Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a genre of American roots music that developed in the 1940s in the United States Appalachian region. The genre derives its name from the Blue Grass Boys. Bluegrass has roots in traditional English and Scottish ballads and dance tunes, by traditional African-American blues and jazz; the Blue Grass Boys played a Mountain Music style that Bill learned in Asheville, North Carolina from bands like Wade Mainer's and other popular acts on radio station WWNC. It was further developed by musicians who played with him, including 5-string banjo player Earl Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt. Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe characterized the genre as: "Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'. It's Holiness and Baptist. It's blues and jazz, it has a high lonesome sound."Bluegrass features acoustic string instruments and emphasizes the offbeat. Notes are anticipated in contrast to laid back blues where notes are behind the beat, which creates the higher energy characteristic of bluegrass. In bluegrass, as in some forms of jazz, one or more instruments each takes its turn playing the melody and improvising around it, while the others perform accompaniment.
This is in contrast to old-time music, in which all instruments play the melody together or one instrument carries the lead throughout while the others provide accompaniment. Breakdowns are characterized by rapid tempos and unusual instrumental dexterity and sometimes by complex chord changes. There are three major subgenres of bluegrass. Traditional bluegrass has musicians playing folk songs, tunes with traditional chord progressions, using only acoustic instruments, with an example being Bill Monroe. Progressive bluegrass groups may use electric instruments and import songs from other genres rock & roll. Examples include Cadillac Bearfoot. Another subgenre, bluegrass gospel, uses Christian lyrics, soulful three- or four-part harmony singing, sometimes the playing of instrumentals. A newer development in the bluegrass world is Neo-traditional bluegrass. Bluegrass music has attracted a diverse following worldwide. Unlike mainstream country music, bluegrass is traditionally played on acoustic stringed instruments.
The fiddle, five-string banjo, guitar and upright bass are joined by the resonator guitar and harmonica or Jew's harp. This instrumentation originated in rural dance bands and is the basis on which the earliest bluegrass bands were formed; the guitar is now most played with a style referred to as flatpicking, unlike the style of early bluegrass guitarists such as Lester Flatt, who used a thumb pick and finger pick. Banjo players use the three-finger picking style made popular by banjoists such as Earl Scruggs. Fiddlers play in thirds and fifths, producing a sound, characteristic to the bluegrass style. Bassists always play pizzicato adopting the "slap-style" to accentuate the beat. A bluegrass bass line is a rhythmic alternation between the root and fifth of each chord, with occasional walking bass excursions. Instrumentation has been a continuing topic of debate. Traditional bluegrass performers believe the "correct" instrumentation is that used by Bill Monroe's band, the Blue Grass Boys. Departures from the traditional instrumentation have included dobro, harmonica, autoharp, electric guitar, electric versions of other common bluegrass instruments, resulting in what has been referred to as "newgrass."
Apart from specific instrumentation, a distinguishing characteristic of bluegrass is vocal harmony featuring two, three, or four parts with a dissonant or modal sound in the highest voice, a style described as the "high, lonesome sound." The ordering and layering of vocal harmony is called the "stack". A standard stack has the lead in the middle and a tenor at the top. Alison Krauss and Union Station provide a good example of a different harmony stack with a baritone and tenor with a high lead, an octave above the standard melody line, sung by the female vocalist. However, by employing variants to the standard trio vocal arrangement, they were following a pattern existing since the early days of the genre; the Stanley Brothers utilized a high baritone part on several of their trios recorded for Columbia records during their time with that label. Mandolin player Pee Wee Lambert sang the high baritone above Ralph Stanley's tenor, both parts above Carter's lead vocal; this trio vocal arrangement was variously used by other groups as well.
