses $3.500 a week...
Stompin' & Segovia. As a child in Chuckatuck, Va., Byrd thought at first that he wanted to be a baseball player, but there was too much music around. "My dad ran the community store, an informal meeting place for farm hands on Saturday afternoons," Charlie recalls. "Some would bring their guitars, and there would be a lot of singin', playin' and spittin' tobacco juice. It was a real stompin' brand of music." Charlie's father taught his son the guitar, and at twelve Charlie was playing on a local radio show. World...
...test came in the just-integrated Washington suburb of Alexandria (pop. 62,000). where Lawyer Armistead L. Boothe, 51, Virginia-born and Oxford-educated, held his senate seat against the combined forces of Virginia-style citizens' councils and all that the Byrd forces could throw against him. Byrd and Son Harry Jr., 44-year-old state senator, personally made calls and wrote letters for the candidacy of their cousin, Marshall J. Beverley, whose savage (for Virginia) campaign was managed by Harry Jr.'s brother-in-law, James M. Thomson. Almond maintained the fiction that he was not involved...
...against the worst the diehards could do. Come next session of the legislature, the narrow majorities by which the moderate school program squeaked through last April will probably be enlarged by the votes of legislators who once were simply afraid to vote for any bill that might stir up Byrd's anger...