Word: minstrell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...before Richard Skelton was born, and when Red was ten he ran away from home to join a show-business type known as Dr. R. E. Lewis-an itinerant medicine man who peddled a solution of water, sugar and Epsom salts called the Hot Springs System Tonic. Mississippi showboats, minstrel shows and vaudeville later gave Red his secondary education and set him up for radio, Hollywood and television, but Dr. Lewis, inadvertently, had already shown him his best professional asset. The "doctor" pushed Red off the medicine wagon one day, and when the boy nose-dived to the ground...
...popular song, singing: "Hello, Central, give me Heaven." She wanted to talk to her mother. And never did the eternal triangle chime more funereally than it did in the Nineties, most notably under the hand of Paul Dresser, songwriter (The Banks of the Wabash), monologuist, medicine-wagon minstrel and older brother of Theodore Dreiser. Dresser's He Brought Home Another might have qualified as the first great aria in soap opera...
...Souchon Recalls Early New Orleans Minstrel Days and Blues (Golden Crest). During the day Dr. Edward Souchon, 67, functions as a surgeon and as director of a New Orleans life insurance firm. At night he can be found strumming a jazz guitar with the Banjo Bums or the Six and Seven-Eighths Band. In his first LP starring role, Jazz Authority Souchon offers some rambling recollections of pre-World War I New Orleans music and provides a few choice examples-Sweet Baby Doll, Animules Ball-in a gravelly, sowbelly voice that has the unvarnished ring of authenticity...
...scandalized the Chicago area from Cicero to Lake Forest, a Second City actress would rush onstage each night, frantically dial a number and say: "Hello, FBI? There's a policeman hanging around in front of my house." Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd is nightly impersonated in a minstrel show, puts on blackface and sings: "How I love to pick old massa's cotton." But "the thing I like most," adds Byrd, "is to take this off and be a white man." He tries-but the black will not come away from his face...
Romantic love did not always exist, says Author Epton. It was invented by the troubadours, the hobohemian minstrel poets of the late Middle Ages. Medieval ladies spent half their time racing across the jousting fields with buckets of hot water, bathing and bandaging strange men. It remained for the troubadours to glamorize the knight-lady relationship and raise it to the level of a semimystical romantic cult. For all their platonic, fig-leafy sentiments, the troubadours themselves were a crudely carnal lot, and they gave romance in France a lasting split personality: love and marriage became contradictory terms...