Word: troubadour
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. John Tasker Howard, 73, historian and sympathetic critic of home grown music (Our American Music), whose biography, Stephen Foster, America's Troubadour, mined such nuggets as the fact that the No. 1 composer of fireside favorites got only $15 for Swanee River, a name he picked from an atlas after making a false start with "way down upon de Pedee ribber"; in West Orange...
Thanks to the characters he created, Runyon is best remembered as the sen timental troubadour of that most cynical of all streets. The truth is, though, that Runyon was all cynic himself. By romanticizing Broadway, he was thumbing his nose at the world of respectability that he mistrusted and despised Cold Blue Eyes. "When a prominent citizen gets jammed up with the rules," he once wrote, "there are always a lot of folks ready to turn on the brine for him. But when some bezark that no one ever heard of gets found out, they rush...
...aged couple, who befriended him in his lean years, and a menagerie of pets. Two members of the French Academy, Novelist Joseph Kessel and Film Maker Marcel Pagnol, have been promoting the initiation of Brassens into the august Academy as "one of the greatest contemporary poets, a modern troubadour who represents a new literary form...
...founded by Grandfather William Boyce Thompson), a pretty brunette who briefly filled the gossip columns in the late '40s when her divorce from polo-playing Polish Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen prompted him to shoot himself (he recovered), settled down to marry Morton Downey, radio's dulcet-toned troubadour of the '30s, and take an active director's role in minding her business; of cancer; in Manhattan...
Ever since he began singing in the caves around St. Germain-des-Prés in the late '40s, Ferre has been the reigning voice of the "Defenders of French Song," a tight little school of contemporary troubadour-poets. He despises literary snobbery, and the lyrics of his 200 songs pulse with the rough and jeering argot of Parisian streets. Legionnaires listened to his records in the crumbling days of French Indo-China. They can still be heard in Hanoi, as well as in New York, Dakar or any place where hypochondriacs have no intention of curing themselves...