Word: minstreling
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Clansman. Trained in the law but bored by it, Scott led a bluff and loyal clansman's life in George III's Scotland and collected the Border ballads he loved. At 33 he published his own ballad. The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and it sold an unheard-of 40,000 copies. After such narrative poems as Marmion and The Lady of the Lake (which started a great tourist rush for the Scottish moors and highlands), Scott started turning out his medieval romances and his beloved tales of bygone borderers and buccaneers...
...were dazzlingly costumed and the plot was explained in plain English. Hollywood's Carmen Jones, for its part, transformed the Seville siren into a beautiful American Negro factory girl, took the toreador from the bull into the prize ring and turned the words from Spanish-flavored French into minstrel-show English. With all these modern wonders, the Metropolitan Opera dared to compete, by staging a revival of Umberto Giordano's opera of the French Revolution, Andrea Chénier, a work it has not done in 21 years...
Died. Billy Beard, 74, famed blackface comedian who, as end man in the Al G. Fields minstrel shows, was known to theatergoers of a generation ago as "the party from the South"; of diabetes; in Atlanta...
Cole Porter never wrote these lines, but he (almost) might have. They are a memorable lampoon by the late Ring Lardner of Minstrel Porter's most famous attack of heartburn. Readers-as distinct from listeners-now have an opportunity to judge the accuracy of Critic Lardner's aim. In a new book out this week, 103 Lyrics of Cole Porter (selected by Fred Lounsberry-Random House; $4.50) were clamped between hard covers without so much as an ocarina accompaniment. It is a rare tribute to a lyricist, but it is also a bit of a dirty trick...
...Supreme Court wishes to black its face and have a minstrel, that is their business, but I deeply resent their blackening mine...