This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
name | Woody Guthrie |
---|---|
background | solo_singer |
birth name | Woodrow Wilson Guthrie |
born | July 14, 1912Okemah, Oklahoma, United States |
died | October 03, 1967New York City, New York, United States |
instrument | Guitar, Vocal, Harmonica, Mandolin, Fiddle |
genre | Folk, protest song |
occupation | Singer-songwriter |
years active | 1930–1956 |
influences | Joe Hill, Will Rogers, Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Lead Belly |
influenced | Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen |
notable instruments | Martin 000-18, Gibson Southern Jumbo, Gibson J-45 }} |
Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour". Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was seemingly not a member of any.
Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. He is the grandfather of musician Sarah Lee Guthrie. Guthrie died from complications of Huntington's disease, a progressive genetic neurological disorder. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.
Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997.
Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a Democratic candidate for office in the county. When Charles was making stump speeches, he would often be accompanied by his son. Charles Guthrie was involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson. His son wrote three songs about the event and said that his father was later a member of the revived Ku Klux Klan.
Guthrie's early family life was affected by several fires, including one that caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah. His sister Clara later died in a coal-oil (used for heating) fire when Guthrie was seven, and Guthrie's father was severely burned in a subsequent coal-oil fire. The circumstances of these fires, especially that in which Charley was injured, remain unclear. It is unknown whether they were accidents or the result of actions by Guthrie's mother Nora, who was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. It leads to dementia as well as muscular effects.
Nora Guthrie was eventually committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, where she died in 1930 from Huntington's disease. Judging from the circumstances of her father's death by drowning, researchers suspect that George Sherman suffered from the same hereditary disease.
When Nora Guthrie was institutionalized, Woody Guthrie was 14. His father Charley was living and working in Pampa, Texas to repay his debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. Woody and his siblings were on their own in Oklahoma; they relied on their eldest brother Roy for support. The 14-year-old Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals and sometimes sleeping at the homes of family friends. According to one story, Guthrie made friends with an African-American blues harmonica player named "George", whom he would watch play at the man's shoe shine booth. Before long, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. In another interview 14 years later, Guthrie claimed he learned how to play harmonica from a boyhood friend, John Woods, and that his earlier story about the shoe-shining player was false.
He seemed to have a natural affinity for music and easily learned to "play by ear". He began to use his musical skills around town, playing a song for a sandwich or coins. Guthrie easily learned old Irish ballads and traditional songs from the parents of friends. Although he did not excel as a student (he dropped out of high school in his fourth year and did not graduate), his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics. Friends recall his reading constantly.
Eventually, Guthrie's father sent for his son to come to Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa and spent much time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He was growing as a musician, gaining practice by regularly playing at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. At the library, he wrote a manuscript summarizing everything he had read on the basics of psychology. A librarian in Pampa shelved this manuscript under Guthrie's name, but it was later lost in a library reorganization.
It was at KFVD that Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about Thomas Mooney, believed by many to be a wrongly convicted man who was, at the time, a leftist ''cause célèbre''. Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and communists in Southern California, including Will Geer. He remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the communist circles in Southern California. Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party", he was never a member of the Party. He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while not subject to party discipline. Guthrie requested to write a column for the Communist newspaper, ''The Daily Worker''. The column, titled "Woody Sez", appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. "Woody Sez" was not explicitly political, but was about current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic; they were published as a collection after Guthrie's death. Steve Earle said of Guthrie, "I don't think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times".
With the outbreak of World War II and the nonaggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the owners of KFVD radio did not want its staff "spinning apologia" for the Soviet Union. Both Robbin and Guthrie left the station. Without the daily radio show, his prospects for employment diminished, and Guthrie and his family returned to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary Guthrie was happy to return to Texas, the wanderlusting Guthrie soon after accepted Will Geer's invitation to New York City and headed east.
Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for "God Bless America", he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land", in February 1940; it was subtitled "God Blessed America for Me." The melody is adapted from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother." This was best known as "When The World's On Fire", sung by the country group The Carter Family. Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.". He protested against class inequality in the fourth and sixth verses:
:''As I went walking, I saw a sign there,'' :''And on the sign there, It said "no trespassing."'' [In another version, the sign reads "Private Property"] :''But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!'' :''That side was made for you and me.''