In the 1960s Flatt and Scruggs added a fifth part to the traditional quartet parts on gospel songs, the extra part being a high baritone. The use of a high lead with the tenor and baritone below it was most famously employed by the Osborne Brothers who first employed it during their time with MGM records in the latter half of the 1950s; this vocal arrangement would be the home aspect of the Osbornes' sound with Bobby's high, clear voice at the top of the vocal stack. Bluegrass tunes can be described as narratives on the everyday lives of the people whence the music came. Aside from laments about loves lost, interpersonal tensions and unwanted changes to the region (e.g. the visible effects of moun
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog digital recording. Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a microphone diaphragm that senses changes in atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic sound waves and records them as a mechanical representation of the sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph record. In magnetic tape recording, the sound waves vibrate the microphone diaphragm and are converted into a varying electric current, converted to a varying magnetic field by an electromagnet, which makes a representation of the sound as magnetized areas on a plastic tape with a magnetic coating on it. Analog sound reproduction is the reverse process, with a bigger loudspeaker diaphragm causing changes to atmospheric pressure to form acoustic sound waves. Digital recording and reproduction converts the analog sound signal picked up by the microphone to a digital form by the process of sampling.
This lets the audio data be transmitted by a wider variety of media. Digital recording stores audio as a series of binary numbers representing samples of the amplitude of the audio signal at equal time intervals, at a sample rate high enough to convey all sounds capable of being heard. A digital audio signal must be reconverted to analog form during playback before it is amplified and connected to a loudspeaker to produce sound. Prior to the development of sound recording, there were mechanical systems, such as wind-up music boxes and player pianos, for encoding and reproducing instrumental music. Long before sound was first recorded, music was recorded—first by written music notation also by mechanical devices. Automatic music reproduction traces back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case, a hydropowered organ that played interchangeable cylinders. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "...cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century."
The Banū Mūsā brothers invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine. Carvings in the Rosslyn Chapel from the 1560s may represent an early attempt to record the Chladni patterns produced by sound in stone representations, although this theory has not been conclusively proved. In the 14th century, a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder was introduced in Flanders. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs, musical clocks, barrel pianos, music boxes. A music box is an automatic musical instrument that produces sounds by the use of a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc so as to pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb; the fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books. The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store a long piece of music; the most sophisticated of the piano rolls were hand-played, meaning that the roll represented the actual performance of an individual, not just a transcription of the sheet music.
This technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls were in continuous mass production from 1896 to 2008. A 1908 U. S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, there were between 70,000 and 75,000 player pianos manufactured, between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 piano rolls produced; the first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through the air was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings, called phonautograms, made in 1857, they consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a vibrating stylus that cut through a coating of soot as the paper was passed under it. An 1860 phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was played back as sound for the first time in 2008 by scanning it and using software to convert the undulating line, which graphically encoded the sound, into a corresponding digital audio file.
On April 30, 1877, French poet, humorous writer and inventor Charles Cros submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris explaining his proposed method, called the paleophone. Though no trace of a working paleophone was found, Cros is remembered as the earliest inventor of a sound recording and reproduction machine; the first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The invention soon spread across the globe and over the next two decades the commercial recording and sale of sound recordings became a growing new international industry, with the most popular titles selling millions of units by the early 1900s; the development of mass-production techniques enabled cylinder recordings to become a major new consumer item in industrial countries and the cylinder was the main consumer format from the late 1880s until around 1910. The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone record credited to Emile Berliner and patented in 1887, though others had demonstrated simi
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is an American tire company founded by Harvey Firestone in 1900 to supply solid rubber side-wire tires for fire apparatus, pneumatic tires for wagons and other forms of wheeled transportation common in the era. Firestone soon saw the huge potential for marketing tires for automobiles, the company was a pioneer in the mass production of tires. Harvey Firestone had a personal friendship with Henry Ford, used this to become the original equipment supplier of Ford Motor Company automobiles, was active in the replacement market. In 1988, the company was sold to the Japanese Bridgestone Corporation. Firestone was based in Akron, Ohio the hometown of its archrival and two other midsized competitors, General Tire and Rubber and BFGoodrich. Founded on August 3, 1900, the company initiated operations with 12 employees. Together and Goodyear were the largest suppliers of automotive tires in North America for over 75 years. In 1906, Henry Ford chose Firestone to supply tires for its car models.
