Library of Congress's Blog, page 39

The “Day Dream” of Billy Strayhorn’s Music

Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. Photo: Unknown. Music Division.

It was just a few years into the 20th century. Times were impossibly hard for a young Black couple in Dayton, Ohio. Two of their three children died in infancy. So on Nov. 29, 1915, when Lillian Strayhorn gave birth to another small and sickly child, she and her husband, James, didn’t bother to name him. They didn’t think he’d live long enough. They just put “Baby Boy Strayhorn” on his birth certificate.

Eventually, though, as Duke Ellington famously put it, “his mother called him Bill.”

Billy Strayhorn’s unlikely rise from childhood sickness and poverty to becoming one of the greatest names in 20th-century American music — he was the composer, arranger and songwriter for Ellington’s orchestra for three decades — is captured in his papers at the Library. The 17,000 items, including music manuscripts, letters, photographs, scrapbooks and business contracts, were brought to the Library by his family in 2018.

Strayhorn as a child. Family photo. Music Division.

Strayhorn wrote the iconic “Lush Life,” about the darker seductions of the jazz life, when he was a teenager. He wrote “Take the ‘A’ Train” at 24, just after joining Ellington’s band. He wrote “Chelsea Bridge.”  “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” “Day Dream.” “Rain Check.” “After All.” His style and Ellington’s so overlapped that scholars have a hard time deciding where one ended and the other began. Ellington agreed. “Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head,” he wrote in his memoir.

He was short, small, bespectacled, neatly dressed and fun to be around. He was a terrific vocal coach. Lena Horne absolutely adored him. “Ever up and onward!” was his motto. His nickname was “Sweat Pea” or “Strays.” He drank. He smoked. He was friends with everybody. He was openly gay in an era when that was all but impossible.

He died of esophageal cancer in 1967. One of his last pieces was “Blood Count,” about his cancer’s deadly progression. When he left one hospital a few weeks before his death, his nurse thanked him for his “extended hand of encouragement” to her. “I … hope that the power of God’s Blessings and protection will be your daily experience,” she wrote.

He was 51 when they buried him.

Strayhorn’s hand-written arrangement of “Day Dream.” Music Division.

His compositions are still “harmonically and structurally among the most sophisticated in jazz,” says the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, a 1,200-page reference work. Pianist Donald Shirley, remembering the man for David Hajdu’s biography, “Lush Life,” put it this way: “Many composers in jazz are good at thinking vertically and horizontally, but Billy could write diagonals and curves and circles.”

Thanks to a number of posthumous recordings, biographies and retrospectives, he is perhaps more widely known today than during his lifetime. Billy Strayhorn Songs Inc., the company his family founded in 1997, works to protect his copyrights and cement his reputation.

“The Strayhorn legacy continues to move ‘Ever Up and Onward’ … as a new generation of artists are performing his works in recordings, on television, in film and on the stage,” said A. Alyce Claerbaut, Strayhorn’s niece and president of BSSI. “There has been increasing scholar study by jazz educators that has highlighted more of the singular genius that his writing and arrangement talents contributed to the Ellington Orchestra.”

Strayhorn and his mother, Lillian Young Strayhorn at a family reunion. Early 1950s. Family photo. Music Division.

Part of the magic of the Library is holding the works of people who have changed history and helped create the modern world. Their hand pressed the pen into the paper here. They scribbled in the margin there. Time moves at the speed of their pen across the paper.

It’s that way with Strayhorn’s papers. In a working copy of “Chelsea,” the musical notation is in pencil but he marks parts for the musicians in red ink: “Paul [Gonsalves],” “Proc [clarinetist Russell Procope]” and so on. Here is “Day Dream,” taking life before your eyes. The man held this very sheet of paper, the song just an idea in his head, concentrating, his hand sketching out chord progressions, until it was there, a finished thing. A ragged copy of “Lush Life,” which got wet somewhere along the way, marks out how the lyrics should be sung: “I used to vis-it all the ver-y gay places …”

It was the era when people wrote letters, and he was delightfully chatty and offhand.

On May 18, 1952, when he was 36 and a big star, he sent his parents a postcard from Yellowstone National Park. It showed a bear, standing on two feet, looking into a car window. “Dear Mom and Pop,” he wrote, “Would you like a nice bear for your living room? Mom, I tried to call on Mother’s Day but couldn’t get through … Love and Kisses, Bill.” From Hamburg, Germany, he wrote boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, after one of his fights: “We’re a long ways from home but we heard all about you. Congratulations! See you soon, Sweet Pea.”

