1927
1927. The first transatlantic telephone call is made from New York City to London, and the U.S. Federal Radio Commission (which was the antecedent of the FCC) started regulating radio frequencies. The Mississippi flooded, affecting 700,000 people - approximately 1% of the entire population of the country - in what was considered the country's greatest natural disaster until the 2004 hurricanes. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was created - although they wouldn't begin presenting the Academy Awards for another two years. The movie The Jazz Singer opens, signalling the end of the era of silent movies, and Pan Am makes it's first flight - from Key West to Havana. Kern and Hammerstein's play, "Showboat," opens begoming the first great classic of American musical theater. It is the year that Ertha Kitt, Sydney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Harvey Korman were born, not to mention George Plimpton, Roger Moor, George C. Scott, Peter Falk, Mstislav Rostropovich, Cesar Chavez and Coretta Scott King. Lizzie Borden died that year. So did Isadora Duncan, Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti.
The world had not yet experienced the Great Depression, and World War I was still the War To End All Wars. 1927 was the year that Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs.
In 1927, on a ranch in Northern California, my grandmother Isabel was 16 years old. Half a country away, in Iowa, my grandmother Gladys was 28. Neither one had met the men that would be my grandfathers.
Flappers had just truly emerged on the scene, embodying the spirit of reckless rebels, scandalizing traditional culture with bare arms, short hair, and long cigarette holders, dancing the night away to jazz bands, (although not at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo, since it hadn't been built yet). And somewhere, deep in Mississippi, a man named Willie "Pinetop" Perkins started playing the blues. He played with Sonny Boy Williamson and B.B.King, and he helped to create the sound of the great Muddy Waters Band. He is considered to be one of the great blues musicians - the yardstick against which other blues pianists for three generations have been measured.
And tonight he played at Glen Echo Ballroom - a place for the first forty years of his career he would not have been allowed to attend. I have heard some tremendous musicianst play to the dances there over the years. But tonight I saw a legend.
The world had not yet experienced the Great Depression, and World War I was still the War To End All Wars. 1927 was the year that Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs.
In 1927, on a ranch in Northern California, my grandmother Isabel was 16 years old. Half a country away, in Iowa, my grandmother Gladys was 28. Neither one had met the men that would be my grandfathers.
Flappers had just truly emerged on the scene, embodying the spirit of reckless rebels, scandalizing traditional culture with bare arms, short hair, and long cigarette holders, dancing the night away to jazz bands, (although not at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo, since it hadn't been built yet). And somewhere, deep in Mississippi, a man named Willie "Pinetop" Perkins started playing the blues. He played with Sonny Boy Williamson and B.B.King, and he helped to create the sound of the great Muddy Waters Band. He is considered to be one of the great blues musicians - the yardstick against which other blues pianists for three generations have been measured.
And tonight he played at Glen Echo Ballroom - a place for the first forty years of his career he would not have been allowed to attend. I have heard some tremendous musicianst play to the dances there over the years. But tonight I saw a legend.