the girl with the lullaby voice

Posted on February 13, 2012 by is there any more pie?

Chickie Williams.

Today is her birthday.  February 13th. 

“The Girl with the Lullaby Voice,” Chickie Williams was a longtime fixture of  country radio’s seminal Wheeling Jamboree, scoring a Top Five hit via the  1948 smash “Beyond the Sunset.” Born Jessie Wanda Crupe in Bethany, WV, on  February 13, 1919, she was a devoted fan of the Jamboree, the live  country music barn dance aired each Saturday night via Wheeling station WWVA. In 1935, she wrote to the program’s star attraction, Doc Williams  and His Border Riders, requesting they make a live appearance at the Reawood  Dance Hall in Hickory, PA. Crupe and Williams soon began a romance, finally  marrying in 1939. After giving birth to the couple’s three daughters, she  adopted the stage name Chickie Williams and joined her husband’s Jamboree  act in August 1946, contributing harmony vocals and later upright bass fiddle.  Two years later she notched her biggest hit with an original arrangement of the  hymn “Beyond the Sunset,” subsequently recorded by country legends including Hank Williams and Red Foley. Chickie was also a regular participant in Doc’s  pioneering tours throughout the northeast U.S. and Canada, and remained a Jamboree castmember for 52 years, retiring alongside Doc (a 61-year  veteran of the series) in 1998. After a long illness, Chickie died in Wheeling  on November 18, 2007. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/chickie-williams#ixzz1m13rqnGn

I became a huge fan of hers when I was nine.  And this is how:

All of the kids in our neighborhood went to St. Catherine’s on Sunday mornings for catechism.  This meant we gathered in the basement in groups according to age and gender and were terrorized by the nuns into memorizing prayers and learning what sins would send us to purgatory and hell.

Then we would sit on folding chairs in the basement, boys on one side of the aisle and girls on the other, for Mass.  Seating was according to age.  No fidgeting was allowed.  We were certainly not invited into the church itself, unless it was to go to confession on Saturday afternoons and tell the priest we’d skipped church last Sunday to go to the lake with our grandparents.

We were not allowed to eat (Communion, you know), so as a skinny little hypoglycemic girl I would regularly faint during Mass.  The basement was stuffy and humid in the summer and on top of an empty stomach I just couldn’t help keeling over.  One of the nuns would half-drag me to a room beside the altar where there was fresh air coming in from a side door.  Thank God for fresh air.

Anyway, when it was my father’s turn to pick us up after church (the neighbors carpooled), he would go early and stop at a tiny used record store in order to browse through the albums.  For twenty-five cents he found Chickie Willliams.

We had been given a portable record player by a departing-for-sea Navy friend, but we didn’t have many records for it (hence my Dad’s search for inexpensive vinyl).  We hit gold with Chickie.  She sang sad songs about dead mothers, missing children, dying sons, dead lovers, scandals,  and lost love.  I memorized every one of them.  My father’s idea of entertaining friends was to sit my brother and me on top of the picnic table and have us sing, “The Baggage Coach Ahead” (a personal favorite of mine), about a young man traveling with the corpse of his wife on the train while his baby cries.

When Banjo Man and I were on our first road trip together (we’d been married 9 months), I entertained him by singing my repertoire of Chickie Williams songs as we drove across Nebraska.

He didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled.  And then he became a fan, too.

Have a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUEhU2bxoQY&feature=related

Posted in music | Leave a comment

in a slump

Posted on February 10, 2012 by is there any more pie?

I am not playing music.  Not for weeks and weeks.  I wish I could figure out what the matter is.

No inspiration?

Not enough hours in the day?

Working too much?

No one to play with?

No music lessons to prepare for?

I miss the music.  I need to order the Headband system for the fiddle.  And the mini sound system.  And a plug adaptor for the new amplifier and the new microphones.  I need to have the lap steel restrung with the proper strings and then I need to start learning how to play it.  I have the book, so what am I waiting for?

