Cash’s dues for the blues
QUESTION Why was Johnny Cash sued over the song Folsom Prison Blues?
When Cash recorded Folsom Prison Blues at Sun Studios in 1955, it fitted comfortably into the American ballad tradition in which troubadours, including Bob Dylan, were influenced by earlier works. But he had perhaps
borrowed a little too freely from Gordon Jenkins’s 1953 pop song Crescent City Blues. This begins:
‘I hear the train a-comin, it’s rolling
round the bend
And I ain’t been kissed, lord, since I
don’t know when.’
Cash’s song starts:
‘I hear the train a comin’, it’s rolling
round the bend
And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I
don’t know when.’
There are many further similarities. Jenkins did not take any legal action until Cash re-recorded his song live at California’s Folsom State Prison in 1968, garnering huge sales. Cash came to a $ 75,000 ( equivalent to $ 630,000 today) settlement.
Reminiscing in 1996 about the song, Cash said: ‘I really had no idea I would be a professional recording artist. I wasn’t trying to rip anybody off.’
The song’s most famous line ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’ was more or less a Cash original, though he’d taken inspiration from Jimmie Rodgers’s Blue Yodel no 1: ‘I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, Just to see her jump and fall.’
Mark Cotton, Stevenage, Herts.
QUESTION Why did the Rev F. W. Densham paint his Cornish church blue and red?
FReDeRICk WIllIAm DenShAm was rector of St Bartholomew, Warleggan, from 1931 until his death in 1953. his eccentric behaviour saw him alienate his conservative parishioners.
Densham was born in 1870 in london to a methodist minister and his wife. At over 6 ft tall, he was an imposing man and very certain in his beliefs.
After working in a boys’ home in Whitechapel and at a home for inebriates, he was sent to natal as a missionary. When he heard of the teachings of Gandhi, he asked to be posted to India,
but this was refused. Instead, he was sent to Cornwall.
The parishioners weren’t ready to accept an Anglican priest with methodist leanings and Densham did little to ingratiate himself. The organ was dedicated to those who lost their lives in World War I, but he tried to have it removed in favour of a piano. In 1933, he upset parishioners further by closing the Sunday school.
he bought a litter of Alsatian puppies, calling his favourite Gandhi. These ran wild, killing sheep belonging to local farmers. So he erected 8 ft-high barbed wire fences around the rectory to protect the flocks from his dogs.
Densham became an increasingly isolated figure who sometimes found himself preaching to an empty church. On one occasion he recorded in the register: ‘no fog, no wind, no rain, no congregation.’
Over the course of a single night, Densham decided to repaint the interior of the church in garish red, blue and yellow to raise his parishioners’ spirits. When they saw it, the congregation walked out, so he responded by painting over the windows. When an emergency meeting was held over the issue, he brought a single candle to illuminate proceedings.
The walls were repainted in traditional white, though a segment of Densham’s work was recently uncovered and is on display in the church.
his antics led some to accuse him of witchcraft, but others remember him fondly as a generous spirit who sent milk to the sick, built a playground for children and held slide shows.
Diane Briggs, St Ives, Cornwall.
QUESTION Why did the Norwegian author Ola Bauer join the IRA?
OlA BAUeR was a playwright, journalist and author. he worked in Africa, Paris and northern Ireland, where he became sympathetic to the Republican cause, although he was not a member of the IRA.
he was born during the German occupation of norway. his father was a member of the Resistance and was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany, where he died three months before the end of the war.
Bauer took part in the Paris student uprising of 1968, an experience he described in his 1980 novel Humlehjertene. Wanting to understand whether the negative depiction of Irish Republicans in the norwegian Press was accurate, he arrived in Belfast in 1972, shortly after Bloody Sunday.
As a journalist for Vi Menn (Us men) magazine, he was an eyewitness to the bombing of the Abercorn restaurant, which claimed the lives of two young women and injured more than 130 people. no one claimed responsibility for it.
The Troubles in northern Ireland were the topic of Bauer’s 1983 novel Rosapenna. named after a street in Belfast, it was a thinly veiled semiautobiographical novel in which a norwegian journalist moves to Belfast, forms a relationship with a female IRA member and is forced to reconsider his view of the conflict.
T. E. L. Davy, Worcester.
QUESTION Why were children given sunray treatment in postwar Britain?
FURTheR to the earlier answer, in the late 1940s I was a 15- year- old nursery assistant.
each monday morning, a dozen toddlers were taken in a converted ambulance to the health clinic in the town centre for sunray treatment on their bare chests. If I was in matron’s good books, I would be chosen to escort and supervise them.
I’d sit on a child’s chair in a semicircle in a room that had a strange smell of chemicals, wearing goggles and with the youngest child on my lap.
The other nursery assistants would envy my healthy pink face, no matter that I had white patches around my eyes.
Mrs E. Haworth, Blackburn, Lancs.
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