:''In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;'' :''By the relief office, I'd seen my people.'' :''As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,'' :''Is this land made for you and me?''
These verses were often omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie. Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944., Sheet music was not produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond until later.
In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by The John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folksinger Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends. Later, Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.
Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on CBS's radio program ''Back Where I Come From'' and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the leftwing musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem.
In September 1940 Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program, ''Pipe Smoking Time''. Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940. He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West. The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said "I have to set [''sic''] real hard to think of being a dad". Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing. Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.
At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children. Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage. Divorce was difficult, since Mary was a member of the Catholic Church, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.
Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanacs Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that World War II was a capitalist fraud. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the 'core' members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. In keeping with common socialist ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannys were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of "Union Maid", members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals.
In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working-class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody....And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance", a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say. Woody routinely emphasized his working-class image, rejected songs he felt were not in the country blues vein he was familiar with, and rarely contributed to household chores. House member Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie, would later recall that Woody, "loved people to think of him as a real working class person and not an intellectual". Guthrie contributed songwriting and authenticity in much the same capacity for Pete Seeger's post-Almanac Singers project ''People's Songs'', a newsletter and booking organization for labor singers, founded in 1945.
While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie and Marjorie were married. After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, and over time had four children. One of their children, Cathy, died as a result of a fire at age four, sending Guthrie into a serious depression. Their other children were Joady, Nora and Arlo. Arlo followed in his father's footsteps as a singer-songwriter. During this period, Guthrie wrote and recorded, ''Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child'', a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')", written when Arlo was about nine years old.
A 1948 crash of a plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California in deportation back to Mexico inspired Woody to write "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)".
During this time Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie and was inspired by his idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Due to Guthrie's suffering Huntington's disease, Dylan and Guthrie's son Arlo later claimed they learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about Arlo's claim, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from Lead Belly."
Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived in a compound owned by Will Geer; with blacklisted singers and actors, he waited out the anti-communist political climate. As his health worsened, he met and married his third wife, Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorinna Lynn. The couple moved to Fruit Cove, Florida briefly. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy. Guthrie's arm was hurt in a campfire accident when gasoline used to start the campfire exploded. Although he regained movement in the arm, he was never able to play the guitar again. In 1954, the couple returned to New York. Shortly after, Anneke filed for divorce, a result of the strain of caring for Guthrie. Anneke left New York and allowed friends to adopt Lorina Lynn. Lorinna had no further contact with her birth parents and died in 1973 at the age of nineteen in a car accident in California. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life; it was Marjorie who cared for him and assisted him until his death.
Guthrie, increasingly unable to control his muscles, was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966, and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center until his death. Marjorie and the children visited Guthrie at Greystone every Sunday. They answered fan mail and played on the hospital grounds. Eventually a longtime fan of Guthrie invited the family to his nearby home for the Sunday visits. This lasted until Guthrie was moved to the Brooklyn State Hospital, which was closer to where Marjorie lived.
When Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie and whose early folk career was deeply inspired by him, learned that Guthrie was hospitalized in Brooklyn, he was determined to meet his idol. By this time, Guthrie was said to have his "good days" and "bad days". On the good days, Dylan would sing songs to him, and at the beginning Guthrie seemed to warm to Dylan. When the bad days came, Guthrie would berate Dylan. Reportedly on Dylan's last visit, Guthrie didn't recognize him. Dylan said that he made his trek to New York City primarily to seek out his idol. At the end of his life, Guthrie was largely alone except for family. Due to the progression of Huntington's, he was difficult to be around. Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated, due to a lack of information about the disease. His death helped raise awareness of the disease and led Marjorie to help found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became the Huntington's Disease Society of America. None of Guthrie's three remaining children with Marjorie has developed symptoms of Huntington's. Two of Mary Guthrie's children (Gwendolyn and Sue) suffered from the disease. (Her son Bill died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at age 23.) Both died at 41 years of age.
These lyrics were rediscovered by Nora Guthrie and were set to music by the Jewish Klezmer group The Klezmatics with the release of ''Happy Joyous Hanukkah'' on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released ''Wonder Wheel — Lyrics by Woody Guthrie'', an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band. The album, produced by Danny Blume, was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.