A teacher, that’s what I’m waiting for.  We’ll be in Austin next month.  I should be able to find someone there who can explain the basics of a C6-tuned lap steel to me.

As far as the fiddle goes, I’m going to go through my lesson books and pick one.  And then I’m going to work my way through it, page by page.  Every day, no matter what.

I’m bringing my old fiddle to Texas so I can play for my grandson, who will certainly be impressed.  What 16-month old wouldn’t be???  I’d better learn a song, and fast.

There will be inspiration in Austin:  Hot Club of Cowtown, Ruby Jane, Warren Hood and Johnny Gimble.  I will worship at their feet and vow to practice more, but that is weeks away.

I am not quilting.  I am not singing.  I am working.  And working out.  And reading while I am working out.  I have stopped cooking. Life is very quiet, which is lovely.  But until I have a grip on this new book, my brain can’t concentrate on anything else.  I’m behind already, because my brain is old and tired and not accustomed to thinking this hard about people I made up in my head.

I slept for eleven hours last night.

Tonight we are going to a concert at the library.  There will be banjos and guitars and hopefully a fiddle or two.  I plan to close my eyes and pretend I’m listening to the Cougar Creek Band and tell myself I’d better get my act together.

Advice is welcome.

 

Posted in music, personal female whining, rhode island | 2 Comments

unwanted and for sale

Posted on February 9, 2012 by is there any more pie?

Write what you know is advice often given to would-be writers.  I’m not sure it’s such great advice, though.  Look at the Harry Potter books, Lord of the Rings and the other phenomenal fantasy novels.

Write about what you want to write about makes much more sense.

So in my new book I am writing about about a consignment store, which one of my characters owns.  Since I spend a lot of time in consignment stores I thought I should get something out of this pasttime besides pie plates and baking dishes and vintage tablecloths and accordion planters.

My (ahem) research has led me to the following conclusion:  Our kids don’t want our stuff.  Not that I blame them or expect them to.

But I think the subject of what people want (and don’t want) is fascinating.  It’s what my characters are dealing with: what to keep and what to throw away and the consequences that come from those decisions.  And of course I’m not just talking about stuff, but relationships and memories and grudges and everything else we carry around one way or another.

When I was 12 and accompanying my mother and real estate agents in the family’s search for a new home, we went into a house of an elderly person who had recently died.  It was an older, two-story home on a quiet street in town and inside it looked as if nothing had been touched since before the funeral.  The agent apologized for the mess and said the grown children wanted nothing.  Whoever bought the house would have to clean it out themselves.  Even as a kid I thought that was strange.  What about the photographs?  The dressers stuffed with clothes and jewelry?  The pictures and rugs and dishes?  Would everything be taken to the dump?  Or would the new owner love the idea of living with old things?

Recently I went to three consignment stores to study exactly what our kids won’t keep after we’ve been shipped off to a nursing facility or to that great Woodstock In The Sky.  I even made notes.   I wish I’d taken pictures.

What They Will Get Rid Of Without A Second Thought

end tables
glass vases
china, especially if it has roses on it
crystal goblets, wine glasses and dessert dishes
china closets
curtains
pianos and organs
collections of ceramic animals
large dolls dressed in elaborate outfits
Barbies
television stands
leather and/or fur coats
sofas
silverplate
costume jewelry
punch bowls
ice cream makers
books
video tapes, dvd’s
coffee tables
anything in a frame
linen, especially if it has to be ironed
maple dining room sets
ceramic planters
baking dishes & pie plates
cookie jars
old chairs
large dressers
bread machines

The shops are full of this stuff.

So I’m going to enjoy it all now.  My collection of ceramic horses is staying with me until the very end.

What are you keeping???

Posted in a more pie opinion, rhode island, secondhand stuff, writing | 4 Comments

superbowl blues

Posted on February 8, 2012 by is there any more pie?

New England Patriots fans have had a rough Sunday and Monday.  The disappointment is palpable, I swear.