The collection, like his music, is a charming and lovesome thing.

“Lush Life” sheet music that was sold commercially. Music Division.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox

 

 

 

 

 

Hazel Scott: The Gorgeous Face of Jazz at the Mid-Century

Hazel Scott in an undated publicity photo from early in her career. Music Division.

Hazel Scott was the gorgeous face of jazz at the mid-century.

She was the most glamorous, well-known Black woman in America, making more than $100,000 per year, draped in custom-designed jewelry and furs. She headlined sold-out concerts, hosted her own television show and starred in Hollywood films. She wowed integrated audiences – she refused to play a segregated room – mixing jazz and classical music. “Vivacious,” newspapers liked to say.

“She has the most incandescent personality,” raved the New York Times.

Jazz, meanwhile, was the crown jewel of Black American culture, the hot, sophisticated music that was remaking popular entertainment. It sent crowds dancing. It was romance. It was swing.

That era is preserved in the Library’s jazz collections, showcasing the music’s continuing influence. There are heartbreaking letters from Chet Baker, amusing ones from Louis Armstrong. The Library holds collections of material from Ella Fitzgerald and Jelly Roll Morton and the papers of Billy Strayhorn, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. The photographs of William Gottlieb are some of the most iconic in jazz history.

Scott with her husband, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (l), and William “Count” Basie, at the famed Birdland club in New York. Photo: Unknown. Music Division.

Scott’s story is captured in a collection of nearly 4,000 items, including music, diaries, contracts, scores, her unpublished autobiography and photographs.

Scott’s son, Adam Powell III, donated the collection to the Library in 2020, he said, so that her legacy endured in all its complexity, particularly since her stardom faded after being persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Cold War. Besides, by the late ‘50s, Elvis was the rage, then the Beatles. Jazz was no longer center stage, and neither was Hazel Scott.

She died in 1981 of pancreatic cancer in a New York hospital. She took her last breath as Dizzy Gillespie, a friend for decades, serenaded her on a muted trumpet. She was 61.

“I’ve always wanted to do what I could to make sure that she was not lost,” Powell said. “Her intelligence and her talent and her values and her stubbornness as it were, so it could be something that was accessible to everybody.”

Scott as a child prodigy. Family photo. Music Division.

It’s a life story that reads like a Hollywood myth.

Born in Trinidad in 1920 and raised in Harlem by her mother, Alma Long Scott, a professional musician, she was a child prodigy with perfect pitch. The Julliard School of Music accepted her as a special student at the age of 8, when the minimum age for acceptance was 16.

Her mother often hosted and cooked for prominent musicians at their apartment. Scott grew up regarding Fats Waller as an uncle, Art Tatum as a de-facto dad and Billie Holiday as a big sister. Her first professional gig, at 15, was with the Count Basie orchestra. At 19, she was the star headliner at Café Society, the first integrated club in New York. In her early 20s, she’d hit the town with Leonard Bernstein on one arm and Frank Sinatra on the other. Lena Horne was a close friend. Langston Hughes mentioned her in a poem.

Her virtuosity was astonishing. She would start playing classical music, perhaps Bach or Beethoven, then slowly add syncopation and rhythm until it was swinging jazz. Then she’d launch into boogie-woogie. Her albums were hits.

She was a Hollywood film star at 23, making four films in one year, musicals like “I Dood It,” “The Heat’s On” and “Rhapsody in Blue.” She demanded the outrageous sum of $4,000 per week and got it. During the filming of “The Heat’s On,” she walked off set for three days until the wardrobe of the Black women dancers in her scene was changed from maids’ outfits to pretty floral dresses.

Scott plays piano, with Red Skelton and other cast members in a publicity still from MGM’s “I Dood It.” 1943. Photo: Unknown. Music Division.

In 1945, she married Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem congressman and pastor who was then the  nation’s galvanizing civil rights leader. They made a dazzling pair, featured on magazine covers, in gossip columns and were the toasts of high-end parties in New York and Washington.

“She had every man in the room hanging on her every word,” Marjorie Lawson, a lawyer and civil rights activist who would later be D.C.’s first black female judge, told Powell biographer Wil Haygood of Scott’s first high-society appearance. “She was a sensation.”

“A Revealing Side of Hazel Scott,” cover story in Jet. June 2, 1966. Music Division.

The couple were both fiercely devoted to civil rights. Conservatives accused them of being sympathetic to Communist causes during the Red Scare days of the Cold War. Scott’s name was listed in a pamphlet that attempted to smear her reputation. HUAC didn’t subpoena Scott, but she insisted on testifying before them anyway. Even her husband, who relished confrontations, urged her not to. She insisted, and, once on Capitol Hill, testified angrily. She finished by saying that musicians and artists should not be vilified by the “vicious slanders of small and petty men.”

