Author: Michael H. Price

Gene Autry’s Empire – ‘Phantom’ or Otherwise, by Michael H. Price

Gene Autry’s Empire – ‘Phantom’ or Otherwise, by Michael H. Price

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  • November 18, 2007

“So how did I get to be a movie star, anyhow?” Gene Autry (1907–98) asked George E. Turner and me in 1985.

George and I were consulting with Old Hollywood’s preeminent make-believe cowboy about his donation of a large collection of motion-picture footage to the Southwest Film & Video Archive at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. (I had begun working with the SMU film library in 1983 in connection with the preservation of an extensive batch of black-ensemble movies from the 1920s –1950s that had been salvaged from an abandoned warehouse in East Texas. Hence the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection, which amounts to a story for another day.)

Anyhow, on this 1985 occasion, Autry had recognized George and me as the authors who had taken him to task a few years earlier – politely, of course – for his having usurped the greater celebrity that had belonged to an authentic cowboy-become-movie star named Ken Maynard.

Now, being admirers of Maynard, George and I had assumed a resentful attitude in a book called Forgotten Horrors. The movie that at once cinched Autry’s stardom and signaled Maynard’s decline is The Phantom Empire (1935). And yes, The Phantom Empire is a horror movie, with nuclear-age science-fictional foreshadowing. And a Western adventure. And a country-music showcase, on top of all that. Only in Hollywood.

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Li’l Abner Lost in Hollywood, by Michael H. Price

Li’l Abner Lost in Hollywood, by Michael H. Price

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  • November 11, 2007

Sustained flashback to 1940, and to an early stage of confidence and high promise for Al Capp’s long-running comic strip, Li’l Abner. Conventional wisdom, bolstered by accounts from Capp his ownself, holds that the name Yokum is a combination of “yokel” and “hokum.” That would be Yokum, as in Abner Yokum and his rural Southern lineage.

Such an explanation also might seem to demean the resourceful gumption that Li’l Abner Yokum and his family represent. Capp established a deeper meaning for the name during a series of visits around 1965-1970 with comics historian George E. Turner and Yrs. Trly.

“There are many real-life Yokums around the South,” explained Capp. “Some spell the name like Abner’s, with variations including Yoakam and Yokom, and so forth. It’s phonetic Hebrew – that’s what it is, all right – and that’s what I was getting at with the name Yokum, more so than any attempt to sound hickish. That was a fortunate coincidence, of course, that the name should pack a backwoods connotation.

“But it’s a godly conceit, really, playing off a godly name – Joachim means “God’s determination,” something like that – that also happens to have a rustic ring to it,” Capp added. “When I came up with that ‘yokel-plus-hokum’ bit in some early interviews, I was steering clear of any such damned-fool intellectualism. It helps to keep things looking simple for the massed readership, when you’re trying to be subversive with a cartoon.” (One such “yokel/hokum” reference appears in an article on Capp’s success with Li’l Abner in the November 1942 issue of Coronet magazine.)

A.D. 1940 is a significant point, here, in that the year marked Abner’s first leap from the funnypapers onto the moving-picture screen.

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R. Crumb’s Music Madness – part two, by Michael H. Price

R. Crumb’s Music Madness – part two, by Michael H. Price

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  • November 4, 2007

Continued from last week:

Robert Crumb and I began early in 1985 to develop a musical accompaniment for the first stage production of R. Crumb Comix at Fort Worth, Texas’ Hip Pocket Theatre. We consulted by telephone between my digs in Fort Worth and his home near Winters, California, and Robert prepared numerous reference dubs from his collection of 78-R.P.M. phonograph records. These, I augmented with musical sources from my own library, plus scattered original compositions. I recruited an orchestra from within guitarist Slim Richey’s and my jazz trio, Diddy Wah Diddy, and from our affiliated string band, the Salt Lick Foundation, with which I had recently completed a string of record albums for Slim’s Ridge Runner/Tex Grass labels.

Band rehearsals commenced in May of 1985, with all concerned forewarned to buck up for a three-hour show scored with what Crumb wanted to be “constant music – just like in those ol’ Hal Roach comedy films.” Yes, and never mind that the Roach pictures (including the Depression years’ Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang series) ran to just 20 or 30 minutes apiece in length. Well, at least there would be an intermission.

