NOT YET ON A ROLL
Chris Maume recalls events from this week in history
21 MARCH 1952
The famed DJ Alan Freed presented The Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena, widely regarded as the first rock’n’roll show (Freed claimed to have invented the term). The highlights were to be Paul Williams and his Hucklebuckers, plus Tiny Grimes and the Rocking Highlanders, a black instrumental band who performed in kilts. Partly due to counterfeiting, more than 20,000 turned up to a venue that held 10,000. After Williams had performed one number, the fire service and police closed the show.
22 MARCH 1930
Stephen Sondheim was born in New York to Jewish parents. His childhood was desperately unhappy – his father left, and he detested his abusive mother. “What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time,” he recalled. She later wrote to him saying that her only regret was giving
birth to him. (When she died in 1992 he stayed away from her funeral.) Fortunately, he became friends with James Hammerstein, whose father Oscar, the celebrated lyricist, became his surrogate father and mentor, and a profound influence.
24 MARCH 1721
Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated six concertos to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, now known as The Brandenburg Concertos. He selected them from pieces written over the years when he was Kapellmeister at Köthen, and wrote them out himself rather than pay a copyist. He begged the Margrave “not to judge their imperfection with the rigour of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him”.