A Great Time to Be a Husband, Parent, and a Dad

A Great Time to Be a Husband, Parent, and a Dad
by Dan Liberto

Note: This article originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the trade magazine for homeschool families. Read the magazine free online or read it on the go by downloading the free apps for your mobile devices.

As I write this note, the paraphrased words of Mordecai in the fourth chapter of Esther ring clearly in my mind: “Who knows but that you have come to this royal position for such a time as this.” Seems initially like pretty lofty stuff. But as husbands, parents, and dads, are we not sitting in the same position, overseeing the family’s royal crest? Aren’t we called to lead our families to the knowledge of Christ? Do we not have the purpose of reflecting to our family and neighbors faith, hope, and most importantly the love of Christ? These are certainly royal objectives, because they are ordained by the King of kings, our Lord Jesus Christ. But do we treat them as royal objectives?

In our nation and in the world, we are experiencing difficult times. But when light is willingly turned off, then there is no option other than darkness. We have willingly, if not purposely, promoted this darkness by limiting the Light of Christ in our daily expression. This daily expression, which is akin to Jesus’ words to take up your cross daily, should begin in the home and radiate out from there.

Read more:

https://www.crosswalk.com/family/homeschool/encouragement/a-great-time-to-be-a-husband-parent-and-a-dad.html

Samuel Kaylin and “Steamboat ‘Round the Bend”

Samuel Kaylin (January 18, 1892 –July 7, 1983) was a film score composer and conductor who scored Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto movies for Fox Film and 20th Century Fox. Kaylin was born Shevach Samuel Kalinowsky on January 18, 1892, at Ekaterinoslav in  the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire (now Dnipro, Ukraine), and immigrated to the U.S. on January 16, 1907,  aboard the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship Neckar.  He worked as a musician at the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.  Kaylin joined Fox Film in 1930 and composed more than 80 film scores. Among them were the scores for Shirley Temple’s Bright Eyes and John Ford’s Judge Priest. Steamboat Round the Bend was a 1935 American comedy film directed by John Ford, released by 20th Century Fox and produced by Fox Film, based on the 1933 novel of the same name by author Ben Lucien Burman with music composed by Kaylin.

In Steamboat Round the Bend, starring Will Rogers, Anne Shirley, Irvin S. Cobb, Eugene Pallette, and Baerton Churchill, a Louisiana con man and riverboat captain Doctor John Pearly (Rogers), who pilots a ramshackle floating waxworks museum, from which he also dispenses highly alcoholic cure-all medicine, learns that his nephew Duke has killed a man in self-defense.  Duke’s only chance for freedom is the testimony of a half-crazed witness, New Moses, who has disappeared upriver.  Pearly’s rival Captain Eli is itching to race his paddle wheeler, the Pride of Paducah, against Pearly’s steamboat, the Claremore Queen.  So Pearly enters his steamboat in a winner-take-all wild steamboat race with his rival while attempting to find the eyewitness that will save his nephew and lasso a win for the Claremore Queen.

The movie was the penultimate film of star Will Rogers and was released posthumously, after he was killed in an airplane crash on August 15, 1935. Shirley is particularly good as a swamp girl taken in by Rogers. Churchill shines in comic role of river prophet “The New Moses.”  The climactic steamboat race is a gem.  After serving as Music Directoro for a few years, Kaylin left 20th Century Fox, Fox Film’s successor, in 1940. He died in Bakersfield, Kern County, CA, on July 7, 1983 at the age of 91.

My collection includes the following work by Samuel Kaylin:

Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (1935).

Brown County Historical Society Pioneer Village School, Nashville, IN

Brown County Historical Society Pioneer Village School

90 E. Gould Street at Old School Way

Nashville, IN  47448

The mission of the Brown County Historical Society, a non-profit organization formed in 1957, is to collect, preserve, and present the history of Brown County, Indiana. To approach this goal, they maintain the Pioneer Museum in downtown Nashville and The Bailey/Reeve Archives at the Society building, and present a monthly program on local history.  Located in downtown Nashville on the Northeast Corner just behind the Brown County Courthouse and across the street from the Brown County History Museum, the recently completed Brown County History Center Pioneer Village welcomes visitors with a wide front porch and rustic charm.  There are exhibit halls; an authentically reconstructed and restored log cabin room with fireplace and exhibits typical of the pioneer period; a two-story 1879 log jail, used until 1919; a two-story dog-trot log building, once used as a community building and housing exhibits of Brown County schools and churches, military items, and a special exhibit of Cracker Jack memorabilia created by local artist Carey Cloud; a working blacksmith shop circa 1850; an 1898 doctor’s office used by Dr. Alfred J. Ralphy for nearly 50 years in Bellsville, in the southeastern part of the county; a gift shop; environmentally controlled areas for the collection and archive of important documents; and a replica one room school house.   The Pioneer Village is open weekends May through October from 11:00 to 4:00 p.m., and by special arrangement.

