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Browsing All posts tagged under »music«
Robert Johnson in Hell
December 7, 2012
Three days, three nights Robert Johnson heard the hellhounds outside his window before he died. Robert howled himself, he barked, sweated and twisted in his bed, until the poisoned whiskey finally brought him down. In the moment of stillness that was his death, he saw coming in at the door the man from the crossroads. […]
Father Theo’s Christmas Playlist
December 25, 2011
Frankly, I grew tired of most Christmas songs a long time ago. The overkill started setting in for me in 1961 or thereabouts, and the majority I’d prefer to never hear again. But I will, I will, unless–during the ever-extending Christmas season–I avoid every store and mall in the land until the day I die. […]
I Hear the Voice of Bluesman Prime
March 14, 2011
Bluesman Prime, the man who invented the blues, was born and grew and took his stand in the American South in the decades following the Civil War. He might have been born into slavery, or in the giddy times just out of it. Regardless, he grew up in an era when American slavery was adapting […]
Humans are hard-wired for music
January 14, 2011
Scientists consider dopamine to be an ancient chemical that is essential for survival. It dishes out feel-good jolts in response for life-supporting actions such as eating and for acquiring ‘secondary’ tangibles such as money. The mechanism can also be triggered by drugs. But music is abstract, is not directly essential for survival and is not […]
A musical imagination
December 26, 2010
“Jerome Brunner, a very musical friend, described to me how once, having put a favourite Mozart record on the turntable, he listened to it with great pleasure, and then went to turn it over to play the other side–only to find that he had never played it in the first place.” Oliver Sacks,Musicophilia, 35
As you always suspected, music is a conspiracy
December 23, 2010
“If there are twelve named notes within an octave, why are there only seven letters (or do re mi syllables)? “After centuries of being forced to eat in the servant’s quarters and to use the back entrance of the castle, this may just be an invention by musicians to make nonmusicians feel inadequate. “The additional […]
doc static says I should write about the blues
December 13, 2010
Doc Static says I should write about the blues. But you know I’ve already had this discussion. (So long ago.) My friend Chuck—who already had admitted to stealing some of my lines for his review of a Doc Watson concert (thank you, Chuck, I accept flattery) and who for a while attended most of the […]
Grandpa Theo
With Malaika
Klick This Pic
An Informal Chronology of the Aboriginal Land Question in BC
Father Theo's Blog 
July 28, 2013
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