In 1918, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company of Canada was incorporated in Hamilton and the first Canadian-made tire rolled off the line on September 15, 1922. During the 1920s, Firestone produced the Oldfield tire, named for racing driver Barney Oldfield. In 1926, the company opened one of the world's biggest rubber plantations in Liberia, West Africa, spanning more than one million acres; that year, the company opened its first Firestone Tire and Service Center. Firestone Complete Auto Care is the division of Firestone that offers automotive maintenance and repair, including tires. In 1927, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone took a trip to southern California to select locations for their new factories. Friends say Ford wanted to be near the ocean and picked Long Beach and suggested Firestone go to South Gate; the tiny community southeast of downtown Los Angeles was agricultural at the time and Firestone found 40 acres of beanfield to house his new manufacturing plant. Architects Curlett and Beelman created a spectacular four-story Italianate complex, with its own power plant and gorgeous polychrome murals by Gladding, McBean depicting the tire and rubber-making process.
A year after the plant opened in 1928, it doubled in size, grew to nearly one million square feet by 1954. The town grew around Firestone, its main boulevard was named after Harvey, Los Angeles became the number one tire market in the country. By the mid-1970s, Ford and GM had massive layoffs as Firestone and other manufacturers opened new plants in non-union locales like Wilson, North Carolina. After considerable downsizing, the end at South Gate came in 1980 when 1,300 workers were laid off and the plant closed. East Los Angeles College has proposed a new satellite campus at the site. In 1928, the company built a factory in Brentford, England, a longtime Art Deco landmark on a major route into the city. In 1936, the company opened a plant in Tennessee. With a work force exceeding 3,000 employees, the Memphis plant was the largest tire manufacturer in the company's worldwide operation. On July 1, 1963, the company celebrated the production of 100 million tires in Memphis; the plant was closed in 1982.
On October 11, 1941, the Firestone Rubber and Latex plant in Fall River Mass had 5 out of 8 buildings and at least 15,000 tons of rubber destroyed by fire. The fire incurred $12 million in damage. During World War II, the company was called on by the U. S. Government to make artillery shells, aluminum kegs for food transport, rubberized military products. Barrage balloons were produced at Akron. Firestone ranked 55th among U. S. corporations in the value of wartime military production contracts. In the 1940s, Firestone was given a defense contract to produce plastic helmet liners. In 1951, Firestone was given the defense contract for the MGM-5 Corporal missile. Firestone was given a total of $6,888,796 for the first 200 units. Known as the "Embryo of the Army," it was a surface-to-surface guided missile which could deliver a high-explosive warhead up to 75 nautical miles, it was modified to be able to carry a nuclear payload for use in the event of Cold War hostilities in Eastern Europe. Built in southern California, this missile was replaced in 1962 by the MGM-29 Sergeant system.
In 1961, Firestone acquired the Dayton Tire division from the Dayco Corporation. Dayco sued both Firestone and Goodyear, alleging that the two companies conspired to monopolize the tire industry in the United States; the United States District Court dismissed the lawsuit. In late 1979, Firestone brought in John Nevin, the ex-head of Zenith Electronics, as president to save the hemorrhaging company from total collapse, it was more than a billion dollars in debt at the time, losing $250 million a year. Nevin closed nine of the company's seventeen manufacturing plants, including six in one day, relocated the company from its ancestral home in Akron to Chicago, he spun off non-tire related businesses, including the Firestone Country Club. In 1988, after discussions with Pirelli, Nevin negotiated the sale of the company to the Japanese company Bridgestone, able to buy the company for much less than it had been worth a decade and a half earlier; the combined Bridgestone / Firestone North American operations are now based in Nashville, Tennessee.
The companies celebrated a 20-year anniversary of the merger in 2008, changed the tire division name to Bridgestone Americ
Louisiana Hayride
Louisiana Hayride was a radio and television country music show broadcast from the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium in Shreveport, that during its heyday from 1948 to 1960 helped to launch the careers of some of the greatest names in American country and western music. Elvis Presley performed on the radio version of the program in 1954 and made his first television appearance on the television version of Louisiana Hayride on March 3, 1955; the creators of the show took the name from the 1941 book with that title by Harnett Thomas Kane, an examination of the "Louisiana Hayride" scandals of 1939–1940 that sent to prison such notables as Louisiana State University President James Monroe Smith and former Louisiana building superintendent George A. Caldwell. First broadcast on April 3, 1948 from the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Shreveport, Horace Logan was the original producer and emcee; the musical cast for the inaugural broadcast included: the Bailes Brothers and Jack, the Tennessee Mountain Boys with Kitty Wells, the Four Deacons, Curley Kinsey and the Tennessee Ridge Runners, Harmie Smith, the Ozark Mountaineers, the Mercy Brothers, Tex Grimsley and the Texas Showboys.