http://www.browncountyhistorycenter.org/

Henry Clay Work and “Marching Through Georgia”

Henry Clay Work (October 1, 1832 – June 8, 1884) was an American composer and songwriter.  Work was born on October 1, 1832, in Middletown, CT, to Alanson and Amelia (Forbes) Work. His father opposed slavery, and Work was himself an active abolitionist and Union supporter. His family’s home became a stop on the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves to freedom in Canada, for which his father was once imprisoned.  Work was self-taught in music. By the time he was 23, he worked as a printer in Chicago, specializing in setting musical type. He allegedly composed in his head as he worked, without a piano, using the noise of the machinery as an inspiration. His first published song was “We Are Coming, Sister Mary,” which eventually became a staple in Christy’s Minstrels shows.  He is credited with  75 compositions.

Work produced much of his best material during the Civil War. He captured the deeply-felt emotions of that conflict and was more popular even than Stephen Foster. Work shares much of the credit for the development of the carefully refined Verse-Chorus structure of late 19th century popular song.  In 1862 he published “Kingdom Coming” using his own lyrics based upon snippets of Negro speech he had heard. This use of slave dialect (Irish too was a favorite) tended to limit the appeal of Work’s works and make them frowned upon today. 1862 also saw his novelty song “Grafted Into the Army”, followed in 1863 by “Babylon is Fallen” (“Don’t you see the black clouds risin’ ober yonder”), “The Song of a Thousand Years”, and “God Save the Nation”. His 1864 effort “Wake Nicodemus” was popular in minstrel shows.

Timothy Shay Arthur’s play Ten Nights in a Barroom, had Work’s 1864 “Come Home, Father,” a dirgesome song bemoaning the demon drink: too mawkish for modern tastes, but always sung at Temperance Meetings.  At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Work wrote his greatest hit, “Marching Through Georgia” (sometimes spelled as “Marching Thru’ Georgia” or “Marching Thro Georgia”), inspired by U.S. Army major general William T. Sherman’s “March to the Sea” to capture the Confederate city of Savannah, Georgia in late 1864. The song, sung from the point of view of a Union soldier, tells of marching through Georgian territory, freeing slaves, meeting Unionist men glad to see the U.S. flag and U.S. soldiers, and punishing the Confederacy for their starting the war.  Thanks to its lively melody, the song was immensely popular, especially with Union Army veterans after the American Civil War, its million sheet-music sales being unprecedented.

Personal problems, including the deaths of three children, seem to have affected his postwar output Settling into sentimental balladry, Work had significant post-Civil War success with “The Lost Letter,” and “The Ship That Never Returned”—a tune reused in the “Wreck of the Old 97” and “MTA.”  A massive hit was “My Grandfather’s Clock,” published in 1876, which was introduced by Sam Lucas in Hartford, CT, and again secured more than a million sales of the sheet music, along with popularizing the phrase “grandfather clock” to describe a longcase clock.”  By 1880 Work was living in New York City, NY, giving his occupation as a musician.  He died in Hartford four years later, June 8, 1884, at the age of 51. He was survived by his wife, Sarah Parker Work, and one of their four children,  Henry Clay Work’s headstone is in Spring Grove Cemetery, Hartford, CT.

“Marching Through Georgia” \is a cheerful marching song and has since been pressed into service many times, including by Princeton University as a football fight song.  Outside of the Southern United States, it had a widespread appeal.  The British Army sang it in India, and an English town thought the tune was appropriate to welcome southern American troops in World War II. The song remains popular with brass bands, and its tune has been adapted to other popular songs, including the  anthem of Glasgow Rangers Football Club “Billy Boys” and “Come In, Come In.” It was also sung by a carpetbagger in “Gone with the Wind,” and Ann Sheridan in “Dodge City.”  Henry Clay Work was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He was a distant cousin to Frances Work, a great-grandmother of Diana, Princess of Wales.Among the best-known of Henry Clay   Also “Kingdom Coming” appeared in the Jerome Kern show “Good Morning, Dearie” on Broadway in 1921, and was heard in the background in the 1944 Judy Garland film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

The following work by Henry Clay Work is contained in my collection:

Marching Through Georgia

Joe Winner and “The Little Brown Jug”

