Word: tonk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...enough that the sheet music of Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, sold more than a million copies and made the son of a former slave well-to-do almost overnight. Not for Scott Joplin. As a youth he may have earned his living playing honky-tonk piano by night in a string of saloons and bordellos in the South and Midwest. But what few realized was that he was expertly tutored in harmony, counterpoint and the works of the classical masters...
...movie is a honky-tonk panorama of contemporary America and most of its obvious contradictions: a flagrant, nearly frenzied, workaday energy and a kind of moral deadness; a proud regard for history and heritage and an abiding need to construct a synthetic mythology; a sweeping national certitude and the hypocrisy that comes with it. Altman is fearless in his thematic ambitions for Nashville, and it is a good measure of his success that the movie is always fleet and supple, never top-heavy. The director and his talented collaborator Joan Tewkesbury (who also did the screenplay for Altman...
...book is as full of holes as some of the bullet-sieved characters. Roxie Hart (Gwen Verdon), a honky-tonk '20s entertainer, murders her lover and beats the rap, thanks to a slick mouthpiece, Billy Flynn (Jerry Orbach). This scarcely matters. What matters is the erotic poetry in motion that uncoils whenever Verdon and her sister in crime Velma Kelly (Chita Rivera) do their solos and duets. They pace the show with spunk incarnate. The chorus is jazzily bacchanalian, and Patricia Zipprodt's eye-riveting costumes swirl right out of a decadent Brechtian Berlin. Chicago is a cinch...
Hint of Passion. At 25, Parsons was already a star of longhair country, who was stretching folk material across thudding rock rhythms. Emmylou had a gift for penetrating to the heart of a lyric. Parsons taught her to sing honky-tonk ballads like his Sin City, and soon invited her to Los Angeles to do back-up harmonies for his albums (GP and Grievous Angel). When Parsons died in 1973, she was personally and professionally devastated. "Gram turned me on to root country, to George Jones with his East Texas twang," she says. "I still try to learn Gram...
...just finished her sixth movie in the past two years, and last week she began work on her seventh, Alfred Hitchcock's Deceit. She has not sought out safe, sympathetic parts. She has played the teasing Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust, the honky-tonk waitress Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, the low-down and libidinous Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and the victimized Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint. Right now she is within hailing distance of being what she calls "a first-rank star...