The show was soon made into a Broadway attraction called Louisiana Hayride. Within a year of its debut, the program was so popular that a regional 25-station network was set up to broadcast portions of the show, was heard overseas on Armed Forces Radio; the flagship station of the program was KWKH/1130 in Shreveport. The popularity of Louisiana Hayride spawned various incarnations in other parts of the United States, most notably in Cincinnati on WLW radio and television. Horace Logan continued to produce Louisiana Hayride until 1957. In 1999, Logan published a book about the Hayride that received acclaim from reviewers such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Beginning with the successful first show on April 3, 1948, Louisiana Hayride ranked second only to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in terms of importance until ABC began telecasting Ozark Jubilee in 1955. While the Opry, the Jubilee and the Hayride all showcased established stars, the Hayride was where talented, but virtual unknowns, were given exposure to a large audience.
Over the years, country music greats such as Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Jimmie Davis, Will Strahan, Slim Whitman, Floyd Cramer, Sonny James, Hank Snow, Faron Young, Johnny Horton, Jim Reeves, Claude King, Jimmy Martin, George Jones and The Three Wise Men, Johnny Cash, Frankie Miller, Tex Ritter, Cowboy Jack Hunt & Little Joe Hunt of the Rhythm Ranch Hands, Nat Stuckey, Lefty Frizzell, among many others, performed on Louisiana Hayride. By mid-1954, a special 30-minute portion of Louisiana Hayride was being broadcast every Saturday on the AFN Pacific channel of the United Kingdom Scottish Forces Radio Network. On October 16 of that year, Elvis Presley appeared on the radio program. Presley's performance of his debut release on the Sun Records label, "That's All Right", brought a tepid response, according to former Hayride emcee Frank Page. Nonetheless, Presley was signed to a one-year contract for future appearances. Presley became so popular that after his final appearance on Hayride in 1956, emcee Horace Logan announced to the crowd a phrase that would become famous: "Elvis has left the building."The immediate and enormous demand for more of Presley's new kind of rockabilly music resulted in a sharp decline in the popularity of the Louisiana Hayride that until that point had been a country music venue.
On March 3, 1955, Presley made his first television appearance on the television version of The Louisiana Hayride, carried by KSLA-TV, the CBS affiliate in Shreveport. Within a few years and roll had come to dominate the music scene, on August 27, 1960, Louisiana Hayride ended its primary run. However, KWKH continued to use the Louisiana Hayride name for packaged music tours throughout the 1960s on a bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly basis ending operations in 1969. In August 1974, Shreveport businessman David Kent mounted a country music show called Hayride U. S. A., retitled Louisiana Hayride in 1975 after KWKH agreed to let Kent use the name. Located at a new dinner theater facility in Bossier City, this new Louisiana Hayride was syndicated on radio and ran until 1987, discovering such talent as Branson fiddle sensation Shoji Tabuchi and popular country singer Linda Davis; some local performances have been done in the Shreveport area under the name including a 2003 Louisiana Hayride cast reunion called One More'Ride that featured 60 acts from the original show including Kitty Wells, the Browns, Betty Amos, Homer Bailes, Billy Walker, Mitchell Torok, Hank Thompson.