In September 1996 Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University cohosted ''Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie'', a 10-day conference of panel sessions, lectures, and concerts. The conference became the first in what would become the museum's annual American Music Masters Series conference. Highlights included Arlo Guthrie's keynote address, a Saturday night musical jamboree at Cleveland's Odeon Theater, and a Sunday night concert at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Musicians performing over the course of the conference included Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Ellis Paul, Jimmy LaFave, Ani DiFranco, and others. In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published a collection of essays from the conference and DiFranco's record label, Righteous Babe, released a compilation of the Severance Hall concert, '''Til We Outnumber 'Em'', in 2000.
From 1999 to 2002 the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service presented the traveling exhibit, ''This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie''. In collaboration with Nora Guthrie, the Smithsonian exhibition draws from rarely seen objects, illustrations, film footage, and recorded performances to reveal a complex man who was at once poet, musician, protester, idealist, itinerant hobo, and folk legend.
In 2003, Jimmy LaFave produced a Woody Guthrie tribute show called ''Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway''. The ensemble show toured around the country and included a rotating cast of singer-songwriters individually performing Guthrie's songs. Interspersed between songs were Guthrie's philosophical writings read by a narrator. In addition to LaFave, members of the rotating cast included Ellis Paul, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Joel Rafael, husband-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's granddaughter) and Johnny Irion, Michael Fracasso, and The Burns Sisters. Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, sometimes called "the Dylan of the Dust", served as narrator. When word spread about the tour, performers began contacting LaFave, whose only prerequisite was to have an inspirational connection to Guthrie. Each artist chose the Guthrie songs that he or she would perform as part of the tribute. LaFave said, "It works because all the performers are Guthrie enthusiasts in some form". The inaugural performance of the Ribbon of Highway tour took place on February 5, 2003 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The abbreviated show was a featured segment of ''Nashville Sings Woody'', yet another tribute concert to commemorate the music of Woody Guthrie held during the Folk Alliance Conference. The cast of ''Nashville Sings Woody'', a benefit for the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, also included Arlo Guthrie, Marty Stuart, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Janis Ian, and others.
Woody and Marjorie Guthrie were honored at a musical celebration featuring Billy Bragg and the band Brad on October 17, 2007 at Webster Hall in New York City. Steve Earle also performed. The event was hosted by actor/activist Tim Robbins to benefit the Huntington¹s Disease Society of America to commemorate the organization's 40th Anniversary.
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” Currently the copyright in much of Woody's songs is claimed by a number of different organizations.
When JibJab published a parody of Woody's song This Land Is Your Land to comment on the US 2004 Presidential election, Ludlow Music attempted to have this parody taken down, claiming it breached their copyright. JibJab then sued to affirm their parody was Fair Use, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acting for them. As part of their research on the case they found that the song had actually been first published by Woody Guthrie in 1945, although the copyright was not registered until 1956. This meant that when Ludlow applied to renew the copyright in 1984 they were 11 years too late, and the song had in fact been in the public domain since 1973 (28 years from first publication). Ludlow agreed that JibJab were free to distribute their parody. In an interview on NPR Arlo Guthrie said that he thought the parody was hilarious and he thought Woody would have loved it too. Ludlow still claims copyright in this song; however, it is not clear what the basis of this claim is.
Although Guthrie's catalogue never brought him many awards while he was alive, in 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the same year Bob Dylan was inducted (much of Dylan's initial folk music work was heavily influenced by Guthrie), and in 2000 he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 1987 "Roll On Columbia" was chosen as the official Washington State Folk Song, and in 2001 Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" was chosen to be the official state folk song of Oklahoma.
On September 26, 1992, The Peace Abbey, a multi-faith retreat center located in Sherborn, Massachusetts, awarded Guthrie their Courage of Conscience Award for his social activism and artistry in song which conveyed the plight of the common person.
On June 26, 1998, as part of its Legends of American Music series, the United States Postal Service issued 45 million 32-cent stamps honoring folk musicians Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Josh White. The four musicians were represented on sheets of 20 stamps.
In July 2001, CB's Gallery in New York City began hosting an annual Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash concert featuring multiple performers. This event moved to the Bowery Poetry Club in 2007 after CB's Gallery and CBGB, its parent club, closed.
In 2005, the Boston-based punk band Dropkick Murphys recorded "I'm Shipping Up to Boston". The song's lyrics are from a poem written by Guthrie, and the music was composed by the band. The song was released in 2005 on the album ''The Warrior's Code'' and gained fame when it was used as part of the soundtrack for the 2006 movie ''The Departed''.
