The future of the most beautiful sport in the World

Southern Rock

De la música que ha parido este seductor país en el que vivo, poca me ha llegado más al corazón que el rock sureño.

Hoy quiero compartir en este blog una selección de seis canciones de mis tres bandas favoritas de este estilo musical.

Comienzo por la obvia, la que todos conocen y seguro han escuchado hasta la saciedad:

"Sweet Home Alabama" de Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Otra de la misma banda, mucho menos conocida, pero con una letra que llega mucho más al corazón:

"One more time":

Cambiando de tercio, y haciendo parada en la banda por excelencia de rock sureño: The Allman Brothers Band. 

Como no podía ser de otra manera: "Jessica", de su legendario LP "Brothers and Sisters":

Mi selección personal de los Allman se va para una canción de uno de los hermanos, Gregg: "Come and Go Blues". Esa letra...

Y cierro con dos canciones de una banda menos conocida en Europa pero que se merece estar junto con Lynyrd Skynyrd y Allman Brothers Band en esta breve selección de Rock Sureño: The Marshall Tucker Band. Hace un par de semanas estuve escuchándolos en el Club Birchmere, en Virginia, y me emocioné. Por Dios qué música...

La primera canción, "Can´t you see". Esta la han versioneado monstruos de la música Country como Waylon Jennings y Hank Williams Jr. No sé qué es mejor en esta canción, si la letra o la melodía:

Dejo "Take the highway" para el próximo blog e incluyo aquí a "Windy City Blues", esto es, el blues de Chicago. En portugués la traducirían algo así como "Saudades da minha terra", que en el caso de esta banda no es otra que Carolina del Sur:

Home

Labour party...

1. C. Attlee (Labour PM 1945-1951) to W. Churchill (Tory PM 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) when meeting in the urinal trough: "Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?".
Churchill´s response: "That´s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalise it".

2. W. Churchill on Labour policies: "The difference between our outlook and the Socialist outlook on life is the difference between the ladder and the queue. We are for the ladder: Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue: Let each wait in his place till his turn comes".

3. Labour voters and politicians just do not get it right. For them, the solution to every single problem is always the same: more taxes. So good that Britain spoke loud and clear last Thursday!!!

Gentle On My Mind

One of the best Country songs ever.

A perfect match of title, lyrics and music.

I could never get tired of it...;)

The English Constitution (I): the dignified parts.

No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions unless he divides them into two classes: First, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population, the dignified parts; and next, the efficient parts, those by which it, in fact, works and rules. Every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and then employ that homage in the work of government. The dignified parts of government are those which bring it force, which attract its motive power. The efficient parts only employ that power. The former raise the army, though they do not win the battle. The elements which excite the most easy reverence will be the theatrical elements; those which appeal to the senses, which claim to be embodiment of the greatest human ideas; that which is brilliant to the eye. They are far from being the most useful, as they are likely to be adjusted to the lowest orders, those likely to care least and judge worst about what is useful. For this purpose, and other things being equal, yesterday´s institutions are by far the best for today; they are the most ready, the most influential, the most easy to get obeyed, the most likely to retain the reverence which they alone inherit, and which every other must win. We must not expect the oldest institutions to be the most efficient. We must expect what is venerable to acquire influence because of its inherent dignity; but we must not expect it to use that influence so well as new creations apt for the modern world. The English Constitution has two capital merits: it contains a simple efficient part which, on occasion, and when wanted, can work more simply and easily, and better than any instrument of government that has yet been tried; and it contains likewise historical, complex, august, theatrical parts, which it has inherited from a long past, which take the multitude.

From The English Constitution; by Walter Bagehot (1867)

The obituaries of The Economist

I am subscribed to the British magazine called The Economist. This weekly newspaper was first published in 1843. Walter Bagehot, author of The English Constitution, was among its early editors. The Economist contains leading articles in which "free-trade principles are most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day". Topics range from finance and economics, to politics, arts, science, and business, among others. It has sections devoted exclusively to the UK (Bagehot), the US (Lexington), Latin America (Bello), Europe (Charlemagne), Business (Schumpeter), and it also includes books reviews and sets of economic and financial indicators. Before reading the Bagehot section that covers UK´s politics, it is the weekly obituary of this magazine that gets my full attention. These obituaries are usually dedicated to global leaders, top economists, Nobel prize winners, universal artists, philanthropists and such. However, from time to time, the editors surprise me with hardly known, unique characters. To me, it is in those obituaries that this weekly publication excels. I would like to share one of the best I have ever read. Pure gold. Enjoy it!

BILL MILLIN

Piper at the D-Day landings, died on August 17th 2010, aged 88

ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina's skirt.

But Mr Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn't), then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots' great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the Somme, who had called the kilted pipers “Ladies from Hell”. And it raised the hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Mr Millin played on June 5th, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was standing on the bowsprit just about keeping his balance above the waves getting rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes even to himself.

His playing had been planned as part of the operation. On commando training near Fort William he had struck up a friendship with Lord Lovat, the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Mr Millin was short, with a broad cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family's return in 1925 from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He had asked Mr Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military arrangement. The War Office in London now forbade pipers to play in battle, but Mr Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest invasion in history”, Lovat wanted pipes to lead the way.

He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan' Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”

Three times therefore he walked up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his feet from mortar fire and the dead bodies rolling in the surf, against his legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes from the rifle of a sniper about 100 yards ahead, noticing only after a minute or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.

He took them across two bridges, one (later renamed the Pegasus Bridge) ringing and banging as shrapnel hit the metal sides, one merely with railings which bullets whistled through: “the longest bridge I ever piped across.” Those two crossings marked their successful rendezvous with the troops who had preceded them. All the way, he learned later, German snipers had had him in their sights but, out of pity for this madman, had not fired. That was their story. Mr Millin himself knew he wasn't going to die. Piping was too enjoyable, as he had discovered in the Boys' Brigade band and all through his short army career. And piping protected him.

The Nut-Brown Maiden

The pipes themselves were less lucky, injured by shrapnel as he dived into a ditch. He could still play them, but four days later they took a direct hit on the chanter and the drone when he had laid them down in the grass, and that was that. The last tune they had piped on D-Day was “The Nut-Brown Maiden”, played for a small red-haired French girl who, with her folks cowering behind her, had asked him for music as he passed their farm.

He gave the pipes later to the museum at the Pegasus Bridge, which he often revisited, and sometimes piped across, during his long and quiet post-war career as a mental nurse at Dawlish in Devon. On one such visit, in full Highland rig with his pipes in his arms, he was approached by a smartly dressed woman of a certain age, with faded red hair, who planted a joyous kiss of remembrance on his cheek.

Extracted from The Economist (August 28th 2010)