The results were devastating.

In less than a week, her nascent television show – the first ever hosted by a Black woman — was canceled. Concert bookings dropped off. Her Hollywood career had already ended, and not just because of her stand about demeaning portrayals of Black women. Scott had called the wife of film mogul Jack Warner an epithet, she wrote in a draft of her unpublished autobiography, an incident which her son confirmed. It was one of a string of incidents over the years in which she recklessly lashed out.

Though she had made the equivalent of millions of dollars, tax brackets at the time claimed about 90 percent of it. Lawyers and accountants mismanaged much of the rest. The Internal Revenue Service said she owed far more taxes than she could pay. The Powell’s marriage crumbled, ending in divorce. She twice took overdoses of pills, but survived both suicide attempts. Stress sent her into eating binges.

Scott on a jaunt to Cannes with friends. From left: British actress and jazz singer Annie Ross, Scott, Lena Horne, Lorraine Gillespie, I.B. Lucas (Scott’s hairdresser and friend) and Dizzy Gillespie. Photo: Adam Powell III. Music Division.

She moved to Paris with their son, had a brief second marriage and, for a while, made a nice living playing in Europe. She was happy, more relaxed, hosting dinners for friends – Holiday, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Lester Young, Quincy Jones. But times changed during the ‘60s, and after a few years, she began to struggle with paying the rent, with her health. Horne and Simone urged her to come back home.

She was just 47 when she returned to the U.S. in 1967, finding a nation caught up in riots, protests, hippies, the Vietnam War and the latter days of the civil rights movement. Young activists scarcely knew who she was. Suddenly, she seemed old-fashioned.

Her work ethic kept her going, playing intimate clubs in New York, getting a few guest roles on television series and soap operas. She settled into the role of a doting grandmother to Adam’s kids and enjoyed her friends. She poured her  angry observations about being a Black woman in America, including many painful scenes in which white men had attempted to prey on her as a young star, into drafts of an autobiography that was never published.

Scott after returning to the U.S. Family photo. Music Division.

But she seemed more at peace now, more settled with how her remarkable life had evolved. The heyday of jazz might be remembered fondly, but it had been a rough way to make a living, filled with the perils of alcohol, drugs, long road trips and broken relationships. Of all the people she considered family – her mother, Tatum, Waller, Holiday – none lived past 47. It was often like that at the top of the jazz world. Clifford Brown died at 25, Bix Beiderbecke at 28, Charlie Parker at 34, John Coltrane at 40, Bud Powell at 42, Nat King Cole at 45, Bill Evans and Billy Strayhorn both at 51.

If she wasn’t at the top anymore, then so be it. She had made it through her roughest years and setbacks.

“Bitterness was not part of her package,” says Karen Chilton, Scott’s biographer. The writer/actress spent years researching “Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC.” “There may have been a sense of longing, of frustration after she came back, of ‘Where do I fit in?’ But she loved music so much, she loved jazz so much….she never stopped playing.”

She recounts Mike Wallace, the famed CBS News journalist, remembering Scott at her funeral this way:  “She was gregarious. And sweet…she really lived.”

Scott’s address book lists her famous friends alongside everyday contacts. Milt Hinton, Al Hall,  Al Hibbler, Paul Harris and  — of course — Lena Horne were jazz stars. Sam and Grayson Hall were a television and film couple, both known for the TV classic, “Dark Shadows.” Edith Hodges was the wife of Johnny Hodges, the legendary jazz saxophonist. The Hit Factory, a famed New York recording studio, was at this location from 1975-1981. Music Division.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

La Biblioteca Podcast: Season 2!

“We the People Defend Dignity,” 2017. Artist: Shepard Fairey. Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy of Shepard Fairey, Obey Giant Art.

This is a guest post by Maria Pena, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications.

As part of  Hispanic Heritage Month, the Library is launching Season 2 of La Biblioteca podcast, a six-part series titled Exploring Latinx Civil Rights in the United States, which zeros in on seminal civil rights cases and events.

The English-language series derives from A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States, created by Hermán Luis Chávez and María Guadalupe (Lupita) Partida, two Huntington Fellows in the Library’s Hispanic Reading Room. The guide offers an overview of 20th and 21st century American court cases, legislation and events that have affected the Hispanic community across the U.S., including Puerto Rico.