In 2006, The Klezmatics set Jewish lyrics written by Guthrie to music. The resulting album, ''Wonder Wheel'', won the Grammy award for best contemporary world music album.
On April 27, 2007, Guthrie was one of four Okemah natives inducted into Okemah's Hall of Fame during the town's Pioneer Day weekend of festivities.
On February 10, 2008, ''The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949'', a rare live recording released in cooperation with the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was the recipient of a Grammy Award in the category Best Historical Album. Less than two years later, Guthrie was again nominated for a Grammy in the same category with the 2009 release of ''My Dusty Road'' on Rounder Records.
!Year | !Title | !Record Label |
1940 | ''Dust Bowl Ballads'' | Folkways Records |
1972 | ''Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie'' | |
1987 | ''Columbia River Collection'' | Rounder Records |
1988 | ''Folkways: The Original Vision'' (Woody and Leadbelly) | Smithsonian Folkways |
1988 | ''Library of Congress Recordings'' | Rounder Records |
1989 | ''Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1990 | ''Struggle'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1991 | ''Cowboy Songs on Folkways'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1991 | ''Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1992 | ''Nursery Days'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1994 | ''Long Ways to Travel: The Unreleased Folkways Masters, 1944–1949'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1996 | ''Almanac Singers'' | UNI/MCA |
1996 | ''Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti'' | Smithsonian Folkways |
1997 | Smithsonian Folkways | |
1997 | Smithsonian Folkways | |
1998 | Smithsonian Folkways | |
1999 | Smithsonian Folkways | |
2007 | ''The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949'' | Woody Guthrie Publications |
2009 | ''My Dusty Road'' | Rounder Records |
Category:1912 births Category:1967 deaths Category:American autobiographers Category:American buskers Category:American folk singers Category:American folk-song collectors Category:American male singers Category:American sailors Category:American singer-songwriters Category:American socialists Category:Cub Records artists Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Woody Category:Industrial Workers of the World members Category:Musicians from Oklahoma Category:Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductees Category:People from Echo Park, Los Angeles Category:People from Okemah, Oklahoma Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Shack dwellers Category:Squatters Category:Songster musicians Category:Songwriters from Oklahoma Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Vanguard Records artists Category:Anti-fascists Category:American folk guitarists Category:American harmonica players Category:American mandolinists Category:American violinists Category:Rounder Records artists
ast:Woody Guthrie ca:Woody Guthrie cs:Woody Guthrie da:Woody Guthrie de:Woody Guthrie es:Woody Guthrie eu:Woody Guthrie fr:Woody Guthrie ga:Woody Guthrie gl:Woody Guthrie it:Woody Guthrie he:וודי גאת'רי la:Woody Guthrie lv:Vudijs Gatrijs nl:Woody Guthrie ja:ウディ・ガスリー no:Woody Guthrie nn:Woody Guthrie pl:Woody Guthrie pt:Woody Guthrie ru:Гатри, Вуди simple:Woody Guthrie fi:Woody Guthrie sv:Woody Guthrie tr:Woody Guthrie uk:Вуді ГатріThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
name | Lillian Gish |
---|---|
birth name | Lillian Diana Gish |
birth date | October 14, 1893 |
birth place | Springfield, Ohio, U.S. |
death date | February 27, 1993 |
death place | New York, New York, U.S. |
occupation | Actress |
years active | 1912–1987 |
website | http://www.lilliangish.com/index.php}} |
Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993) was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987.
She was a prominent film star of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D.W. Griffith, including her leading role in Griffith's seminal ''Birth of a Nation'' (1915). Her sound-era film appearances were sporadic, but included memorable roles in the controversial western ''Duel in the Sun'' (1946) and the offbeat thriller ''Night of the Hunter'' (1955). She did considerable television work from the early 1950s into the 1980s, and closed her career playing, for the first time, opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film ''The Whales of August''.
The American Film Institute (AFI) named Gish 17th among the greatest female stars of all time. She was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1971, and in 1984 she received an AFI Life Achievement Award.
