Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 25

The Louvins' brotherly (dis)harmony

The Los Angeles Times has a feature coming out in tomorrow's paper about Satan Is Real. Which, thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can read tonight.

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The records that brothers Ira and Charlie Louvin made in the 1950s and early '60s are some of the most revered and influential in the history of country music. The songs, many of them written by the Alabama-born siblings, have been widely recorded by succeeding generations of singers; their distinctive harmonies on songs such as "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby," "When I Stop Dreaming," "If I Could Only Win Your Love," "Every Time You Leave" and "Don't Laugh" created a template that strongly affected groups fromthe Everly Brothers to the Beatles and the Byrds, to the Judds and forward to Lady Antebellum.

"You can't find anybody, I don't think, that was not inspired by them," Vince Gill told The Times when Charlie died last January at age 83. "They were the kingpins of that family harmony."

The rest.

Poke around inside Satan Is Real

HarperCollins has a browsable copy of Satan Is Real up on their website that you can poke around in.

And, of course, it's out today. Just saying.

Best book cover of 2012

So says Paper magazine about Satan Is Real. And after quoting the back matter, they also have this to say:

Uh, this book sounds awesome. Whoever wants to read it with us in our just-formed "Papermag Timeless Murder Ballads Book Club" should definitely do so.

I'd love it if book clubs like that existed. I've been a member of exactly one in my life. It lasted until it came time for my pick and I chose Harry Crews' Feast of Snakes.

Required reading

Woke up this morning to find that the New York Post has mandated Satan Is Real as required reading.

Which is a hell of a good way to begin 2012.

Happy new year!

Drew Landry

Do yourself a favor. Click here, and then click the "listen" button on the left side of the page.

You download the whole album from Amazon. Which I'll be doing.

And then, of course, there's this, which it seems like I'm the last person on earth to have heard about:

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And this I'm collecting pretty much just so I have it together to watch tonight. It's a flick that I don't think was ever released, Last Man Standing. It's described as "A verite documentary following Cajun singer/songwriter, Drew Landry, through 3 years and 3 albums of living through hurricanes, heartbreak, and the struggle of chasing a dream across America."

Last Man Standing Part One

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Last Man Standing Part Two

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Last Man Standing Part Three

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Last Man Standing Part Four

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Last Man Standing Part Five

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Last Man Standing Part Six

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Last Man Standing Part Seven

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Last Man Standing Part Eight

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Last Man Standing Part Nine

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Last Man Standing Part Ten

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High shelf booze

Good morning.

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Look what I got in the mail

Reading for the whole family.

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Quote

From a letter from Hemingway's transvestite son, Gregory, to his father, found here.

When it's all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centred shit, the stories or the people?

Author Russell Banks on Writing Through the Voices of Outcasts, Criminals and Revolutionaries

This interview with Russell Banks is fantastic.

Silent Night

I somehow made the mistake of watching Glee last night (I was sick; don't have cable), and it was their spirituality episode. It was just about as subtle as you might expect, ending with an argument that anyone who ain't spiritual in the way the Glee writers are spiritual is deficient, and the Constitution is just dumb.

Best part, it ended with a mentally disabled woman saying, "God doesn't make mistakes." Which is the kind of deeply offensive and stupid cliche that reminds me why I'd rather eat glass than watch broadcast television. I can get that kind of thematic weight off of bumper stickers, and I don't have to suffer through 30 minutes of butchered pop songs and corny dialogue.

But it did get me thinking about the kind of spirituality that I am interested in. Charlie Louvin and Johnny Cash's Christianity, for instance. Or Josh T. Pearson's, in this, one of my favorite Christmas carols:

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