OVER YOU

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Early Aaron Neville, when he was at his absolute best, with the melisma firmly under control. (Note that his name was misspelled on the label of the 45.)

Later in life, Allen Toussaint said he regretted composing such a dark song, though he seemed to take a sheepish pride in having been so daring.

HOME OF THE BLUES

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This is one of the greatest albums of all time — not exactly blues, but a superior compilation of New Orleans R & B.  Once, back in the 80s, I was rambling around New Orleans with a famous rock guitarist.  We checked out a record store at some point and he saw this album and insisted that I buy it.  He said that if he was ever having trouble getting into a girl’s pants he’d put this on the turntable and then suddenly there would be no problem.  I think it really does have some special mojo to it.  It makes you slightly delirious, as New Orleans R & B can.

The Minit label issued a follow-up album, Home Of the Blues Vol. 2, heavy on Irma Thomas, which is sweet, too, but not as perfect as this collection.  The two volumes were released as a single CD five years ago by EMI abroad, and can be had as an import via Amazon.

Click on the images to enlarge.

CUSTER’S LAST FIGHT

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In 1884, eight years after George Armstrong Custer’s death, the Anheuser-Busch brewing company commissioned an original oil painting, Custer’s Last Fight, by Cassilly Adams.  It was reproduced as a lithograph by F. Otto Becker in 1889 and distributed as an advertising poster by Anheuser-Busch.  This depiction of the Battle Of the Little Bighorn undoubtedly hung in more saloons than any image before or since, and fixed the iconography of Custer’s last moments in the national imagination.

Click on the image above to enlarge.

It’s inaccurate on a number of counts.  Custer had short hair at the time of the battle, and the fighting probably never got so close and tangled.  The Indians were better armed than Custer’s troopers, with repeating rifles, and, except for isolated charges to count coup, would have picked off the soldiers from a safer distance.

Still, it served the Custer myth, which his wife Libbie (above) spent the rest of her long life burnishing, primarily through a series of well-written memoirs of her years on the plains with Custer.  They are considered factually accurate but obviously have a slanted point of view.

According to the Brookston Beer Bulletin website the lithograph is the oldest piece of American breweriana known to exist.