Word: grandstaff
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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...very young man, demobilized after World War I (he faked a birth certificate to join up at 15), Francis Marion Grandstaff could not decide whether to follow his father's profession of medicine or his childhood inclination to music. He solved his dilemma by taking up crime...
Indiana-born, sturdily built Grandstaff boxed a little, tried selling pianos. But he found pilfering the easiest way. The only trouble was that he almost always got caught. Finally, in 1940, he was picked up in Memphis for breaking into a store, stealing a $25 radio. It was his 20th conviction and his fourth in Tennessee, and in Tennessee four strikes are out. As a "habitual criminal," Frank Grandstaff was sent to the state penitentiary at Nashville for life...
Cowboys & Indians. But Grandstaff was also a habitual musician. In the penitentiary library, he came across a book called Big Spring: the Casual Biography of a Prairie Town-a folksy history by Big Spring (Texas) Druggist Shine Philips. From his piano-selling days, Grandstaff remembered Big Spring: a prairie town of 20,000 which had sprung up around a spring where buffaloes, Indians, cowboys and finally the Texas and Pacific R.R. had come for water. He decided to write some music about Big Spring...
Clapped into solitary for stealing luminal from the prison dispensary, Grandstaff could compose without disturbance. He wrote on the walls, worked out rhythmic passages by pounding his commode and the frame of his cot. When he was released from solitary, he put words & music on paper...