Been poking around archive.org a good bit lately, specifically in the 78 cylinder archive. Some pretty excellent stuff there if you like your blues/country/jazz authentic and alive. Some of my faves include Big Bill Broonzy's Good Liquor Gonna Carry Me Home (what should be sad is in fact pretty fun), Geeshie Wiley's Last Kind Words (haunting), LeadBelly's Where did you Sleep Last Night (haunting again), Charlie Poole's Don't Let Your Deal Go Down, Dock Boggs' Country Blues (feels like your sitting around a campfire at a sqatters camp), Trio Matamoros' Yo 'Ta Cansa (check out that shift there at the end) and Im So Glad from Skip James.
Anywho, I stumbled upon this CBS radio re-enactment of the third day of The Battle of Gettysburg complete with multiple radio correspondents. Bizarre interviews with soldiers in the field (especially the creepy confederate who sounds like a jailhouse rapist around 9:40), field reports from the middle of the battle and the excellent booming, echoey, dissafected voice shouting YOU ARE THERE like the horsemen of the Apocalypse are upon us. Surreal. I have openly mocked war re-enactments in the past but this one is worth a listen just for the strangeness of it all. Also kind of weird how they never really talk about all the dead (50,000 lives lost).
As an added plus you can follow along on Wikipedia. Strange fact about the only civilian death being a stray bullet striking a woman making bread in her kitchen. A bad time and place to make bread I suppose.
I think the battle was a clever decoy to cover up the assassination of this Bread Woman! Those bastards!!
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It gets even weirder as the house where she was kneading dough was hit by 150 bullets 2 days previous. The hint was not taken I guess. Then, the day after Ginney dies her mom bakes 15 loaves of bread from the dough Ginney kneaded.. Hows that for a fun fact of the day.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginnie_Wade