Joseph Eastburn “Joe” Winner Jr. (1837-1918) was an American composer, songwriter, and music publisher of the 19th century who is best known for his tune “The Little Brown Jug” (1869). Winner was born in 1837 at Philadelphia, PA, the son of Joseph E. Winner Sr., an instrument maker specializing in violins, and his wife Mary Ann Winner, who was a relative of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  From 1845 to 1854 he partnered with his brother, the composer Septimus Winner, in the music publishing business. Septimus was also a songwriter who used the pseudonyms Alice Hawthorne, Percy Guyer, Mark Mason, Apsley Street, and Paul Stenton for such well known songs as “Listen to the Mockingbird,” “Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone,”“Ten Little Indians,” and “Whispering Hope.”

Working apart from his brother, Joseph operated his own publishing business in Philadelphia from 1854 to 1907.  He sometimes used the pseudonym R. A. Eastburn on his compositions.  “Little Brown Jug” was written in 1869 and was originally published in Philadelphia with the author listed as Winner’s middle name “Eastburn.”  It was intended as a drinking song and remained well known as a folk song into the early 20th century. Like many songs which make reference to alcohol, it enjoyed new popularity during the Prohibition era.  Joseph Eastburn Winner died in 1918.  In 1939, bandleader Glenn Miller recorded and broadcast his swing instrumental arrangement of “The Little Brown Jug” with great success, and the number became one of the best known orchestrations of the American Big Band era.

My collection includes the following work by Joe Winner:

The Little Brown Jug

Krys Mach and Prairie Daughter

Krys Mach is a self taught musician.  He started playing clarinet at age 15 and then moved on to alto saxophone at 18, studying with Aubrey Frank at the Guildhall School of Music in London.  Getting his first tenor saxophone at age 20, he started playing with younger kids to gain access to sight reading jazz charts in the youth orchestras at Luton, Bedforshire, U. K., where he met Mario Travaras and formed Kat Kool and the Kool Kats with Travaras on guitar and Paul Young as bassist and later vocalist.  Also, Mach played with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Great Britain led by Bill Ashton and was lucky enough to play 2nd tenor next to Dave Bishop.   In fact, he did a tour of Australia with Ashton’s National Youth Jazz Orchestra a day after having wisdom teeth removed.

Mach worked on several Greek cruise liners around the Mediterranean sea, most notably the Oceanus  which in later years sank . Always a bebopper at heart, he ended up playing with jazz funk bands.  Jazz fusion was really popular at that time, and he got busy doing sessions locally and in London for singers and bands, joining jazz funk band Unlimited Source and then the Luton band Stikki Stuff, doing numerous recording sessions and gigs in London, the U.K., and Europe.  In addition, he performed and recorded with the internationally acclaimed group Level 42 led by Mark King, doing several world tours and appearing on TV with them for nearly six years.  One of the highlights was performing to 10,000 fans per night for 14 nights in a row sold out at Wembley Arena in England.

After doing several American tours and appearing on the television shows Saturday Night Live in New York and American Bandstand in Los Angeles, Mach moved to Los Angeles.  After years of touring, he was seeking to replenish the fire within, so he worked in jazz clubs throughout the 1990s with top jazz pianist Frank Strazerri, world famous jazz drummer Nick Martinis, and many L.A. studio jazz players. Through the years, he continued studying saxophone players and jazz history to understand the various jazz traditions, becoming involved in instrument development and consultation  and helping many top flight players with their instruments, including Tom Scott, Wayne Shorter, and Wilton Felder.  Today he is finding new and often younger musicians to collaborate with on recording sessions and performing at jazz venues and events in and around Los Angeles and in the U.K. and Europe. Also he enjoys finding ways to teach and help other players who are interested in various forms of jazz.

In addition to the Bb and bass clarinets and the soprano, alto, baritone, and tenor saxophones, Mach plays several other instruments, such as the Ewi (Electronic wind instrument), trumpet, flute, and various eastern flutes and ocarinas.   His arrangement and performance of a traditional Native American melody, “Prairie Daughter” has appeared on several albums, including Spiritual Sound of Native America (2008) and Traditional Native American Flute – Cries from the Earth (2012).  Scott Yanow, a jazz journalist, wrote, “Krys Mach is an exciting and hard-swinging tenor-saxophonist. His control of the tenor, some of the upper register cries in his playing, and his ability to play at fast tempos are reminiscent of Johnny Griffin but he has his own musical personality. He can be relied upon to add excitement to any jazz date.”