The first several generations of Gishes were Dunkard ministers. Her great-great-great grandfather came to America on the ship ''Pennsylvania Merchant'' in 1733 and received a land grant from William Penn. Her great-great grandfather was in the American Revolutionary War and is buried in a cemetery in Pennsylvania for such soldiers, a bit of an oddity because Dunkards are supposed to be more pacifist than Amish or Quakers. Letters between her and a Pennsylvania college professor indicate that her knowledge of her family background was limited.
In 1912, their friend Mary Pickford introduced the sisters to D. W. Griffith, and helped get them contracts with Biograph Studios. Lillian Gish would soon become one of America's best-loved actresses. Although she was already nineteen, she gave her age as 16 to the studio.
Having appeared in over 25 short films and features in her first two years as a movie actress, Lillian became a major star, becoming known as "The First Lady of the Silent Screen" and appearing in lavish productions, frequently of literary works such as ''The Scarlet Letter''. MGM released her from her contract in 1928 after the failure of ''The Wind'' (1928), now recognized by many as among her finest performances and one of the most distinguished works of the late silent period.
She directed one film, ''Remodeling Her Husband'' (1920), when D. W. Griffith took his unit on location—he told Gish that he thought the crew would work harder for a girl. Gish never directed again, telling reporters at the time that directing was a man's job.
With her debut in talkies only moderately successful, she acted on the stage for the most part in the 1930s and early 1940s, appearing in roles as varied as Ophelia in Guthrie McClintic's landmark 1936 production of ''Hamlet'' (with John Gielgud and Judith Anderson) and Marguerite in a limited run of ''La Dame aux Camélias''. Of the former, she said, with pride, "I played a ''lewd'' Ophelia!".
Returning to movies, Gish was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1946 for ''Duel in the Sun''. The scenes of her character's illness and death late in that film seemed intended to evoke the memory of some of her silent film performances. She appeared in films from time to time for the rest of her life, notably in ''Night of the Hunter'' (1955) as a rural guardian angel protecting her charges from a murderous preacher played by Robert Mitchum. She was considered for various roles in ''Gone with the Wind'' ranging from Ellen O'Hara, Scarlett's mother, which went to Barbara O'Neil, to prostitute Belle Watling, which went to Ona Munson.
Gish made numerous television appearances from the early 1950s into the late 1980s. Her most acclaimed television work was starring in the original production of ''The Trip to Bountiful'' in 1953. She appeared as Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in the short-lived 1965 Broadway musical ''Anya''. In addition to her later acting appearances, Gish became one of the leading advocates on the lost art of the silent film, often giving speeches and touring to screenings of classic works. In 1975, she hosted ''The Silent Years'', a PBS film program of silent films.
Gish received a Special Academy Award in 1971 "For superlative artistry and for distinguished contribution to the progress of motion pictures." In 1979, she was awarded the Women in film Crystal Award in Los Angeles In 1984, she received an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, becoming only the second female recipient (preceded by Bette Davis in 1977), and the only recipient who was a major figure in the silent era. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1720 Vine Street.
Her last film role was in ''The Whales of August'' in 1987 at the age of 93, with Vincent Price, Bette Davis and Ann Sothern, in which she and Davis starred as elderly sisters in Maine. Her final professional appearance was a cameo on the 1988 studio recording of Jerome Kern's ''Show Boat'', starring Frederica von Stade and Jerry Hadley, in which she affectingly spoke the few lines of ''The Old Lady on the Levee'' in the final scene. The last words of her long career were, "Good night, dear."
Some in the entertainment industry were angry that Gish did not receive an Oscar nomination for her role in ''The Whales of August''. Gish herself was more complacent, remarking that it saved her the trouble of "losing to Cher" (who did, in fact, win for her performance in ''Moonstruck'').
She was involved with producer Charles Duell and drama critic and editor George Jean Nathan. In the 1920s, Gish's association with Duell was something of a tabloid scandal because he had sued her and made the details of their relationship public.
During the period of political turmoil in the United States that lasted from the outbreak of World War II in Europe until the attack on Pearl Harbor, she maintained an outspoken non-interventionist stance. She was an active member of the America First Committee, an anti-intervention organization founded by retired General Robert E. Wood with aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh as its leading spokesman. She said she was blacklisted by the film and theater industries until she signed a contract in which she promised to cease her anti-interventionist activities and never disclose the fact that she had agreed to do so.
She maintained a very close relationship with her sister Dorothy, as well as with Mary Pickford, for her entire life. Another of her closest friends was actress Helen Hayes; Gish was the godmother of Hayes' son James MacArthur.
