Enjoy…it’s all Euskera to me.

I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high,
He reached the sky,
And didn’t come down ’til the fourth of July

Searching for the origins of this rhyme has been quite interesting. It seems to primarily be a playground rhyme sung whilst jumping rope. There are some indications that the origin is from the African American traditions in the southern United States. For instance, it is included on the 1956 album Music from the South, Vol 5.

It later appeared as a verse in Rufus Thomas’ 1965 classic, Walking the Dog, which was covered by Jackie Shane, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Sonics, The Count Bishops, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Grateful Dead and Aerosmith, among others. Quite a list, eh? Here’s the original version, which I think might be the best of them all:

I suspect the version my daughter learned from her grandmother is much closer to the original playground chant. Without further ado, I present I Asked My Mother For Fifty Cents:

Here’s the original:

Here’s the remix by Yolanda Be Cool. The actual singing doesn’t start until the 30 second mark. Just try not to tap your foot, I dare you!!

When my parents were here, and Nora began talking about my ringtone as she does sometimes, my father realized that, using his iPhone, he could call my phone using FaceTime for free over my wifi network and make my phone ring. Absolute hilarity ensued. We did this about 75 times that night. No, really, that’s how many missed calls my phone had on it when I recovered it from Nora’s grasp.

I admit that sometimes I forget just how people talk back home and it’s a shock when I visit. The manner of speaking in this film is a very authentic example of western North Carolina speech. If you have any interest whatsoever in bluegrass music and how it’s really played in the Deep South, I urge you to spend nineteen minutes watching this film. You won’t regret it.

The music is absolutely fantastic. I particularly liked the pun-laden knickknacks. Here’s a list of all the awards this movie has won.

In case you’re curious of just how small the town is, you can have a look around on Google Street View. That’s the barber shop with the white awning and the pickup truck. Give a 360º spin to really appreciate the locale.

Unfortunately, two years ago, the head barber, Lawrence Anthony, the first person to talk in the film, passed away. His son intends to fulfill his father’s wish to keep the shop open. Since then, the shop has sustained some water damage and is in need of repair. You can find a follow-up video and a link to donate to Lawrence Anthony’s nonprofit Barbershop Preservation Fund here. I’ve just made a donation.

It would be a true shame to lose this culture. Thank you so much to Matt Morris for documenting it.

Today on my walk around town, when I hit “shuffle” on my iPhone, it chose a random song to play from my entire music collection, which, currently at 53 gigabytes, doesn’t even come close to fitting on my iPhone.

Of course this is a natural consequence of both higher wireless bandwidths and higher storage and retrieval capacities of enormous server farms (a.k.a. The Cloud). If your iDevice is always online with cloud computing, then the need for syncing data from your computer to your iDevice has pretty much vanished, if all the data is available on high bandwidth servers.

It’s pretty clear to me that the future revenue model of the music industry will be one of subscriptions to stream any music the subscriber desires (or to download with a small fee per track). The artists would receive a certain amount every time their song was streamed or downloaded. This is called the Open Music Model and is just what Spotify does.

For now, at least, to my mind conditioned to the current model of music ownership, iTunes Match is one of the coolest services I’ve used in a while. It’s definitely worth $24.95 of my money every November 15th.

They were very stern at first with an announcement over the intercom telling us that video and still image recording devices were expressly prohibited, but when the artist comes out to pose for photos with her fans, screw the rules! So I took some photos…

There was a light right behind Rosana that made for some really awesome fog shadows, but also was completely blinding when she moved out of the way of the beam.

She plays chords and even some complex fingerpicking on most of her songs, but her lead guitarist was absolutely phenomenal. Why is the lead guitarist always on the singer’s right and the bassist on the left? Is there a reason?

With social networking what it is these days, I thought that leaving a message on her Facebook page might actually reach her. I don’t know if it will, but this is what I wrote.

Querida Rosana,

Soy estadounidense, y me enamoró con una española en 1999, y me dijo mi novia que su cantante favorita eras tú. Inmediatamente compré los dos discos, y pasé el año que estuvimos separados por el atlantico (por razones de inmigración) escuchando tus discos. ¡Sin saber ni siete palabras en castellano! Pero con tus letras me iba aprendiendo. Entonces, entenderás que ocupas un sitio muy especial en mi corazón.

Ahora estoy casado con esa misma española y vivimos en Cantabria. Te vimos en 2007 y otra vez esta noche, y nos encantaste las dos veces. ¡Eres una gran artista! Y sobre todo una gran persona.

Un abrazo americano,
Erik

In English:

Dear Rosana,

I’m an American, and I fell in love with a Spaniard in 1999, and my girlfriend told me that her favorite singer was you. Immediately I purchased both CDs and spent the year that we were separated by the Atlantic (for immigration reasons) listening to your CDs. Without knowing even seven Spanish words! But with your lyrics, I was learning. So, you’ll understand that you occupy a special place in my heart.

Now I’m married to that same Spaniard and we live in Cantabria. We saw you in 2007 and again tonight, and we loved you both times. You are a wonderful artist! And an even more wonderful person.

An American hug,
Erik

She might not see it, but if she does, I’m certain she’ll take the time to respond.

See you next tour, Rosana! ¡Hasta la próxima gira!

We were singing the other night and she was doing such a good job that I pulled out the video camera and captured this adorable video, in which she drinks a lot of water and sings the Alphabet Song and sings backup on Old MacDonald Had A Farm. It’s worth sticking around to the last number since she has this wonderful mime act she invented for the “here, there, everywhere” lyric where she points wildly in all directions.

Ay, ay, ay, ay,
Canta y no llores,
Porque cantando se alegran,
Cielito lindo, los corazones.

Properly performed, it should sound something like this:

or this:

Nora understands the meaning of more than half of this chorus. She knows “canta” (sing) and she definitely understands “no llores” (don’t cry). I’m not sure if she comprehends that “porque” means “because”, but I think she really might have an understanding that “cantando” is another form of the verb “to sing”, even if she doesn’t know what a gerund is. The last line is the hardest, and she rarely actually makes it that far.

Thus, without further ado, I present to you Nora’s debut music video performance, the mariachi classic, Cielito Lindo…

Lyrics

Is anyone else getting choked up? Beautiful!