“I am excited by the diversity of voices and topics in this season of La Biblioteca. I learned quite a bit, and I know our listeners will come away feeling better informed,” said Suzanne Schadl, chief of the Latin American, Caribbean and European Division.

Season 2 evolves out of the resource guide — among the most viewed in the Library — and speaks with lawyers, community organizers and legislators about Latino cultural identity and history in the United States.

The first episode centers on Madrigal v. Quilligan, a 1978 federal class action lawsuit filed by 10 Mexican American women against the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center for involuntary or forced sterilization. Although the plaintiffs lost the case in an unpublished decision from a California federal district court, the California Department of Health established new sterilization procedures and bilingual protocols for better informed consent for patients. Hermán and Lupita discuss the case and its impact with lawyer Antonia Hernández, who managed the case while working for Model Cities Center for Law and Justice.

Running through Nov. 2, subsequent weekly podcasts will discuss the fate of Central American immigrants who’ve entered the country illegally and the Temporary Protection Status, an immigration program enacted by Congress in 1990; the “Latinx” identity; Latino voter engagement; Latino student activism, and environmental activism in Puerto Rico. Guests include members of Congress, immigrant advocates, a bilingual journalist and academic experts.

La Biblioteca Podcast launched in 2017 to explore the Library’s collections. The first season, Exploring the PALABRA Archive, featured  discussions with academic experts, poets and critics about a selection of recordings from the PALABRA Archive.

In addition to the Season 2 podcast, the Library joins Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations with a release of 50 new recordings from authors featured in the PALABRA Archive, including Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska and Cuban-American author, poet and anthropologist Ruth Behar. There will also be a Zoom webinar on Oct. 11 with Latin American children and young adult authors Angela Burke Kunkel, Aida Salazar and Yamile Saied Méndez.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

By the People: Transcribe Early Copyright Applications

Title page copyright application for “The Female Spy,” a romance novel of 1846. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The Library’s newest crowdsourcing campaign, American Creativity: Early Copyright Title Pages, is now online and ready for your amusement, education and transcription. It features the great (and not so great) ideas of yesteryear in copyright applications from 1790 to 1870, which recorded the young nation’s attempts to capitalize on the present and transform the future.

It’s the largest By the People crowdsourced transcription campaign so far. Previous campaigns have focused on subjects as varied as Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Civil War soldiers, baseball legend Branch Rickey and centuries of Spanish legal documents. Volunteers can read and transcribe the works or check the work of others, both steps in digitizing vast numbers of archived papers and thus making them more easily available online.

Title copyright page for “My Bondage, My Freedom,” by Frederick Douglass, 1855, six years before the Civil War began. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

In this project, the 18th- and 19th-century title pages are taken from the Early Copyright Records Collection, which we’ve recently expanded to include over 200 handwritten pre-bound ledgers that were once held by various states. From 1790 through 1870, copyright registration was accomplished by completing a form at the local federal district court, paying a fee, and depositing a printed title page with the court clerk. The Copyright Act of 1870 — the birth of modern copyright law — consolidated all these records. These early records offer a uniquely American sensibility and chronicle an industrious new nation and its intellectual pursuits. Some of the titles will be readily recognized, but many were never published or have been lost to history.

They contain some of almost every sort of intellectual activity: books, sheet music, prints, maps, dramatic compositions, advertising labels and patent drawings. There are novels, histories, plays, religious and educational instruction, music scores, science and mechanical inventions. The handwritten entries made by state court clerks often include fascinating notations, as well as pasted-in content.

“The Frog Who Would A Wooing Go,” copyright title page, 1858. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Don’t miss a lively discussion of early American copyright webinar on Thursday, Oct. 7, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Registration is free. Speakers include John Cole, Historian at the Library of Congress; Zvi Rosen, legal scholar of copyright at the Southern Illinois University School of Law; and George Thuronyi, head of the public Information and education at Copyright Office. The recorded program will be available shortly after the live presentation.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Thomas Jefferson’s Quran at the World Expo in Dubai

Yasmeen Khan (center), head of the Library’s Paper Conservation Section, helps install Jefferson’s copy of the Koran in the U.S. exhibit in Dubai, UAE, as USA Pavilion photographer Ibrahim Rahma films. Photo: Steve Hersch. 

Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran, one of the treasures of the Library, is making its first-ever appearance in the Middle East this month, debuting at the glittering World Expo in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Jefferson’s English translation of the Islamic holy book is one of the stars of the Expo’s U.S. Pavilion, themed “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of the Future,” a riff on Jefferson’s famous phrase from the Declaration of Independence. Library staff installed the two-volume, 1764 copy of the Quran in a secured case as the first object on display after guests emerge from a sound and light experience that showcases the U.S. founding principles, particularly its innovations. Jefferson and the Quran are the first example of those goals, followed by some of the works of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Graham Bell.