So Robert reached Texas on schedule, got settled in, and found the progress agreeable. He warmed especially to the women (consistent with Crumb’s vision) whom director Johnny Simons had cast. Robert took issue with some of the music as sounding “too modernistic – that ’forties swing stuff” (no accounting for taste) but found the score workable overall, enjoying the sound well enough to commandeer a plectrum banjo from Salt Lick’s Lee Thomas and perform as a member of the orchestra on the opening weekend that June. Crumb’s banjo-playing fit right in, evoking memories of Eddie Peabody and the Light Crust Doughboys’ Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery. I had composed one of the show’s tunes, “Save Me a Slice of That,” as a Doughboys pastiche.

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R. Crumb’s Music Madness and Me, by Michael H. Price

R. Crumb’s Music Madness and Me, by Michael H. Price

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  • October 28, 2007

The life and times of R. Crumb, a mensch among men and one of the more steadfastly brilliant practitioners of American (resident or expatriate) cartooning, have been sufficiently well covered in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film, Crumb (1994), and in Peter Poplaski’s The R. Crumb Handbook (M.Q. Publications; 2005) and innumerable column-inches of The Comics Journal, that I feel no particular need to pursue any generalized biographical tack here.

In a recent letter, Crumb brings things somewhat up to date: “I’m in the middle of a big project – comic-book version of the Book of Genesis, approx. 200 pages when finished.” This involvement had prevented his traveling to Texas in 2006 to take part in a new experimental-theatre staging of R. Crumb Comix with director Johnny Simons and Yrs. Trly. Simons’ Fort Worth-based Hip Pocket Theatre troupe has adapted Crumb’s stories on several occasions since 1985.

Robert Crumb’s larger career might reasonably find itself crystallized in two warring viewpoints: The authoritative critic Robert Hughes’ earnest likening of Crumb to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, greatest of the Sixteenth Century’s Flemish painters, vs. this published declaration from Crumb his ownself: ‘Broigul I ain’t… let’s face it.’

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The Perils and Pleasures of Moviola, by Michael H. Price

The Perils and Pleasures of Moviola, by Michael H. Price

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  • October 21, 2007

I’ve been sorting through the newspaper-cartoon backlog lately, beefing up the digital-image archive while determining whether anything from a busy stretch at the drawing board during the 1990s might bear resurrecting for fresh publication. Much of this material involves a Hollywood-lampoon strip called Moviola, which originated as a weekly feature for the Star-Telegram of Fort Worth, Texas, during its last years as a higher-minded publication.

The first movie parody I ever encountered – and thus, a building-block of my long-stretch involvement in cartooning and film scholarship – came from my Uncle Grady L. Wilson, a theatre-chain manager. Grady could concoct the damnedest jolly nonsense from the flimsiest of material, and keep a straight face in the bargain. He announced to me one day in 1954 that he had booked a picture called "The Preacher from the Black Lagoon."

Now, I was six years old at the time and as impressionable as Silly Putty, and so I found it necessary to witness the arrival of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon on the big screen before it dawned on me that my uncle had been just woofing.

 

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Cowpuncher cartoonist J.R. Williams, by Michael H. Price

Cowpuncher cartoonist J.R. Williams, by Michael H. Price

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  • October 14, 2007

Great cultures yield great artists, and I’m not talking necessarily about Ancient Rome or the Renaissance periods of either Italy or Harlem. The cowboy culture of the Southwestern Frontier has spawned its share of artistry, from poets and musicians to painters and, yes, cartoonists.

Conventional wisdom holds that Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), was the most gifted of the Western cartoonists. Russell’s illustrated correspondence, as preserved at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, helps to shore up this belief. But Russell’s leanings toward the presumably finer arts prevented him from pursuing cartooning as a career.

A near-contemporary of Russell’s, James R. Williams (1888-1957), took a different tack, becoming a working cartoonist who based a long-running daily newspaper feature upon his younger days as a ranchhand.

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: Shock! Theatre, 50 years later

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Shock! Theatre, 50 years later

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  • October 7, 2007

The 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in North America occurred in 2004. So what else is new? That occasion could hardly be treated as commonplace nostalgia, so urgent has the influence remained. Witness Julie Taymor’s newly opened film, Across the Universe. Nor can mere nostalgia account for the significance of the 50th anniversary of a similarly intense cultural phenomenon known as Shock! Theater.