So…I did not spend Monday morning trying to find a New England Patriots Superbowl Champions t-shirt for my grandson, or hats for my sons.  Which was the bright side.

To be perfectly honest, I usually don’t care about the football game.  Every year we go to our friends Ruth and Kenny’s house to watch the game with their family and neighbors.  And every year Kenny makes hot dogs at halftime.  Every year I try to be polite and not elbow Kenny’s elderly parents away from the stove so I can get to the hot dogs first.

I talked Banjo Man out of trying out a new recipe (salmon bites) to bring to the party.  I think he was going to substitute herring and throw some other strange ingredients into the food processor (gives me the shivers just to think about it).  We brought a blueberry cake instead.

This year’s game was exciting and stressful and heartbreaking—and Banjo Man and I were cemented to the sofa watching every play.  Until just before the half, when it was time to check on Kenny’s progress with the dogs.

Kenny always has steamed rolls, chopped onions and relish.  Be still my heart.  Is there anything better?

Not at the Superbowl.  Not this year.

Posted in food, friends | Leave a comment

the blues is my business…

Posted on February 7, 2012 by is there any more pie?

…and business is good.

This is what I heard on the radio recently as I was coming home from Walmart.  The temperature was about 60 degrees and I had the truck window rolled down to let the February spring breeze air out the car.

Folks around here are calling this the “non-winter”.

I admit to having had a crabby week, but it’s hard to frown when the sun is shining and there is no snow and Walmart had a sale on potato chips and Etta James is singing on the radio and I’m heading to the library to pick up the book I’ve been waiting for since December.

Maybe I need to get out more often.

Posted in books & music | 1 Comment

a kindle fire library book

Posted on February 6, 2012 by is there any more pie?

I bought a Kindle Fire in November.  Not because I had any desire to join the e-reader craze and not because I’m the kind of person who has to have the latest technological inventions.  I actually bought it to enable Banjo Man to give up the Blackberry phone he didn’t know how to use in the first place and to replace his method of checking email and stock reports while traveling with a simpler device.  (wow, that was a long sentence!)

Of course I should have known that my husband would not be the least bit interested in learning how to use a Kindle.  Even when it proved its worth by showing us a map when we were lost trying to find a restaurant that neither one of us remembered the address to.

I love books.  Love, love, love books.  Owning an e-reader of any kind seemed silly to me.  I get my books from the library.  I rarely buy them.  And I refuse to pay $12.99 to download a NYT-bestseller from Amazon when I can wait a week or two and get it free from the local library.

Then I learned that Amazon has free books, the books published before 1923 (or somewhere around then, meaning I downloaded all of Jane Austen’s book in five minutes).  And daily book deals (you have to search for the free ones).  And I discovered that many of my own novels had been reissued as e-books, which will mean extra bucks in the “future sound system” account.

But the best part of this Kindle Fire (aside from being able to check email and read websites along with reading books) is downloading library books.  There are a limited number available, so I have to wait my turn.  But…it doesn’t cost anything.

And I’ve discovered that reading on the Kindle is practically a luxury because (a) it props up nicely on the handles of the exercise bike and treadmill, leaving my hands free for holding my coffee mug and checking my pulse <g>, (b) I can read in bed at night without the light on (the screen is backlit), (c) I can make the font size as big as I want, (d) I don’t have to turn the pages, which can be a pain when my hands hurt and (e) I don’t have to haul books to Texas and will never run out of things to read on the plane even if the flights are delayed or cancelled.

Thanks for the Memories is a wonderful story.  I’m a big Cecilia Ahern fan and while this doesn’t have the heartbreaking drama of P.S. I Love You (didn’t you just love that movie?), it’s classic Ahern with quirky characters and Irish wit.

I’m now off to see what else I can find on the library’s e-zone website…

(yep, this is about as exciting as it gets here in Rhode Island in February)

Posted in books & music | Leave a comment

twinkie guilt

Posted on February 3, 2012 by is there any more pie?

I don’t have any Twinkie guilt, but I do have Twinkies.