“Thomas Jefferson was widely interested in and curious about a variety of religious perspectives,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Our nation’s history is a rich and beautiful reflection of the diverse ideas, cultures and religion of its citizens. The Library of Congress, the nation’s library, is a symbol to free access to information and the role it plays in a knowledge-based democracy that we share.”

The Expo, delayed for a year due to COVID-19 but still billed as Expo 2020, is a continuation of the 170-year-old tradition of international exhibitions that began as a means of sharing, if not showing off, each nation’s technology and cultural gems.

The first such event was held in London in 1851, billed as “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” the brainchild of Prince Albert. He wanted to show off Britain’s industrial gains to the world (particularly Europe) as a means of building trade and British power. It was held in an iron-and-glass structure so striking that it was called the Crystal Palace.

Stereograph view of the Crystal Palace. Marian S. Carson collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

It was a magnificent success, with more than 6 million people attending, launching a plethora of such fairs through the 19th century until today. These displays were mixed with great technological wonders – nascent telephones (and mobile phones a century later), televisions, the Ferris Wheel and so on – but also, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the overt racism and colonialism of the era, as people from developing nations were often exhibited as “natives.”

The event in Dubai features exhibits from 192 nations as well as dozens of corporations and runs until next March. The Jefferson Quran will be on display for three months, an unusual stay for the type of item the Library usually only loans to other permanent museums, libraries or cultural institutions.

The book, and a framed map of Mecca that came with it, traveled in a custom-made wooden crate with four inches of padding and customized trays with more padding, along with a sensor that detects vibrations and temperature changes. Library conservation and security staffers, along with police and an international freight company that specializes in fine art shipping, secured the crate en route.

Title page of Jefferson’s copy of the Koran. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Jefferson bought his copy of the Quran in 1765 in Williamsburg, when he was 21 or 22, studying law. The two volumes are a second edition of the influential 1734 translation by George Sale, with Jefferson’s copy published in London in 1764.

Jefferson, who had an abiding interest in world religions, may have also valued the Quran as a comparison for legal codes across the world. Further, some of the enslaved Africans brought to America were Muslims, as the Library documents in the writings of Omar Ibn Said. Jefferson, who enslaved more than 600 Black people over the course of his life, may well have had firsthand experience with members of the faith.

He would go on to amass the largest collection of books in the United States in the early 19th century. After the British burned the Capitol building and the Library of Congress during the War of 1812, Jefferson sold his collection of 6,487 volumes to Congress in 1815 for $23,950. Many of his political opponents voted against the purchase, citing Jefferson’s wide-ranging interests as an “infidel philosophy” and that the books were “good, bad, and indifferent … in languages which many can not read, and most ought not.”

The Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The collection was so large that it took 10 wagons to carry them from his Monticello estate to Washington. It is regarded as the founding of the modern Library, and Jefferson as the Library’s patron saint, with the Library’s main building bearing his name. A fire on Christmas Eve in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of Jefferson’s collection, but the Quran was one of the volumes that survived. The book was rebound by the Library in 1918.

It endures as powerful symbol of Islamic faith in the country  ̶  U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, who in 2006 became the first Muslim elected to Congress, took his oath of office on Jefferson’s Quran.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

National Book Festival: That’s a Wrap!

The Library’s first live event since the spring of 2020. Crossword puzzle experts Adrienne Raphel (l), Will Shortz (c) and Lulu Garcia-Navarro chat in the Coolidge Auditorium. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Let the record reflect that on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021, at about 7 p.m., Shari Werb, the Library’s director of the Center for Learning, Literacy and Engagement, came on stage during the National Book Festival in the Jefferson Building and said the following.

“This is the first event in our historic Coolidge Auditorium in over a year and a half.”

It was a statement so welcome and so long in coming that the crowd – most of them sitting a few seats apart around the auditorium — burst into applause. She had to wait for it to die down before adding: “And it feels really good to be back home.”

The comeback event was an on-stage, socially-distanced conversation with crossword puzzle gurus Will Shortz and Adrienne Raphel. The last event before COVID-19 shut down all live events and no small number of other Library operations? March 2, 2020. Garth Brooks, Gershwin Prize winner, chatting on the very same stage with his wife and fellow country music star Trisha Yearwood, with Librarian Carla Hayden asking the questions.

