One of the greatest musical artists of all time is Aretha Franklin.  Not only is she noted for her performance of soul music, she is also adept at jazz, rock, pop, R&B, gospel and yes, Blues!!  She is commonly referred to as “The Queen of Soul”.

She has scored a total of 20 #1 hits on the R&B charts, and has won 18 Grammy Awards throughout her amazing career.  In 1987 she became the first female to be entered into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and she was even the featured artist at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Aretha was born in Memphis, Tennessee to a family of 5 children.  Primarily her grandmother, due to marital problems with her parents, raised her.  She was a self-taught piano prodigy and her extraordinary vocal gifts would come to fruition in her early teens.  She recorded her first gospel album at age 14.  An early pregnancy derailed her gospel career, but when she returned to singing she decided to reinvent herself as a pop singer.

Probably what she is best known for is her recording of “Respect”.  This song became her own personal mantra as well as one of the most famous songs of all time.  This launched her career into super stardom!  She went on to win a Grammy for this song, as well as for her performance of it.  She went on to win 8 Grammy Awards that year.

Aretha has been through many ups and downs in her personal life but has never left our minds as one of the greats.

For over 25 years Chicago has been hosting it’s annual blues festival.  It’s an incredible scene with several stages set up throughout Grant Park.  The admission is free and every year thousands and thousands of blues lovers come together to celebrate this great genre.

The Chicago story came about some 90 years ago as the blacks from the South began moving to the more Northern cities in the early 1900s.  Chicago was a place of promise for them.  It gave them hope for more opportunity and a better life.  Much of what their music was based on.

Many musicians on their journey North stopped at Memphis and spent time there, which is why Memphis today is such an important part of the blues history.  In Chicago, though the players were starting to plug in their guitars, and the blues music became infused with an edgier, more electrified sound.  Roaring vocals and boogie-woogie style became popular across the city’s venues and the Chicago style began to take hold.

The recording industry also made the Chicago scene boom.  Chess Records, Vee-Jay and numerous other small labels were a huge force in this city.  Muddy Waters exemplified the Chicago sound of the 40s and 50s. It was aggressive and electric, and by the late 40s Chicago was a powerhouse for this electric blues.

The blues had it’s own economical and cultural draw.  Blues clubs abounded in the city such as the South Side’s Maxwell Street.  Tourists and locals alike who were huge supporters of the blues, would spend their money in the stores, and on liquor in the clubs.  They would frequent the hairdressers, and clothing stores.  This “heyday” cemented Chicago as the Blues capitol.

In the late 60s and 70s blues began to lose its popularity with black audiences.  Some believe this was due to the increasing popularity of disco, soul and R&B.  Yet the blues did begin to gain more attention from the white audience.  A new collection of clubs began to open on Chicago’s North side because of this interest.

Today, even though Chicago’s South side has drastically changed, the Chicago scene remains alive from the North side’s traditional blues to the south Side’s blues melded with soul.  Chicago’s Blues Fest helps keep this alive.

Epistle 11 – Test Patterns

Once upon a time doctors and TV repairmen made house calls. Now, neither do. TV repairmen are extinct and doctors think they will be if the government has its way. Of the two species, the TV guys were clearly the more critical in the early days of television. On average, they showed up about once a month with their medical bags filled with nifty little pliers and screwdrivers and an assortment of vacuum tubes to replace the mysterious, dusty ones that burned out just before your favorite program. We watched with baited breath to see if the picture tube had flat-lined, the kiss of death for months of entertainment.

The geeks of that era actually took their own tubes to the neighborhood drug store and soda fountain and tested them on a gadget that was converted from an old carnival fortune-telling machine. I tried it once, replacing two tubes at $3.95 each that the gypsy said were evil, and I still couldn’t remove the snow storm from the screen. After another panic call to Harold, our friendly repairman who was now treated as a member of the family, the snow and the vertical flickering were restored through alchemy.

Thanks to his video voodoo, we were all overjoyed to turn on the magic box in time for hours of the test pattern instead of I Love Lucy. The TV Guide said there was boxing on Fridays, Gunsmoke on Saturdays, and Ed Sullivan on Sundays, but they were just standbys in case the test pattern went off the air. We didn’t know why our local station preferred the test pattern instead of James Arness as Matt Dillon—maybe someone thought the test pattern was a better actor—but to its credit, the station occasionally displayed a bit of creativity by showing us a disconnected plug with an entertaining “oops”. No matter, we watched anyway. Can you imagine what the rest of life was like?