Barney Cannon, a KWKH deejay, became a specialist on the history of country music, KWKH, the Hayride. In August 2009, the Louisiana Hayride was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. In 2009, after several years of litigation over the Louisiana Hayride name and trademark, a federal court ruled that Margaret Lewis Warwick owned the rights to the name; as of May 31, 2012, KWKH had changed to a sports format and ceased producing the classic country music format reminiscent of the Hayride era. At the Louisiana Hayride Tonight, a set of 20 CDs with 599 Hayride performances, was released in October of 2017 by Bear Family Records; the release includes a book on the Hayride's history. A unreleased live recording of Jambalaya, by Hank Williams, is included in the set; the set includes archival material from the collection of Chris Brown, Archivist at Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport. The Louisiana Hayride Years: Making Musical History in Country's
United States Army
The United States Army is the land warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States, is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution; as the oldest and most senior branch of the U. S. military in order of precedence, the modern U. S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, formed to fight the American Revolutionary War —before the United States of America was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army; the United States Army considers itself descended from the Continental Army, dates its institutional inception from the origin of that armed force in 1775. As a uniformed military service, the U. S. Army is part of the Department of the Army, one of the three military departments of the Department of Defense; the U. S. Army is headed by a civilian senior appointed civil servant, the Secretary of the Army and by a chief military officer, the Chief of Staff of the Army, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It is the largest military branch, in the fiscal year 2017, the projected end strength for the Regular Army was 476,000 soldiers. S. Army was 1,018,000 soldiers; as a branch of the armed forces, the mission of the U. S. Army is "to fight and win our Nation's wars, by providing prompt, land dominance, across the full range of military operations and the spectrum of conflict, in support of combatant commanders"; the branch participates in conflicts worldwide and is the major ground-based offensive and defensive force of the United States. The United States Army serves as the land-based branch of the U. S. Armed Forces. Section 3062 of Title 10, U. S. Code defines the purpose of the army as: Preserving the peace and security and providing for the defense of the United States, the Commonwealths and possessions and any areas occupied by the United States Supporting the national policies Implementing the national objectives Overcoming any nations responsible for aggressive acts that imperil the peace and security of the United StatesIn 2018, the Army Strategy 2018 articulated an eight-point addendum to the Army Vision for 2028.
While the Army Mission remains constant, the Army Strategy builds upon the Army's Brigade Modernization by adding focus to Corps and Division-level echelons. Modernization, reform for high-intensity conflict, Joint multi-domain operations are added to the strategy, to be completed by 2028; the Continental Army was created on 14 June 1775 by the Second Continental Congress as a unified army for the colonies to fight Great Britain, with George Washington appointed as its commander. The army was led by men who had served in the British Army or colonial militias and who brought much of British military heritage with them; as the Revolutionary War progressed, French aid and military thinking helped shape the new army. A number of European soldiers came on their own to help, such as Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who taught Prussian Army tactics and organizational skills; the army fought numerous pitched battles and in the South in 1780–1781, at times using the Fabian strategy and hit-and-run tactics, under the leadership of Major General Nathanael Greene, hit where the British were weakest to wear down their forces.
Washington led victories against the British at Trenton and Princeton, but lost a series of battles in the New York and New Jersey campaign in 1776 and the Philadelphia campaign in 1777. With a decisive victory at Yorktown and the help of the French, the Continental Army prevailed against the British. After the war, the Continental Army was given land certificates and disbanded in a reflection of the republican distrust of standing armies. State militias became the new nation's sole ground army, with the exception of a regiment to guard the Western Frontier and one battery of artillery guarding West Point's arsenal. However, because of continuing conflict with Native Americans, it was soon realized that it was necessary to field a trained standing army; the Regular Army was at first small and after General St. Clair's defeat at the Battle of the Wabash, the Regular Army was reorganized as the Legion of the United States, established in 1791 and renamed the United States Army in 1796; the War of 1812, the second and last war between the United States and Great Britain, had mixed results.
The U. S. Army did not conquer Canada but it did destroy Native American resistance to expansion in the Old Northwest and it validated its independence by stopping two major British invasions in 1814 and 1815. After taking control of Lake Erie in 1813, the U. S. Army seized parts of western Upper Canada, burned York and defeated Tecumseh, which caused his Western Confederacy to collapse. Following U. S. victories in the Canadian province of Upper Canada, British troops who had dubbed the U. S. Army "Regulars, by God!", were able to capture and burn Washington, defended by militia, in 1814. The regular army, however proved they were professional and capable of defeating the British army during the invasions of Plattsburgh and Baltimore, prompting British agreement on the rejected terms of a status quo ante bellum. Two weeks after a treaty was signed, Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and Siege of Fort St. Philip, became a national hero. U. S. troops and sailors captured HMS Cyane and Penguin in the final engagements of the war.