This time around, there was an even more festive atmosphere. Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and moderator of the event, joked when she came onstage, “I even put on my pre-pandemic jeans for the occasion.”

And then, like slipping into an comfortable pair of old shoes, the evening fell into the familiar pattern of Library events that once seemed a given: A smart, well- informed talk about an interesting subject, polite questions from a curious audience and a few laughs along the way.

As the festival wound down its 10-day schedule, with more than 100 authors appearing in a variety of platforms, Hayden was thrilled with the way the second virtual NBF had turned out.

“This year, the National Book Festival showed there is a huge appetite from booklovers across the nation to connect and engage more than ever with their favorite author,” she said. “Users were able to curate their own festival experience whether it was watching a live author conversation, listening to podcasts, streaming on-demand videos or watching the PBS special.”

The festival’s final days continued to showcase writers across the literary spectrum. There was a symposium on comic book history, “With Great Responsibility: The Spider-Man Origin Story in Art and Comic Books,” featuring the Library’s copy of the comic in which the superhero first appeared, “Amazing Fantasy” #15, from 1962. Peter Godfrey-Smith, the Australian philosopher of science, discussed how animal life developed a “sense of experience,” or consciousness, from his book “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.” Novelists George Saunders (“Lincoln in the Bardo”) and Alice McDermott (“Charming Billy”) talked about their craft with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles.

And, of course, there was the perennial favorite: Cookbooks and the entertaining chefs and authors behind them.

The common refrain here is that food is never just about food. It’s about everything: family, culture, humor, shared traditions and new experiences. The blends of American cooking, which incorporates cultures and ingredients from all over the world, results in an ever-changing but always compelling menu – and conversation.

“American food wouldn’t be the same, it would be very dull without the black experience,” said Marcus Samuelsson, author of “The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.”

Samuelsson is head chef of the Red Rooster Harlem. He was in conversation with Hawa Hassan, the Somali-born entrepreneur who has just written, “In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Counties that Touch the Indian Ocean.”

East African cooking isn’t widely known in the U.S., so the pair dropped into a conversation about how and where to buy the ingredients needed – specialty stores? Chain grocers? It wasn’t, they agreed, a decision just about where to find turmeric.

Hassan counseled practicality.

“If you’re starting out, I hate to endorse these bigger grocery chains, but you’re going to find cumin there, you’re going to find cardamom there,” she said. “Then, as you get more familiar with these cuisines, start going to the specialty stores to support them.”

Samuelsson agreed that would do if you were in a hurry, but there was more to the dish than just the spices.

”When you go to one of our stores, one of our markets, it’s a vibe,” he said. “It’s such a pleasure to go to an African market…it’s never is about just about buying the thing. If you’re doing that, you’re missing out. It’s about arguing about the price, it’s going back and forth, and they’re always gonna win. You know you’re going to lose, but you’re going to have a great time.”

Southern chefs brought more of a down-home flavor. The recipes and methods of cooking in the Deep South have been shaped across the generations by small-towns, home-grown vegetables, and no small amount of poverty; it’s a place where fancy ingredients aren’t on the shelves and far-flung dishes aren’t what’s on for supper.

Rodney Scott grew up in Hemingway, South Carolina, population 400, where “the biggest thing in town was your imagination.” Yearwood, the country music star, grew up in a Monticello, Georgia, population 2,000, where “our exotic spices were salt and pepper and sometimes garlic powder if we were really getting crazy.”

They both cook professionally now, though. Scott is co-founder of Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ, operating in both Charleston, South Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama. He was the 2018 recipient of the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef Southeast and is author of “Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day.” Yearwood, author of four cookbooks (the latest is “Trisha’s Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family”) hosts her own cooking show on the Food Network.

Scott cooked his first “whole hog” over an open pit at age 11; Yearwood grew up in a house where her mother cooked by ear, saying things about frying chicken like, “you cook it till it sounds right.”

Like Hassan and Samuelsson, they said that ingredients alone aren’t what makes food taste great; it’s also the life lived around its preparation.

“Food,” Scott said, “is one of the universal languages.”

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Kazuo Ishiguro: People in Service, A Life of Meaning

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Andrew Testa.

Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, making a headlining appearance at this year’s National Book Festival, was asked why so many of his central characters work in service-oriented jobs.

A metaphor, he said, for the lives most of us lead.

Ishiguro’s haunting works include “The Remains of the Day,” “Never Let Me Go,” and his newest, “Klara and the Sun.” In each, the central character works in service to others. In “Remains,” it’s an English butler on an estate; in “Never,” a nurse who helps coordinate organ donations; in “Klara,” a robot created in the form of a little girl to help her owners avoid loneliness and heartbreak.