Aren’t they pretty?  I filled up with gas at the 7-11 and, with much anticipation and forethought, found them in the aisle across from the broiling hot dog machine.

I saw my endocronologist today.  She looks like Halle Berry and is young and adorable.  We’ve been trying for a year and a half now to discover why I am not losing weight.  I showed her my exercise chart (averaging 100 minutes a day) and she called me an athlete.

No one–and I mean NO ONE–has ever called me an athlete before.

It was quite thrilling.  So I bragged about my yoga groin/hip sprain.  That’s what athletes do.

Oh, and I lost a pound.  A pound in four months of yogurt and blueberries and Atkins bars and no bread and healthy (gag me) eating.  One lousy pound.

She also told me I should indulge my Wheat Thins love occasionally (didn’t I tell you she was adorable?).

She told me, “Listen to your body.”

(My body says stuff like stay in bed, paint your toenails purple, eat all the pepperoni you want.  It does NOT say eat a couple of Wheat Thins and a tub of tofu sprinkled with flax seed.)

I decided to celebrate my athlete status and my stupid one-pound weight loss with something totally forbidden and bad for me.  When was the last time you ate a Twinkie?  Years, I’ll bet.  Me, too.  I can’t wait.  I think I’ll drag it out for an hour or so.

Conversation when I arrived home this afternoon:

Banjo Man:  Wow, you went to a consignment store.  What are these?
Me:  Wilton baking pans.  I can make my own sheet cakes now.  Don’t touch the Twinkies.
Banjo Man:  Twinkies?  You’re eating Twinkies?
Me:  Yep.  After I take a picture of them for the blog.
Banjo Man: (peering closer)  How many are in there?
Me:  Three.  It’s a bonus pack.
Banjo Man:  Well, that’s okay.  After all, how many Twinkies are you going to eat after you die?     None, so you might as well–
Me:  What do you mean, none???  There will be Twinkies in Heaven!  Thousands of Twinkies!!  I’ll be eating all the Twinkies I want every day.  There will be DOGS and FABRIC and MUSIC–”
Banjo Man (holding up his hands in surrender) :  I get it!  Twinkies in Heaven or otherwise, what’s the point of being good?
Me:  Exactly.

Preview of the afterlife.

Posted in food, personal female whining | 5 Comments

feel the fear

Posted on February 2, 2012 by is there any more pie?

Banjo Man is cooking again.  I think he has been watching too many cooking shows on television.  The man just loves “Chopped”, “Top Chef” and that show about the diners and dives.

I think he is trying to help out around the house, now that I am back to work writing again and tend to snarl at kitchen appliances and gripe about leaving my desk to do anything remotely domestic.

Last night he fried steaks.  He is collecting appetizer recipes (“Salmon Bites”??  Really???)to take to a Superbowl party. Tonight my fearlessly confident husband has decided to make runzas, the original Nebraska fast food.  He bought the dough, the hamburger, the cabbage and the onions.  I showed him how to google a recipe and he is sure it is going to be easy.

Nothing with dough is ever easy.  But I guess he’ll have to learn that the hard way.

He has a friend coming over for Manhattans and man talk at 6:30 tonight, so it should be an interesting evening.  I’m going to hide in my room, watch “Biggest Loser”, finish reading the latest John Sandford novel and fret over tomorrow’s writing schedule.

For more info on making runzas and to see what the little buggers are supposed to look like, check out http://dancinginthekitchen.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/runzas/

In the meantime, I’ll be in bed with a bowl of yogurt and a box of Sweenors chocolates.