Per the treaty, both sides (the United S
Milton Berle
Milton Berle was an American comedian and actor. Berle's career as an entertainer spanned over 80 years, first in silent films and on stage as a child actor in radio and television; as the host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater, he was the first major American television star and was known to millions of viewers as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr. Television" during TV's golden age. Milton Berle was born into a Jewish family in a five-story walkup at 68 W. 118th Street in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. His given name was Mendel Berlinger, he chose Milton Berle as his professional name when he was 16. His father, Moses Berlinger, was a varnish salesman, his mother, Sarah Glantz Berlinger, changed her name to Sandra Berle. He had three older brothers: Phil and Jack Berle. For many years the latter two worked as Berle's TV production staff members, while Phil Berle was a program executive at NBC. Berle entered show business at the age of five, he appeared as a child actor in silent films, beginning with The Perils of Pauline, filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
The director told Berle. In Milton Berle: An Autobiography, he explained, "I was scared shitless when he went on to tell me that Pauline would save my life. Which is what happened, except that at the crucial moment they threw a bundle of rags instead of me from the train. I bet there are a lot of comedians around today who are sorry about that." By Berle's account, he continued to play child roles in other films: Bunny's Little Brother, Tess of the Storm Country, Love's Penalty, Divorce Coupons and Ruth of the Range. Berle recalled, "There were trips out to Hollywood—the studios paid—where I got parts in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, with Mary Pickford. However, Berle's claim to have appeared in Tillie's Punctured Romance has been disputed by film historians, among them Glenn Mitchell, who in his book The Chaplin Encyclopedia writes that Berle's alleged role was most played by child actor Gordon Griffith. In 1916, Berle enrolled in the Professional Children's School. Around 1920, at age 12, Berle made his stage debut in a revival of the musical comedy Florodora in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which moved to Broadway.
By the time he was 16, he was working as a Master of Ceremonies in Vaudeville. By the early 1930s he was a successful stand-up comedian, patterning himself after one of Vaudeville's top comics, Ted Healy. In 1933, he was hired by producer Jack White to star in the theatrical featurette Poppin' the Cork, a topical musical comedy concerning the repealing of Prohibition. Berle co-wrote the score for this film, released by Educational Pictures. Berle continued to dabble in songwriting. With Ben Oakland and Milton Drake, Berle wrote the title song for the RKO Radio Pictures release Li'l Abner, an adaptation of Al Capp's comic strip, featuring Buster Keaton as Lonesome Polecat. Berle wrote a Spike Jones B-side, "Leave the Dishes in the Sink, Ma." From 1934–36, Berle appeared on The Rudy Vallee Hour, he attracted publicity as a regular on The Gillette Original Community Sing, a Sunday night comedy-variety program broadcast on CBS from September 6, 1936 to August 29, 1937. In 1939, he was the host of Stop Me If You've Heard This One with panelists spontaneously finishing jokes sent in by listeners.
In the late 1940s, he canceled well-paying nightclub appearances to expand his radio career. Three Ring Time, a comedy-variety show sponsored by Ballantine Ale, was followed by a 1943 program sponsored by Campbell's Soups; the audience participation show Let Yourself Go could best be described as "slapstick radio" with studio audience members acting out long suppressed urges—often directed at host Berle. Kiss and Make Up, on CBS in 1946, featured the problems of contestants decided by a jury from the studio audience with Berle as the judge. Berle made guest appearances on many comedy-variety radio programs during the 1930s and 1940s. Scripted by Hal Block and Martin Ragaway, The Milton Berle Show brought Berle together with Arnold Stang a familiar face as Berle's TV sidekick. Others in the cast were Pert Kelton, Mary Schipp, Jack Albertson, Arthur Q. Bryan, Ed Begley, Brazilian singer Dick Farney, announcer Frank Gallop. Sponsored by Philip Morris, it aired on NBC from March 11, 1947 until April 13, 1948.