Biographical and other:
Category:1893 births Category:1993 deaths Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:American silent film actors Category:American film actors Category:American stage actors Category:American film directors Category:Actors from Ohio Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:American Episcopalians Category:American people of German descent Category:People from Springfield, Ohio Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in New York Category:Old Right (United States) Category:20th-century actors Category:Silent film directors
ar:ليليان غيش ca:Lillian Gish da:Lillian Gish de:Lillian Gish es:Lillian Gish fa:لیلین گیش fr:Lillian Gish fy:Lillian Gish gl:Lillian Gish ko:릴리안 기시 id:Lillian Gish is:Lillian Gish it:Lillian Gish he:ליליאן גיש la:Lilliana Gish hu:Lillian Gish nl:Lillian Gish ja:リリアン・ギッシュ no:Lillian Gish pl:Lillian Gish pt:Lillian Gish ro:Lillian Gish ru:Гиш, Лиллиан sr:Лилијан Гиш sh:Lilian Gish fi:Lillian Gish sv:Lillian Gish tr:Lillian Gish vi:Lillian Gish zh:莉蓮·吉許This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
School tradition | Austrian School |
---|---|
Color | firebrick |
Name | Thomas DiLorenzo |
Birth date | August 08, 1954 |
Nationality | United States |
Field | Economic history, American history |
Influences | Henry Hazlitt, John T. Flynn |
Opposed | Harry V. Jaffa |
Contributions | }} |
Thomas James DiLorenzo (born August 8, 1954) is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland. He is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. He is a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an associated scholar of the Abbeville Institute. He was formerly an affiliated scholar of the now-defunct League of the South Institute, the research arm of the pro-secession League of the South (though he has denied any lasting affiliation, noting that he only gave a few lectures there shortly after its founding). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech.
DiLorenzo has devoted much effort to scholarly historical revisionism, focusing on what has been called "the Lincoln Cult" as a political and historical phenomenon. In the same vein, he has spoken out in favor of the secession of the Confederate States of America, defending the right of these states to secede in a view similar to that of abolitionist Lysander Spooner. He has also criticized the crediting of the New Deal for ending the Great Depression.
DiLorenzo lectures widely, and is a frequent speaker at Mises Institute events.
Category:1954 births Category:Living people Category:American economists Category:American historians Category:American libertarians Category:American political writers Category:Austrian School economists Category:Libertarian historians Category:Libertarian economists Category:Libertarian theorists Category:Virginia Tech alumni Category:American people of Italian descent
cs:Thomas DiLorenzo et:Thomas DiLorenzo es:Thomas DiLorenzo fr:Thomas DiLorenzo ko:토머스 딜로렌조 hsb:Thomas DiLorenzo it:Thomas DiLorenzo pt:Thomas Dilorenzo ru:Дилоренцо, Томас Джеймс zh:湯瑪斯·迪洛倫佐This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | James Larkin |
---|---|
Office | Teachta Dála |
Term start | June 1943 |
Term end | May 1944 |
Term start2 | July 1937 |
Term end2 | June 1938 |
Constituency2 | Dublin North East |
Term start3 | September 1927 |
Term end3 | September 1927 |
Constituency3 | Dublin North |
Birth date | January 21, 1876 |
Birth place | Liverpool, England |
Death date | January 30, 1947 |
Death place | Dublin, Ireland |
Occupation | Trade union leader |
Children | James Larkin, Jnr |
Nationality | Irish }} |
Larkin moved to Belfast in 1907 and founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the Irish Labour Party, and later the Workers' Union of Ireland. Perhaps best known for his role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, "Big Jim" continues to occupy a significant place in Dublin's collective memory.
From 1893, Larkin developed an interest in socialism and became a member of the Independent Labour Party. In 1905, he was one of the few foremen to take part in a strike on the Liverpool docks. He was elected to the strike committee, and although he lost his foreman's job as a result, his performance so impressed the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL) that he was appointed a temporary organiser. He later gained a permanent position with the union, which, in 1906, sent him to Scotland, where he successfully organised workers in Preston and Glasgow.
