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Two songs no one seems to know the lyrics to and one made it to the US Attorney General's Office
Louie Louie -was a ballad written by Richard Berry in 1955, made famous by the Kingsmen. It is written in the style of a Jamaican ballad and tells the story of a Jamaican sailor returning to the island and his lady love
In February 1964, an outraged parent wrote to Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General of the United States. alleging the lyrics were obscene. Your tax dollars hard at work, the FBI investigated the complaint. In 1965 the FBI obtained a copy of the Kingsmen recording and after TWO YEARS of investigation concluded the recording could not only be interpreted - it was unintelligable at any speed.
The lyrics controversy resurfaced again in 2005 when a superintendent of the Benton Harbor, Michigan school system refused to let the marching band play the song in a parade. She later relented.
Wooly Bully - Sam Sham and the Pharohs was originally to be a tribute to the 'Hully Gully' Dance. A line dance thought to originate in the sixties, but was known some forty years earlier as a dance in black juke joints in the first part of the 20th Century. The Phrase "Hully Gully' or "Hull da Gull" comes from a folk game whereby each player shakes a handful of nuts or seeds and says, "Hully Gully, how many?" For legal reasons the name was changed to Wooly Bully.
The lyrics are a conversation between 'Hattie' and 'Matty' concerning the American Bison and the desire to develop dance skills although no attempt was made to connect these topics. The warning in the song "Let's not be L-7s" means let's not be squares and dancers would form the L and 7 with their fingers.
The lyrics, hard to understand, the song was banned by many radio stations. Despite all this, the song became a world-wide sensation, selling 3 million copies, reaching No.2 in June 1965. It was the first American record to sell a millon copies during the British invasion. It stayed in the Hot 100 for 18 weeks and was nominated for a Grammy. it was also named Billboard's 'Number One Record of the Year' although it never reached number one. This feat would not be be achieved again until Faith Hill in 2000.
The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) began on January 24, 1848 when gold was found by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. News of the gold brought some 300,000 people flocking to California in late '48. The gold-seekers called, 'forty-niners' in reference to 1849, faced substantial hardships on their trip.
There were no laws governing property rights in goldfields and a crude system of 'staking claim' was developed. Native Americans were attacked and pushed off their land and an estimated 100,000 California Indians died between 1848 and 1868 as a result.
The Oil Rush in the United Statesbegan in Titusville, Pennsylvania from 1859 to about 1870, when colonel Edwin L. Drake struck rock oil there. Numerous productive and profitable oil wells were drilled and refineries were built. Titusville expanded enourmously and an oil exchange was founded.
Coal was mined in America beginning in the early 18th century and commercial mining began around 1730 Midlothian, Virgina. Coal cutting machines weren't invented until the 1880s. Before then, coal was mined from underground with pick and shovel. Historically, coal mining has been a very dangerous activity and the list of mining disasters and effects on health is a long one. In the U.S. alone, over 100,000 coal miners have lost their lives over the past century. Time and technology have not necessarily helped the cause as in 2006 fatal work injuries among miners doubled from the previous year.
Alcatraz Island. Beginning in November 1969, the island was occupied for more than 19 months by a group of American Indians from San Francisco, who were part of a wave of Indian activism across the nation, with public protests through the 1970s. The occupation of Alcatraz gave many Native Americans a sense of shared pan-Indian identity, as well as renewed purpose about activism and reclaiming their cultures. Following a succession of demands at Alcatraz, the U.S. government returned excess, unused land to several tribes.
The Dust Bowl or Dirty Thirties was a period from 1930 to 1936 of severe dust storms causing major ecological damage to American and Canadian prarie land. The phenomenon ws caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extreme farming without crop rotation, fallow fields and other techniques to prevent wind erosion. These immense storms were given names like 'Black Blizzards' and 'Black Rollers.' Millions of acres of farmland became useless, overlapping the Great Depression, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of their homes. Many became migrant workers working at starvation rates.
The Railroad - The first American Transcontinental Railroad was built between 1863 and 1869.
John Henry is an American folk hero and tall tale. Henry worked as a steel-driver in the construction of tunnels for railroad tracks. his abilities were measured in a race against a steam powered hammer which he won only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand. There are many versions of John Henry's story, but in almost all he is a black man of exceptional physical gifts, a former slave and born in Tennessee.
I've Been Working On the Railroad The origins of the song are unknown. Some trace it back to a "Louisiana Levee" song of African Americans and might suggest the underground railroad, others believe it is an old hymn adopted by the Irish work gangs in the West. The verses, "Dinah" and "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah" were latter additions. "Dinah" more likely refers to the locomotive itself and the horn signifies the call to lunch. The tune was also adopted by Texans as 'The Eyes Are Upon You.'
In the 1920s, the US stock market expanded rapidly and reached a peak in August 1929, when prices began to decline while speculation increased. On October 24, "Black Thursday," a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Banks and investment companies bought large blocks of stock to stem the panic, but on October 29, "Black Tuesday," 16 million shares were traded and prices collapsed. The 1929 crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a halt.
Bing Crosby one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation.
The Great Famine of Ireland was a period of starvation disease and emigration from 1845-1852, known outside of Ireland as The Irish Potato Famine.
The cause of the famine was a potato disease known as potato blight. It ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. One third of the population was entirely dependant on the potato for food. During the famine approximately 1 million people died and Ireland's population decreased between 20% and 25%.
Henry Ford, an American industrialist and found of the Ford Motor Company is credited with the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American Industry.
Robbie Robertson assembled Native American musicians and captured the modern political voice of the Native American via original and traditional songs. The Album, "Music For The Native Americans.' informs the listener of the nature of Native American culture and their battle for survival. Born of a Jewish father and a Mohawk Indian mother, his earliest exposure to music was Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation.
All the songs on the album share the fortunes, long hardships of struggle and touching moments of the culture of the American Tribal Nations - a discovery of the Native American culture through song story telling by Robertson.
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