re: Pictures from days gone by....

Many, LA (2007)















Anyone know if the Otasco is still open? It was one of a handful of stores that was permitted to keep using the Otasco name when the company went bankrupt in 1988

Granny would have loved it

the version that popularised the song, the incident took place in Texas



In 1934 Huddie William "Lead Belly" Ledbetter recorded a version of the song at Angola Prison for John and Alan Lomax, who mistakenly attributed it to him as the author. However, Ledbetter, for his Angola session, appears to have inserted several stanzas relating to a 1923 Houston jailbreak into the traditional song. Ledbetter recorded at least three versions of the song, one with the Golden Gate Quartet, a gospel group (recorded for RCA at Victor Studio #2, New York City, June 15, 1940).

John and Alan Lomax, in their book, Best Loved American Folk Songs, told a credible story identifying the Midnight Special as a train from Houston shining its light into a cell in the Sugar Land Prison. They also describe Ledbetter's version as "the Negro jailbird's ballad to match Hard Times Poor Boy. Like so many American folk songs, its hero is not a man but a train." The light of the train is seen as the light of salvation, the train which could take them away from the prison walls. It is highly reminiscent of the imagery of such gospel songs as Let the Light from your Lighthouse Shine on Me. Carl Sandburg had a different view. He believed the subject of the song would rather be run over by a train than spend more time in jail.

The song, as popularized by Ledbetter, has many parallel lines to other prison songs. It is essentially the same song as "De Funiac Blues," sung and played by Burruss Johnson and recorded by John Lomax at the Raiford State Penitentiary in Florida on 2 June 1939. Many of the lines appear in prison work songs such as "Jumpin Judy," "Ain't That Berta," "Oh Berta" and "Yon' Comes de Sargent." These songs, including Ledbetter's "Midnight Special" are composite. They mix standard prison song verses indiscriminately. Many of these component pieces have become canonized in the blues idiom and appear in mutated forms regularly in blues lyrics.

Although later versions place the locale of the song near Houston, early versions such as "Walk Right In Belmont" (Wilmer Watts; Frank Wilson, 1927) and "North Carolina Blues" (Roy Martin, 1930) — both essentially the same song as "Midnight Special" — place it in North Carolina.[13] Most of the early versions, however, have no particular location. Only one recording, collected by the Lomaxes at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, actually identifies the railroad operating the Midnight Special — the Illinois Central which had a route through Mississippi.

Aspen, 1950



ski jumper, Steamboat Springs, 1950



Boulder Canyon, 1900



Yellow Magpie, Arapahoe Tribe, 1899




Pearl Street, Boulder, 1865



Golden, CO , 1887



Guys drinking beer, Boulder, 1908




Folsom Field, 1930



Long's Peak, taken from Longmont, sometime in the 1950s.

Early 80's had a crazy uncle with a house on Ono Island.

You looked out at the beach at the Flora-Bama.

Nothing on the beach to the right or the left.

Maybe stuff at the State Park, but that was it.

quote:

---

Otasco

---

Oklahoma Tire And Supply COmpany

Those Peanuts strips are cool.

Liberace looks like a vagina waiting for a dick...