Posted in food, rhode island | 2 Comments

upward dog sun moon warrior prayer pose

Posted on February 1, 2012 by is there any more pie?

yoga is a challenge.

i’ve taped several episodes on the dvr.  and i’ve tried.

oh, how i’ve tried.

i stretch.  exhale.  inhale.  reach.  hold.  pose.

but there is one little problem:  i cannot see the instructor when i am on all fours with my butt in the air and my head hanging down and my toes planted properly.

how am i supposed to know what i’m doing?  by the time i study the poses on the tv screen, the teacher and students have moved on to something else.  i can’t keep up.  i can’t produce a “soft face” when i am cursing at the television.

last night i yoga’d along with the “anxiety” yoga hour.

yes, an hour.

 it had been a busy day, with many phone calls from my agent about e-books and royalties and reversion amendments.  i’m late getting a synopsis to my editor and the work is going slower than i’d estimated.  my mother lost her wallet (we found it at the movie theater–thank you, whoever you are, for turning it in to the manager) and a confused banjo man has a new computer with mysterious windows 7.

i felt less crabby after the yoga hour, but i was also crippled.  my toes cramped.  my butt ached.  i groaned and moaned every time i had to get up off the couch.  banjo man saved the night and produced a surprise box of wheat thins he’d bought for an emergency.

he will never be a computer geek, but he sure knows what to do for a cranky wife.

i will not give up on yoga.  i need to find a beginners class somewhere.  a class with other people who have no idea when to exhale or what a plank is.

maybe it’s time to head to the local senior center.

Posted in personal female whining, rhode island | 2 Comments

my new orleans grandmother

Posted on January 31, 2012 by is there any more pie?

Grandma and me, 1960

Today is Eveline’s birthday.  She was known as Evelyn, but the French version is the name on her birth certificate.  Her maternal grandmother was the daughter of Rosa, a French Quarter orphan married to a flamboyant French doctor who had other wives, other children.  When they separated, she taught dancing and French on Royal Street in New Orleans.

Evelyn’s father was an Irish immigrant; her husband the son and grandson of German immigrants.  My mother’s genealogy records read like the History of New Orleans, starting at 1790 when Rosa’s father escaped the slave rebellion of Santa Domingo and married his first wife, daughter of a plantation owner.

I love genealogy.  Can you tell?

Grandma was orphaned, too.  Her father, a handsome Irish policeman, died two years before his wife, of yellow fever.  Grandma worked in a sweat shop, sewing shirts.    Her ambitious and stern nightmare of a German mother-in-law was not impressed.

Louis and Evelyn's wedding day

My New Orleans grandmother was a character, as opposite from my cool New England grandmother as a grandmother could get.   She liked to laugh, she hugged, she called me her “little daw-lin”.  She cooked gumbo and jambalaya in giant pots and scooped dinner in big ladles from the stove.  The old house was small and sparse, a shotgun style, with a narrow porch on one side and a square porch on the other.  A rarely used “front room” held a trunk filled with old Mardi Gras costumes.

Grandma played poker, bet the horses, worked as a shill in the nearby Mississippi casinos.  To make extra money, she and Grandpa (a sweet man who worked on the locks on the river) ran concession stands at baseball games and racetracks.  She carried a pistol in her purse and at least once, on a public bus, defended my grandfather’s life and the night’s income by threatening to kill the thugs who thought robbing the old folks would be easy.

Her fenced yard was guarded by a pack of mean dogs who answered only to Grandma; she called them her “babies”, but everyone else was terrified to cross the driveway to my aunt’s house without Grandma’s protection.

We visited New Orleans (for Mardi Gras)  three times when I was a child and teenager.  I flew there by myself after Christmas, right before I started dating Banjo Man.  (That was back when going on an airplane meant dressing in your best clothes, wearing panty hose, making sure your shoes matched your handbag.)  I loved those visits, loved my Grandma’s laugh, loved the hot French bread delivered to the house each morning.

I knew nothing about the gambling then, except the three times she came to Rhode Island to visit us, my mother would whisper, “Remember, don’t play poker with her!”

We’d play for pennies anyway, but neither my brother or I had inherited the betting gene and were therefore no challenge for her.

My brother, grandmother and me, 1960.

 Happy Birthday, Grandma.  Thank you for the gumbo, the giggles and the hugs.  Your quiet little bookworm granddaughter thought you were absolutely wonderful.

Posted in family | 4 Comments