Black Jack David and the Gypsy King: The Mythic Roots of a Folk Song

Not long ago, I left these Louisiana swamps to go home for the weekend, back to the Arkansas Ozarks where I grew up.  I guess I was a little homesick, because I loaded my MP3 player with traditional songs; mostly old Anglo-Americans tunes from the southern hills.  Some those songs strike primal chords in my emotions, because I've heard them as far back as I can remember.

I can't play a lick on any instrument, but my great-grandfather, Neal Morris, was a singer and recollector of old songs, and he can be heard singing on some of the field recordings collected by the great folk music collector Alan Lomax.  Neal's son (my great uncle) was the folksinger and folklorist Jimmie Driftwood.  My great-grandfather died before I was born, but Jimmie Driftwood lived until I was in my mid-twenties.  I never got to know him that well, but I went to his house many times as a kid; and listened to him and the rest of my extended family sing into the night.  Sometimes, I would fall asleep, and have to be carried out to the car.  That twangy mountain music would run through my dreams all the way home.  No wonder I still have an Arkansas accent.

Timeline Site Gets a Facelift

 

I haven't been posting here much lately, because I've been working on updating one of my websites.  In an earlier post, I talked about how I had put my educational poster, Universal Heritage:  Timelines of the Universe, Life, and Humankind, online.  At first, I just made PDF's of all the timelines, and linked to those.  But all 16 of those were originally designed to fit on one poster, so they were a little, well, cramped looking.  I've expanded and updated them and turned them into actual webpages, and made the homepage a little more aesthetically pleasing and simple.  Since it isn't a poster anymore, I also moved from www.worldviewposters.com to a different domain: 

www.universetimelines.com

The whole thing is now full of hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles, so if you want to quickly find out more about something you see on one of the timelines, just click on it.  If you're wondering why I chose Wikipedia, I have a rather long-winded explanation here. 

Hope you enjoy looking at the new site, and if you have any questions or comments, please let me know at ross b mays at g mail dot com.

The Big Picture: History of the Universe Poster Goes Online

Lately I've been showcasing some old creations on this blog.  In the past, I took on much larger projects than I have time to do now.  Or maybe I'm just too lazy to create something new.  In any case, this is a poster I made a few years ago.  Yes, it's a timeline of the whole universe--like I said, I took on larger projects back then.  Anyway, I had about a thousand of these printed up. I've sold almost all of them, and I made a satisfying return on my investment.  I used to ship these all over the world (especially to Australia.  The Aussies loved them for some reason).  These days, though, I sell so few that it isn't really worth my time to ship them.  Buying mailing tubes, standing in line at the post office, getting emails from people in Romania whose poster was lost between here and there--it's a bit of a pain.  So, I'm setting it free...at least in electronic form.  It's available at www.worldviewposters.com.

If you happen to be interested in perusing a visual overview of the history of the universe (and who isn't, right?) you can click on the picture to open up PDF versions of the individual timelines.  I recommend zooming in to at least 125%.  You may want to start at the third timeline, which shows the full age of the universe, and then going backward and forward from there.  The first timeline deals with the big bang, and it's much more intimidating than the other ones.

Hope you enjoy it, and thanks to all the people who bought a copy!

Moi Egal à Toi

 This is just a short post to showcase this image.  I saw it in a documentary called Faubourg Treme - The Untold Story of Black New Orleans.  The woman in the image actually wasn't a New Orleanian.  She was Haitian, and the engraving was made around the time of the Haitian Revolution.  I think they chose to use it in a documentary about New Orleans because refugees from the revolution streamed into the city in 1809, more than doubling its population.  So there is a Haiti-New Orleans connection, but I imagine the real reason they used it is the caption, which translates as "I am your equal".  I don't know French, so I wouldn't have even noticed except that the documentary translated the main heading.  The rest of it says (if my amateurish translation can be trusted) "Color is nothing, the heart is everything; am I not your brother?"

I thought this was pretty moving.  Here's a young black woman, at a time when most black people in this hemisphere were enslaved, and commonly thought to be inferior beings, gazing straight ahead to meet anybody's eye. Her look seconds what the caption says.

But who was this woman?  What became of her?  The portrait doesn't say, and there doesn't even seem to be much written about the engraver, François Bonneville, even though he also did a portrait of Toussaint Louverture.  There's a lot of mystery here, and if I have time, I'll try to solve some of it. What's not mysterious, though, is what this image is saying, and how bold it was to say it at that time.  I don't know who that woman was, but she's got my respect.