The following work by Krys Mach is contained in my collection:

Prairie Daughter

Motivation: A Motivating Force, Stimulus, or Influence: Incentive, Drive

Motivation: A Motivating Force, Stimulus, or Influence: Incentive, Drive
By Andrew Pudewa, the Institute for Excellence in Writing

(Note: This issue of Biblical Homeschooling includes an article by the very popular and talented writing teacher, Andrew Pudewa, regarding “Motivation.”)

To accomplish difficult tasks, motivation is absolutely necessary. No one doubts the need for motivating students, and methods of inspiring them to accomplish a teacher’s goals are numerous. On one extreme, there is fear: “Do this or die,” while on another, huge reward: “Do this and you win a million dollars.” When motivating children to write, however, there are some significant principles that must come into play because the fear of death impedes learning, and ultimately, material reward becomes ineffective. Some children write for fun; reading what they’ve written is its own reward. They embrace the idea of journals, and, inspired by their dreams and future, they write because they have a mission: to become writers. But these students are rare. Most children, especially those for whom writing is difficult, don’t have an instinctive inner drive to write. Typically the desire must be developed, and often the teacher’s biggest challenge is creating and maintaining that motivation.

For most of us, the basic reason for writing lies in Audience. We write a letter because we believe that someone will read it. We complete an assignment because it will be read and graded. We submit an article to a publication because we hope it will be published and appreciated by many.

Read More:

Click to access motivation.pdf

James A Bland and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”

James Alan “Jimmy” Bland (October 22, 1854 – May 5, 1911) was an African-American musician and song writer.  Bland was one of eight children born in Flushing, New York, to a free black family. His father was one of the first U. S. Negro college graduates (Oberlin College, 1845).  Beginning with an eight-dollar banjo purchased by his father, Jimmy was performing professionally by age fourteen.  He was educated in Washington, DC and graduated from Howard University in 1873.   Often called “The World’s Greatest Minstrel Man,” Bland toured the United States, as well as Europe. Bland’s earliest recorded minstrel performance was with the Original Black Diamonds of Boston in 1875.

Bland is reputed to have written over six to seven hundred songs, though only about fifty were published under his name.  They include “In the Morning in the Bright Light” (1879), “In the Evening by the Moonlight” (1879), “Oh! Dem Golden Slippers” (1879–the theme song for the long-running Philadelphia Mummers Parade), “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane” (1880), and “De Golden Wedding” (1880). His best-known song is “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (1878), written in a time when many newly-freed slaves were struggling to find work.

The song is not an adaption by Bland of the “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” by the Christy Minstrels, also known by the title; “Floating Scow of Old Virginny”, a song copyrighted by Edwin Pearce Christy in 1847. Bland simply appropriated the song title. Bland’s song bears no resemblance to it melodically, harmonically, or in the lyrics (except that both songs are minstrel songs). The latter song was very popular during the California gold rush and the American Civil War. Many parodies were written on this melody and became popular with miners, Civil War soldiers and civilians.  However, Bland’s version was the best known.

Beginning in 1881, Bland spent 20 years in London before returning to the United States.  He toured Europe in the early 1880s with Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels and remained in England to perform as a singer/banjo player without blackface. Appearing as “The Prince of Negro Songwriters,” he was invited to give command performances for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. Music historian Alec Wilder calls Bland the black writer who “broke down the barriers to white music publishers’ offices.” Bland was one of the most prolific minstrel composers of all time.  He spent his later years in obscurity, died from tuberculosis May 5, 1911, in Philadelphia, PA, and was buried in an unmarked grave without a funeral at Merion Memorial Park, Bala Cynwyd, PA.

In 1939, Bland’s grave was found by American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) with the assistance of the editor of The Etude magazine, James Francis Cooke. His grave was landscaped and a monument was erected. The Lions Club of Virginia also assisted in this effort. “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,”, in a slightly modified form, was the official State Song of Virginia from 1940 to 1997. It was retired and designated “state song emeritus” in the latter year, because of controversy over its racial nature. The Annual Bland Music Scholarships Program was established in 1948 to assist and promote cultural and educational opportunities for the musically talented youth of Virginia.James Bland was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

My collection includes the following work by James A Bland:

“Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (1878).

Pioneer One Room School House, Gnawbone, Indiana

Pioneer One Room School House

Gnawbone, Indiana

This Pioneer One Room School House is from a print of an original photo taken by Scott D. Van Osdol at Gnawbone, Indiana, in the southern part of the state.  The photo is of an old, long-forgotten one-room school house from early pioneer days.  A bell tower with the original cast iron bell still sits atop this beautiful wooden structure.  With its setting back off a gravel road in a heavily forested area of woods, one can almost hear the children playing outside through the crisp autumn air as the leaves rustle about their feet.  Scott says, “Possibly one of the most scenic backwoods photos I have ever had the privilege to come across on one of my many hiking and photography expeditions!”

