Word: voodoos
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Divorced. William Buehler Seabrook, 55, travel writer, student of cannibalism, voodoo and primitive sex customs (Jungle Ways, The Magic Island); by Marjorie Worthington Seabrook, 41, his onetime companion in African exploration; in Newburgh, N.Y. She was his second wife, he her second husband. Her first husband married Seabrook's first wife...
Future Coffee Concerts include: an oratorio version of the chichi-melodious Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera, Four Saints in Three Acts; Spanish music (with the bagpipers); voodoo dancers and Brazilian Soprano Elsie Houston; a "Jubilee" of gospel-singing Negro quartets (some with three or five members) and the guitar-playing bishop. The bishop, the Rev. Utah Smith, wears paper wings, lately inspired Composer-Critic Thomson to write: "As a stimulator of choric transports he incites the faithful to movements and behavior not very different from those of any true jitterbug. Myself, I found it distinctly pleasant to hear good swing...
...Houston. She studied singing in Europe, sang in nightspots, married a surrealist poet whose name she will not tell because he is anti-Nazi, and still in Paris. Singer Houston has been in the U. S. since 1938, is currently at Manhattan's Rainbow Room, where she performs voodoo songs by candlelight. At the Museum's opening concert she went through her routine with a pair of candles which, by order of the fire department, were enclosed in chimneys. In the darkened house Elsie Houston was something to see as she slapped a tom-tom, crooned incantations...
Willie Seabrook is the Richard Halliburton of the occult. The Magic Island credulously expounded Haitian voodoo, introduced "zombi" into U. S. speech. Adventures in Arabia found Seabrook among the whirling dervishes, learning to become a trance mystic. Jungle Ways presented him studying magic on the Ivory Coast, photographing phallic monuments, eating human flesh ("like good, fully developed veal"). Asylum was a frank account of another weird region: a New York insane asylum where he was cured of dipsomania...
...civic reforms has hoary Memphis seen under the rule of the "Red Snapper," Boss Crump. One was to make all east-west streets avenues. Caught in that genteeling was the street of dance halls, voodoo doctors, fortune tellers and saloons that Blueswriter W. C. Handy made famous in Beale Street Blues. Last week a counter-reform movement gathered such power that Mayor Walter Chandler, longtime Crumpet, had to take notice. Memphis Negroes couldn't get used to living on Beale Avenue. They wanted to be back on Beale Street, the way the tune says...