At our house, we were blessed with radio until I was 10, so I was forced to use my imagination (which became extinct with the TV repairman), to see Matt and Chester clean up Dodge instead of hanging around the Long Branch ogling Miss Kitty. Radio also saved me from a life of crime because The Shadow and Jack Webb convinced me it did not pay. But then TV sets with grand cabinets and tiny screens showed up at the local appliance store and I began living on the edge, watching Crusader Rabbit through the shop window until my father placed two fingers in his mouth and whistled loud enough to be heard across town. Since we didn’t have a dog, it was my job to race back home.

How do we cope today with our desolation, our lives bereft of test patterns, dusty tubes and trusted repairmen in our living rooms? Maybe government bureaucrats will make house calls. I’ll serve them coffee on a TV tray while they take my blood pressure.

We Will Win

Do you think that all baby boomers are all alike and created equal?  Baby Boomers are the “Woodstock generation” — In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values; however, many commentators have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations.[1]

Just like everything else, there are many different stereotypes about us Boomers.  Let’s take a look at a few and see if any really add up. Boomers are comprised primarily of active adults, characterized as people who are aged 55 years or older. The active part, well that can be a bit subjective.

Baby Boomers are now middle age and entering senior years and while most Americans say it is more difficult for middle class people to maintain their standard of living than it was five years ago. Baby Boomers are changing their retirement.

Why is that though? Well, it’s not that we were not prepared, or preparing for retirement. Many of us were well set. Unfortunately, with the lack luster economic down turn, or to be more politically correct, the “economic correction of the markets” as so many people call our current state of economy. Most of us Boomers were slapped with this overcorrection, and are beginning to hit the age of retirement as our net worth in real estate and stocks has been wiped out.  This really left many of us with no choice but change or rethink our retirement strategy.

At the same time many Baby Boomers are not ready to stop working. Some have even started to work with children or young entrepreneurs as they have years of knowledge and skills to share, and feel that it’s their way of leaving a lasting mark on the world.

The stereotype that Boomers are technology challenged just perpetuates things.  Surprisingly, more and more Boomers are embracing technology. Everything from the iPhone to social media, we have found our way around and have embraced the changing times.

However, like any other generation, there are some that take longer than others to move towards change. Sometimes change comes so quickly that by the time that ANY generation catches up, someone is on to the next big thing. Take the overhaul of Facebook for example, it wasn’t just Boomers who stood heals dug in unwilling to embrace the home page feed feature, or the vanity name change option, but many of the 50 million Facebook users felt that they liked the old way better.

Sure you may not catch too many Boomers on Hulu.com catching up on past American Idol reruns but in such a fast paced world that we live in, who is?  Boomers, in large numbers are traveling the world using the internet every day. So to say that we are technically challenged is a far cry from the truth. But hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Reference URL 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Boomer

Epistle 1 – Spam

. Technically, I’m not a Baby Boomer because I was born before the end of WWII. I guess that makes me a Beta Boomer. But the drift of my life has been borne on the high tide of the Boomers (not those old geezers like my brother), and so I cast my lot with theirs.

. The historic events that define the Boomer generation started right after WWII when all the GI’s returned home from the war and behaved like rabbits. A frisky bunch, those people. Good Lord, they kept it up for over 15 years!

. The first important thing I remember about being a Boomer is the public school food. The hallways of my grade school were stacked to the scuppers with army surplus food, particularly something truly evil call Spam. (No, children, spam was not invented to bedevil computer users. It was invented to bedevil Boomers during their tender, formative years, which explains their behavior.) The real Spam, (from Spawn of Ham, an old horror movie), is a ghastly, ghoulish thing crammed into a can and sealed tight for public safety. It can be sliced cold for a sandwich, cooked for a dinner entrée, or just left to squat in the refrigerator, daring you to even touch it, heaven forbid eat it.

. It would still be there except that boomer parents were made of sterner stuff than their offspring. Apparently the war also made them a hell of a lot meaner, too. Can you imagine forcing an innocent child to eat that today? You can’t even spank a kid today without going to jail, let alone poison it. But I read somewhere that native Hawaiians have made Spam their food of choice. Can that really be true? 113,539 Hawaiians can’t be wrong, can they? Maybe it’s the ukuleles.

. But I digress. The point is that the epic events spawned by Boomeritis were due to Spam. Of course, it has morphed into something very different now but it is still evil, and you young people deserve to know the awful truth. It’s not the crushing national debt that your elders have saddled you with for the rest of your life that you should resent to the very core of your being. It’s that they ate Spam. On the other hand, if they survived Spam, maybe you will survive the debt.

God loves little children and old Boomers.

We Will Win