Ishiguro, 66, joined the online festival from his home in London. In a conversation with Marie Arana, the Library’s former literary director, he said the “person in service” archetype – mostly arrived at unconsciously — represents people living small lives beneath the waves of history. They “torture themselves” in a struggle to be good, decent people, in the hopes that it will contribute to a larger good.

“In every endeavor, we care about this so much, and this is what fascinates me about people and it touches me about people,” he said. “It moves me about human beings, in (their) struggle to do something that they think will bring them dignity and pride and a sense of self-worth. And so I often show people in service because that is such a huge part of who we are.”

It wasn’t the only insight of the talk. In a 40-minute conversation, Arana and Ishiguro shared their stories of having a childhood in one country and an adult life in another – Arana in Peru and the U.S., Ishiguro in Japan and the United Kingdom.

He was born in Nagasaki, but moved with his parents to England when he was five. Still, his parents had not originally planned to stay long, spoke Japanese at home, and the family generally regarded England as an interesting place they were passing through. They wound up staying, but Ishiguro, while adapting fully to English life, still regarded himself as Japanese.

“I certainly don’t think as myself as an Englishman with just a few years of a Japanese childhood somewhere at the beginning,” he said. “I think the Japanese side of myself runs all the way through.

“I saw the world around me, the only one I had direct contact with, as something that was slightly provisional and certainly the values were not something that were permanent,” he continued. “…they were more the customs of the natives who we should respect and look at with interest, but these were not absolute right and wrongs about how to behave. I had one set of values at home and another at school…I think I’ve grown up with that slight distance, of dislocation.”

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Hispanic Heritage Month: Selena’s “Ven Conmigo”

As we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, author Joe Nick Patoski, who has been writing about Texas music and musicians for five decades, examines Selena’s 1990 album, “Ven Conmigo.”  It was added to the Library’s National Recording Registry in 2019.

To fully appreciate Selena, the superstar Tejano singer, start with “Ven Conmigo,” the second album that Selena y Los Dinos recorded for their new major label, EMI-Latin. Released in 1990, the record was a watershed for Selena and her siblings, the Quintanilla family band. They were from Corpus Christi and were serving notice that they were the new standard bearers of Tejano, the regional music popular among second- and third-generation Texans of Mexican descent.

The big band ensemble sound dated back to the 1940s and was built on the polka as its primary rhythm. Tejanos — the name also describes Texans of Mexican descent — borrowed the European dance tradition from Czech and Germans immigrants to Texas in the early 20th century and reworked it into their own style.

Tejano had its own living legend, Little Joe Hernandez of Little Joe y La Familia, but the music’s popularity had remained local until a wave of younger musicians appeared primed to reach a wider audience. Major record labels, including EMI, had taken notice and were betting on the crossover potential of acts such as Emilio Navaira, La Mafia, Grupo Mazz, and Selena.

The songs on “Ven Conmigo” illustrate the evolution that Selena and her siblings had made during nine years of management and direction from their father, Abraham Quintanilla Jr. He had once sung street-corner harmonies in his own version of Los Dinos in the early 1960s. Frustrated over his group’s inability to crossover into the mainstream, Abraham taught his English-speaking children to play the bouncy Tejano rhythm and how to sing in Spanish.

They began as a small combo that played Papa Gayo’s, the family’s Mexican restaurant in Lake Jackson, when Selena was in elementary school. Years of playing every weekend on the road polished the act into a state-of-the-art performing enterprise complete with recording studio and touring busses. Joining Selena was her older brother and producer-composer, Abraham III (known professionally as A.B. III), and her sister, Suzette, the drummer. Onstage was a full ensemble that included longtime colleague Ricky Vela on keyboards, and from Laredo, a second keyboardist, Joe Ojeda. Pete Astudillo, a singer-songwriter-dancer, co-produced with A.B. III. At the center of it all was 20-year-old Selena.

The head-and-shoulder profile photograph of Selena looking down, pensive, on the album cover, speaks volumes.  The perky teen who came of age at Tejano Music Awards shows in San Antonio had grown into a woman in full flower, of exceptional natural beauty, her jet-black hair cut stylishly short.

Most songs on the album are straight up Tejano. They are distinguished by a gliding, danceable rhythm with keyboards and synthesizers replacing the traditional accordion and horns for a more modern sound. Then there were the romantic ballads, showcasing Selena’s soaring vocals.

