Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Video’ Category

You never know what you’ll find when you go searching around on YouTube. I have written here before about searching for the song Peoria. I was hoping to find a performance of the song by Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band that I remembered from my childhood, but instead I found a lively performance by the Duesseldorfer Banjo Club.

Last night I was searching again, this time looking for videos of Clancy Hayes, popular singer and banjo player who did the vocals for the Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band. What I found was a record I didn’t know existed, Hayes singing a song for Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1960 Presidential campaign.

It’s a catchy number, featuring lines like this:

They’ve proved they have the know-how
To guide our ship of state
Through fair and stormy weather
That’s for sure!

Not much video in this video — it’s just a still shot of the record. Great Tweed label, though!

YouTube’s Music Discovery Project is a great new tool that produces playlists of music videos. Enter a name, and you get back a playlist of videos by that artist, a list of related artists, and a “mix tape” of videos of your artist and similar performers. You can deselect any videos you don’t like, and save the playlist to your YouTube account.

The examples on the YouTube page are people like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and the Black-Eyed Peas, but I’ve found it works just as well with the real oldies like Cab Calloway, Jack Teagarden and Kate Smith.

There are a lot of music recommendation services and personalized internet radio services out there which may have more features, but I like the speed and simplicity of YouTube’s service, along with the video content that’s available here, especially for the old stuff. None of the recommendation services are perfect, but I like using them even if I disagree with a lot of the selections. This can be a good way to find new artists — or in my case, new OLD artists.

Here’s a screenshot of the Mix Tape page for Jack Teagarden. You can click on this to see a larger image, or better yet, just go to YouTube and try this yourself! You don’t need to have a YouTube account to try this, only to save the playlist.

• Music Discovery Project — Direct link to this YouTube service
• Jack Teagarden and Friends — My video mix playlist of Jack Teagarden and similar artists
• YouTube Music Discovery — Post from the unofficial Google Operating System blog
• YouTube Launches Music Discovery Project “Disco” — Post from RollingStone

Caught Mapping — I’ve always loved maps, so I was happy to run across this short educational film from 1940 on the Internet Archive. It’s about how road maps were kept updated. Information was gathered by pairs of men driving around the country in specially-equipped cars, making measurements and taking notes. Back at the office, cartographers used the notes to update the maps by drawing on clear overlays placed over the previous edition of the map. The overlay was photographed with a huge camera onto a glass plate, which was used to create a printing plate to print the overlay onto the map. Quite an ingenious process, actually.

As the narrator says, “Yes, it’s swell teamwork on the part of everyone that gets speedy, accurate information for modern roadmaps!”

This film was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, known for its stylish and imaginative training and promotional films produced for the armed forces, the automotive industry and other industrial clients. Caught Mapping was sponsored by Chevrolet, and not surprisingly there are lots of great shots of modern, reliable automobiles handling all sorts of road conditions, and running smoothly enough to allow the passenger to be taking legible notes. There are also a few shots near the beginning of the motoring public consulting road maps. I particularly like the two young women wearing their glamorous hats, one of which looks like a big feather was shot straight through it.

The film runs a little less than ten minutes and is an interesting and informative look at the ways street maps were maintained in the days before GIS, GPS, satellite imagery, Google Maps and Google Earth! I wonder if fifty years from now, people will be looking back at the primitive processes Google is using to gather the imagery for Streetview, which is not unlike the road warriors driving around to personally check every inch of road.

Caught Mapping — View the video on the Internet Archive site, with more information and different video formats to download.

Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town
Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around
Bet your bottom dollar you’ll lose the blues in Chicago
Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down

I’m off to Chicago for the American Library Association conference tomorrow, and this song is stuck in my head. It plays there pretty much nonstop every time I’m there. My father used to play the Bob Scobey record of this all the time when I was a child, and the lyrics fascinated me. I had no clear idea of what a “toddlin’” town might be, but it sounded cool. I assumed that “Billy Sunday” was a mythical character, like Mother Nature and Father Time, and assumed that this line meant that Chicago didn’t observe the kind of Blue Laws we had in Massachusetts, and that people there went grocery shopping on the Sabbath. I wondered about State Street, that great street, and wondered exactly what they did there that they don’t do on Broadway, but thought perhaps it was better not to ask!

Here’s a wonderful version of the song, featuring Blossom Seeley (voice), Lil Hardin-Armstrong (voice and keyboard), Jack Teagarden (Trombone) and Jimmy Noone (clarinet.) The video quality is pretty bad, but that gives it a hazy, dreamlike quality that I think works well here.