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-one-room-school-house-gnawbone-indiana-scott-d-van-osdol.html

Richard Shuckburgh and “Yankee Doodle”

    Richard Shuckburgh (mid 1700s) was a military surgeon at a fort in Albany, NY, during the 1740s and 50s and is sometimes credited with being the writer of the song “Yankee Doodle.”  However, how many different Richard Shuckburghs held that post at the fort in Albany remains an uncertainty at this time. Also, a number of same-named individuals were alive and in America during the eighteenth century. This individual may have been of German origins or could have been the son of an English noble family. Perhaps he was serving in America as early as the mid-1730s. On June 27, 1737, he was commissioned a surgeon in the “Independent Company of New-York” commanded by Captain Horatio Gates. Perhaps he came to Albany sometime thereafter.  Alexander Hamilton visited with the garrison surgeon “Mr. Shakesburrough” while in Albany during the summer of 1744. In March 1747, John, the son of Richard and Mary Shuckburgh, was baptized at the Albany Dutch church.  A Richard Shucksburgh received a number of commissions as surgeon to British forces during the 1750s and 60s.

Shucksburgh is often thought to have been the author of the traditional tune “Yankee Doodle”. However, other origins have been claimed for the song.  The melody is thought to be much older than both the lyrics and the subject, going back to folk songs of Medieval Europe, being well known across western Europe, including England, France, Holland, Hungary, and Spain. The earliest words of “Yankee Doodle” came from a Middle Dutch harvest song which is thought to have followed the same tune, possibly dating back as far as 15th-century Holland. It contained mostly nonsensical words in English and Dutch.   The term Doodle first appeared in English in the early seventeenth century and is thought to be derived from the Low German dudel, meaning “playing music badly,” or Dödel, meaning “fool” or “simpleton.”  The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became slang for being a fop.  Dandies were men who placed particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisure hobbies. A self-made dandy was a British middle-class man who impersonated an aristocratic lifestyle. They notably wore silk strip cloth, stuck feathers in their hats, and carried two pocket watches with chains.

In British conversation, the term “Yankee doodle dandy” implied unsophisticated misappropriation of high-class fashion, as though simply sticking a feather in one’s cap would make one to be noble.  By using the term, the British were insinuating that the colonists were low-class men lacking masculinity, emphasizing that the American men were womanly.  The earliest versions of the song date to before the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution (1775–83).  Perhaps the most common legend is that Dr. Richard Shuckburgh wrote a ballad set to the “Yankee Doodle” tune to poke fun at New Englanders who served in the French and Indian War in Canada.

Tradition places its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial “Yankees” with whom they served in the French and Indian War. It was apparently written around 1755 or 1758 by British Army surgeon Dr. Richard Shuckburgh as a guest at the Van Rensselaer brick manor also known as Fort Crailo, near Albany, while campaigning in upper New York, and the British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap.  According to one story, he wrote the mocking ballad after seeing the appearance of Colonial troops under Colonel Thomas Fitch, the son of Connecticut Governor Thomas Fitch.  The tune for “Yankey (or Yankee) Doodle” was known in America from the 1760s onward.  A Richard Shuckburgh is said to have died in Schenectady, NY, in August 1773.

Obviously songs like this didn’t please the New Englanders, or “Yankees,” as they were called, so they added additional verses to that mocked the British troops and hailed George Washington as the Commander of the Continental army, and. it became popular among the Americans as a song of defiance.  The current version seems to have been written in 1775-1776 by Edward Bangs (1758-1818), a Harvard sophomore who also was a Minuteman at Lexington.  .  One day, over two hundred years ago, he wrote a simple ballad about a farmer and his son as they “went down to camp” which was printed on a broadside sheet.  This broadside, probably dating from 1775 or 1776, is the earliest known printing of this version.  Now his ballad is part of American history.

It wasn’t until the Bangs version that this most famous of early American songs became well known. His words –with slight variations — were often reprinted during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  By 1781, Yankee Doodle had turned from being an insult to being a song of national pride. Most of the authorities now conclude that the song is American in origin.  By the mid-19th century, this ballad was printed in Father Kemp’s Old Folks Concert Tunes as “Yankee’s Return From Camp (Yankee Doodle Dandy).”   Today it is the “State Song” of Connecticut.

The following work by Richard Shuckburgh is contained in my collection:

“Yankee Doodle” (attr.).