In 1908, Larkin moved south and organised workers in Dublin, Cork and Waterford, with considerable success. His involvement, against union instructions, in a dispute in Dublin resulted in his expulsion from the NUDL. The union later prosecuted him for diverting union funds to give strike pay to Cork workers engaged in an unofficial dispute. After trial and conviction for embezzlement in 1910, he was sentenced to prison for a year. This was widely regarded as unjust, and the then Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Aberdeen, pardoned him after he had served three months in prison.
After his expulsion from the NUDL, Larkin founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) at the end of December, 1908. The organisation exists today as the Services Industrial Professional & Technical Union (SIPTU). It quickly gained the affiliation of the NUDL branches in Dublin, Cork, Dundalk and Waterford. The Derry and Drogheda NUDL branches stayed with the British union, and Belfast split along sectarian lines. Early in the new year, 1909, Larkin moved to Dublin, which became the main base of the ITGWU and the focus of all his future union activity in Ireland.
In June 1911, Larkin established a newspaper, ''The Irish Worker and People's Advocate'', as a pro-labour alternative to the capitalist-owned press. This organ was characterised by a campaigning approach and the harsh denunciation of unfair employers and of Larkin's political enemies. Its columns also included pieces by intellectuals. The paper was produced until its suppression by the authorities in 1915. Afterwards, the ''Worker'' metamorphosed into the new Ireland Echo.
In partnership with James Connolly, Larkin helped form the Irish Labour Party in 1912. Later that year, he was elected to the Dublin Corporation. He did not hold his seat long, as a month later he was removed as he had a criminal record since his conviction in 1910.
Guinness staff were relatively well-paid, and enjoyed generous benefits from a paternalistic management that refused to join Murphy's lockout. This was far from the case on the tramways. The chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company, industrialist and newspaper proprietor William Martin Murphy, was determined not to allow the ITGWU to unionise his workforce. On 15 August, he dismissed forty workers he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week. On 26 August, the tramway workers officially went on strike. Led by Murphy, over four hundred of the city's employers retaliated by requiring their workers to sign a pledge not to be a member of the ITGWU and not to engage in sympathetic strikes.
The resulting industrial dispute was the most severe in Ireland's history. Employers in Dublin engaged in a sympathetic lockout of their workers when the latter refused to sign the pledge, employing blackleg labour from Great Britain and elsewhere in Ireland. Guinness, the largest employer in Dublin, refused the employers' call to lock out its workers but it sacked 15 workers who struck in sympathy. Dublin's workers, amongst the poorest in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, were forced to survive on generous but inadequate donations from the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, distributed by the ITGWU.
For seven months the lockout affected tens of thousands of Dublin's workers and employers, with Larkin portrayed as the villain by Murphy's three main newspapers, the ''Irish Independent'', the ''Sunday Independent'' and the ''Evening Herald''. Other leaders in the ITGWU at the time were James Connolly and William X. O'Brien, while influential figures such as Patrick Pearse, Constance Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the generally anti-Larkin Irish press.
The lockout eventually concluded in early 1914 when the calls for a sympathetic strike in Britain from Larkin and Connolly were rejected by the British TUC. Larkin's attacks on the TUC leadership for this stance also led to the cessation of financial aid to the ITGWU, which in any case was not affiliated to the TUC. Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU were unsuccessful in achieving substantially better pay and conditions for the workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history. The principle of union action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established. Perhaps even more importantly, Larkin's rhetoric, condemning poverty and injustice and calling for the oppressed to stand up for themselves, made a lasting impression.
Larkin was reported as having helped disrupt Allied munitions shipments in New York during World War I. In 1937, he voluntarily assisted US lawyers investigating the Black Tom explosion by providing a sworn affidavit from his home in Dublin. According to British Army Intelligence officer, Henry Landau:
Larkin testified that he himself never took part in the actual sabotage campaign but, rather,confined himself to the organizing of strikes to secure both higher pay and shorter hours for workmen and to prevent the shipment of munitions to the Allies.Larkin's speeches in support of the Soviet Union, his association with founding members of the American Communist Party, and his radical publications made him a target of the "First Red Scare" that was sweeping the US; he was jailed in 1920 for 'criminal anarchy' and was sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing prison. In 1923, he was pardoned and later deported by Al Smith, Governor of New York.