Berle described this series as "the best radio show I did... a hell of a funny variety show". It served as a springboard for Berle's emergence as television's first major star. Berle first appeared on television in 1929 in an experimental broadcast in Chicago which he hosted in front of 129 people, he would return to television 20 years becoming the first major American television star. Berle would revive the structure and routines of his vaudeville act for his debut on commercial TV, hosting The Texaco Star Theatre on June 8, 1948 over the NBC Television Network, they did not settle on Berle as the permanent host right away. Comedian Jack Carter was host for August. Berle was named the permanent host. Berle's visual style, characterized by vaudeville slapstick and outlandish costumes, proved ideal for the new medium. Berle modeled the show's structure and skits directly from his vaudeville shows, hired writer Hal Collins to revive his old routines. B
Hillbilly
"Hillbilly" is a term for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States in Appalachia and the Ozarks. The first known instances of "hillbilly" in print were in The Railroad Trainmen's Journal, an 1899 photograph of men and women in West Virginia labeled "Camp Hillbilly", a 1900 New York Journal article containing the definition: "a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Tennessee, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him"; the stereotype is twofold in that it incorporates both positive and negative traits: "Hillbillies" are considered independent and self-reliant individuals who resist the modernization of society, but at the same time they are defined as backward and violent. Scholars argue; the Appalachian Mountains were settled in the 18th century by settlers from the Province of Ulster in Ireland. The settlers from Ulster were Protestants who migrated to Ireland, during the Plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, from Scotland and Northern England.
Many further migrated to the American colonies beginning in the 1730s, in America became known as the Scots-Irish. Scholars argue; the term "hill-folk" referred to people who preferred isolation from the greater society, "billy" meant "comrade" or "companion". It is suggested that "hill-folk" and "billie" were combined when the Cameronians fled to the Scottish Highlands. There is the belief that most of the settlers from Scotland and northern Ireland were followers of king William of Orange.'Billy' is a diminutive of'William'. For the people who settle in America in the hills and who were Williamites, the term hillbilly connects both people who live in the hills and who are supporters of king William of Orange's ideologies. In 17th century Ireland, during the Williamite War, when Protestant supporters of King William III were referred to as "Billy's Boys". However, some scholars disagree with this theory. Michael Montgomery's From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English states, "In Ulster in recent years it has sometimes been supposed that it was coined to refer to followers of King William III and brought to America by early Ulster emigrants, but this derivation is certainly incorrect....
In America hillbilly was first attested only in 1898, which suggests a independent development."The term "hillbilly" spread in the years following the American Civil War. At this time, the country was developing both technologically and but the Appalachian region was falling behind. Before the war, Appalachia was not distinctively different from other rural areas of the country. Post-war, although the frontier pushed farther west, the region maintained frontier characteristics. Appalachians themselves were inbred in their isolation. Fueled by news stories of mountain feuds such as that in the 1880s between the Hatfields and McCoys, the hillbilly stereotype developed in the late 19th to early 20th century; the "classic" hillbilly stereotype reached its current characterization during the years of the Great Depression, when many mountaineers left their homes to find work in other areas of the country. The period of Appalachian out-migration from the 1930s through the 1950s, saw many mountain residents moving North to the Midwestern industrial cities of Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit.
This movement North, which became known as the "Hillbilly Highway", brought these isolated communities into mainstream United States culture. In response, poor white mountaineers became central characters in newspapers and motion pictures. Authors at the time were inspired by historical figures such as Daniel Boone; the mountaineer image transferred over to the 20th century. Pop culture has perpetuated the "hillbilly" stereotype. Scholarly works suggest that the media has exploited both the Appalachian region and people by classifying them as "hillbillies"; these generalizations do not match the cultural experiences of Appalachians. Appalachians, like many other groups, do not subscribe to a single identity. One of the issues associated with stereotyping is; when "hillbilly" became a used term, entrepreneurs saw a window for potential revenue. They brought it to life through various forms of media. Television and film have portrayed "hillbillies" in both sympathetic terms. Films such as Sergeant York or the Ma and Pa Kettle series portrayed the "hillbilly" as wild but good-natured.
Television programs of the 1960s such as The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, portrayed the "hillbilly" as backwards but with enough wisdom to outwit more sophisticated city folk. Gunsmoke's Festus Haggen was portrayed as quick-witted; the popular 1970s television variety show Hee Haw lampooned the stereotypical "hillbilly" lifestyle. A darker image of the hillbilly is found in the film Deliverance, based on a novel by James Dickey which depicted some "hillbillies" as genetically deficient and murderous, while depicting others as helpful and smart. "Hillbillies" were at the center of reality television in the 21st century. Network television shows such as New Beverly Hillbillies, High Life, The Simple Life displayed the "hillbilly" lifestyle for viewers in the United States; this sparked pro
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