That strange, weird polka groove drives the title track, with David Lee Garza’s accordion added on this song for old-school street cred. It also distinguishes “Yo Te Amo,” a duet Selena sings with Astudillo, on a song he co-wrote.  The updated polkita rhythm also defines “La Tracalera,” a much-improved remake of her 1982 version of the Tex-Mex truckers’ anthem, complete with shout outs to San Antonio, Laredo, Houston, Dallas, Waco, Victoria, Corpus Christi, and La Feria.

“La Tracalera,” “Aunque No Salga El Sol” and “Despues de Enero” — the last a ballad showcasing Selena’s vocal range — were written by Johnny Herrera, her father’s mentor. Herrera, from Corpus Christi, had several hits in Mexico in the 1950s where he was known as “El Suspiro,” the Sigh.

Three songs on “Ven Conmigo” offer hints where Selena was headed.

The second single, “Baila Esta Cumbia,” completely strayed from the Tejano formula. The song was a cumbia, not a polka, and was produced by Astudillo and A.B. III. It borrowed heavily from Fito Olivares, who hailed from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Powered by a mesmerizing beat tailored for dancing, the song hit big in Mexico, something few Tejano bands had  accomplished. Selena was opening doors.

“Enamorada de Ti,” another percussive, made-for-dance collaboration between A.B. III and Astudillo, features a rap break with a growling, assertive Selena busting rhymes, showing what she’s got.

Along with “No Quiero Saber,” the production team was making a strong case that they could create the English-language crossover songs that the label executives wanted when they signed Selena.

“Ven Conmigo” froze all that in time.

Weeks after the album’s release, guitarist Chris Perez joined Los Dinos, adding a rock component to the band’s sound.  Two years later, he and Selena married.

With “Ven Conmigo,” Selena was ascendant, earning comparisons to Gloria Estefan and Madonna. She was signed to endorse Coca-Cola, the first Tejana to do so. Yet to come were concerts that filled Houston’s Astrodome with 60,000 fans; street dances at Miami’s Calle Ocho that turned on the larger Latin music world to this new singer coming out of Texas; a movie with Johnny Depp; and a role in a Mexican telenovela. Each album that followed topped the previous one, capped by 1994’s fully-formed “Amor Prohibido,” which sold more than 500,000 copies. It was only the second time a Tejano act had sold that many records.

The success of “Ven Conmigo” also attracted the attention of Yolanda Saldivar, a San Antonio nurse. She first asked to run Selena’s fan club, but eventually worked her way into being Selena’s business associate, managing the singer’s boutique in San Antonio and assisting Selena as she developed a fashion line with designer Martin Gomez.

On the morning of March 31, 1995, Saldivar shot Selena to death at a Corpus Christi motel, following a dispute over charges that Saldivar had been embezzling funds. She was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. She is eligible for parole in 2025.

Selena’s legacy, meanwhile, glows brighter than ever.

Joe Nick Patoski  has authored and co-authored biographies of Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Selena, and the Dallas Cowboys. 

Jason Reynolds Takes a Third Lap

As the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for the past two years, Jason Reynolds has been an enthusiastic and supportive proponent of reading, writing and creativity, even in the depth of the pandemic. In April 2020, we joined with him to launch a 30-part video series for kids, “Write. Right. Rite,” offering fun and engaging prompts to express creativity. The popular video shorts were widely used in home and classroom settings during a time when social distancing required fresh and engaging virtual content.

“Jason’s GRAB THE MIC platform has proven that connecting with kids on their level empowers real world growth in reading and writing,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Today, she made it official: Reynolds has been appointed to an unprecedented third year as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The Ambassador program is an initiative of the Library in partnership with Every Child a Reader and the Children’s Book Council, with generous support from Dollar General Literacy Foundation.

Reynolds discussed plans for his third year during an interview on NPR’s TED Radio Hour podcast at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. You can also read the complete announcement on his third year, with details of those plans, which include a nationwide virtual tour to meet students in rural communities to continue his work of encouraging young people to share their own narratives and write their stories.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Welcome to the 2021 National Book Festival!

The 2021 Library of Congress National Book Festival has begun! Watch as News4 Today journalist Eun Yang talks to Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about this year’s Festival:

{mediaObjectId:'CC21D5071FA79A90E053CAE7938CDE48',playerSize:'mediumWide'}

Join us for the 2021 National Book Festival, Sept. 17-26. Audiences are invited to create their own festival experience this year, with more than 100 authors in programs in a range of formats. Subscribe to the Festival blog for future updates, and visit the Festival website.

Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.