In September 1923 Larkin formed the Irish Worker League (IWL), which was soon afterwards recognised by the Comintern as the Irish section of the world communist movement. In 1924 Larkin attended the Comintern congress and was elected to its executive committee. However, the League was not organised as a political party, never held a general congress and never succeeded in being politically effective. Its most prominent activity in its first year was to raise funds for imprisoned members of the Anti-Treaty IRA.
During Larkin's absence at the 1924 Comintern congress (and apparently against his instructions), his brother Peter took his supporters out of the ITGWU, forming the Workers' Union of Ireland (WUI). The new union quickly grew, gaining the allegiance of about two thirds of the Dublin membership of the ITGWU and of a smaller number of rural members. It affiliated to the pro-Soviet Red International of Labour Unions.
In January 1925, the Comintern sent Communist Party of Great Britain activist Bob Stewart to Ireland to establish a communist party in cooperation with Larkin. A formal founding conference of the Irish Worker League, which was to take up this role, was set for May 1925. A fiasco ensued when the organisers discovered at the last minute that Larkin did not intend to attend. Feeling that the proposed party could not succeed without him, they called the conference off as it was due to start in a packed room in the Mansion House in Dublin.
In the September 1927 general election, Larkin ran (a huge surprise for all) in North Dublin and was elected. However, as a result of a libel award against him won by William O'Brien, which he had refused to pay, he was an undischarged bankrupt and could not take up his seat.
Larkin was unsuccessful in his attempts in the following years to gain a position as a commercial agent in Ireland for the Soviet Union, and this may have contributed to his disenchantment with Stalinism. The Soviets, for their part, were increasingly impatient with what they saw as his ineffective leadership. From the early 1930s Larkin drew away from the Soviet Union. While in the 1932 general election he stood without success as a communist, in 1933 and subsequently he ran as "Independent Labour". In 1934 he gave important evidence on the 1916 Black Tom explosion to John J. McCloy, allowing a case for damages against Germany to be reopened; presumably because of Germany's new Nazi government.
During this period he also engaged in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. In 1936 he regained his seat on Dublin Corporation. He then regained his Dáil seat in the 1937 general election but lost it again the following year. In this period the Workers' Union of Ireland also entered the mainstream of the trade union movement, being admitted to the Dublin Trades Council in 1936, although the Irish Trade Union Congress would not accept its membership application until 1945.
James Larkin died in his sleep on 30 January 1947. His funeral mass was celebrated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and thousands lined the streets of the city as the hearse passed through on the way to Glasnevin Cemetery.
''Les grands ne sont grands que parce que nous sommes à genoux: Levons-nous.'' ''Ní uasal aon uasal ach sinne bheith íseal: Éirímis.'' ''The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.''
The slogan appeared on the masthead of the Workers' Republic, founded by James Connolly in Dublin in August, 1898. Originally the organ of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, this periodical later became the official organ of the Communist Party of Ireland, which was founded in 1921. The original slogan is usually attributed to Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794), the French revolutionary.
On the west side of the base of the Larkin monument is a quotation from the poem ''Jim Larkin'' by Patrick Kavanagh:
''And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin's gutter'' ''Until Jim Larkin came along and cried'' ''The call of Freedom and the call of Pride'' ''And Slavery crept to its hands and knees'' ''And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter'' ''Degradation of their miseries.''
On the east side of the monument there is a quotation from ''Drums under the Windows'' by Sean O'Casey:
''...He talked to the workers, spoke as only Jim Larkin could speak, not for an assignation with peace, dark obedience, or placid resignation, but trumpet-tongued of resistance to wrong, discontent with leering poverty, and defiance of any power strutting out to stand in the way of their march onward.''
A road in Clontarf, North Dublin, is named after him.
(ElectionsIreland.org)
Category:1876 births Category:1947 deaths Category:Irish communists Category:Labour Party (Ireland) politicians Category:Teachtaí Dála Category:Members of the 6th Dáil Category:Members of the 9th Dáil Category:Members of the 11th Dáil Category:Irish trade unionists Category:Irish Comintern people Category:Burials at Glasnevin Cemetery Category:Irish socialists Category:Industrial Workers of the World members Category:World War I spies from Ireland Category:People deported from the United States Category:Politicians from Liverpool Category:Recipients of American gubernatorial pardons Category:People associated with the Dil Pickle Club
ast:James Larkin de:James Larkin ga:Séamas Ó Lorcáin pl:James Larkin pt:James Larkin sv:James LarkinThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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