The likening of Shock! to the Beatles’ impact, and to rock music as a class, will become more evident, so bear with me.

Depending upon one’s hometown locale, some folks might remember Shock! Theater under some other proxy local-teevee title. My immediate North Texas readership recollects the syndicated-television breakthrough of Shock! Theater under the localized name of Nightmare. That Fort Worth version premiered in September of 1957 over a scrappy and innovative independent channel – a distinctive presentation of a nationwide syndie-teevee blitz.

In reviving a wealth of Depression-into-WWII movie chillers from Universal Pictures Corp., Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems syndicate left the style of presentation up to the individual stations. A channel typically would assign a local-market announcer to pose as a creepy personality (such as John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, in Philadelphia and New York) who would introduce the various Frankensteins, Draculas and so forth and then intrude at intervals to present blackout gags.

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction cycle persists

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction cycle persists

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  • September 30, 2007

Continued from last week…

An Arlington, Texas-based songwriting and guitar-building partner of mine named Greg Jackson tells of the time when, as a schoolboy intent upon advancing his family’s music-making traditions, he brought home a just-learned story-song called “Five Nights Drunk” and demonstrated it to his folk-singing father as a fresh revelation. Manny Jackson listened long enough for the verses to open the floodgates of memory, then burst out laughing: “Why, I learned that song back when I was just a boy, and it was old even then! Here: Let me show you how it really goes!”

I suspect that that communal dream-stream, rippling with the waves and the undertow of ancient Ideas That Wouldn’t, and Will Not, Stay Dead (like the Man Who Wouldn’t Stay Dead of my Grandmother Lillian’s cycle of folk-tales) is the truer basis of the fabled Unbroken Circle of Southern non-sectarian gospel-singing tradition. Our shared notions and perceptions bind our generations, one to another – more so, even, than blood kinship – if only we will bother to heed the interests in common and build upon them. The past is ever-present.

Greg Jackson and I, both natives of the Texas Panhandle with immigrant and native-tribal ancestral ties to Kansas and Oklahoma and points eastward, have enjoyed the good fortune to be involved since around 1980 with a music-making and storytelling ensemble called the Salt Lick Foundation. East Texan by origin but long based in Dallas and Fort Worth, Salt Lick is ostensibly a bluegrass band that nonetheless reserves the right to indulge in blues and honky-tonk forms, with the occasional forays into rock ’n’ roll, Latinate and Cajun idioms, and free-form jazz.

An immersion in folklore is a foregone conclusion with Salt Lick – from fiddler Earnie Taft’s (above) devotion to Irish traditionalism, to bassist Ron Green’s eerie ability to channel the presence of some 19th-century circuit-riding revivalist preacher. We deepened the connections in a stroke when we teamed in 1984 with the Wimberley-based novelist and playwright Elithe Hamilton Kirkland (1907–1992) to develop a musical stage revue called Precious Memories.

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: What’s A Fishhead?

MICHAEL H. PRICE: What’s A Fishhead?

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  • September 23, 2007

Continued from last week …

We had left Robert Bloch hanging in mid-conversation last week, speaking of Irvin S. Cobb as a forerunner of the “bizarre pulp” movement in popular fiction.

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944) was a crony and occasional collaborator of Will Rogers, and a key influence upon Rogers’ droll sense of humor. He can be seen as an actor in such Rogers-starring films as Judge Priest (1934; deriving from Cobb’s folksier tales) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), both directed by John Ford. It was for other works entirely that Robert Bloch remembered Cobb.

“Have you ever read Irvin Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’?” Bloch asked me around 1979-1980. “Well, if it was good enough for Howard Lovecraft to single out as a nightmare-on-paper [in the 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction], then I was ready and willing to tear into it. Which I did. Changed my entire direction, that one story did.”

I can relate, all right. In 1995, independent publisher Lawrence Adam Shell and I set about to adapt as a graphic novel Cobb’s 1911 tale of righteous vengeance, “Fishhead,” in which a swamp-dwelling hermit of grotesque aspect runs afoul of malicious neighbors. If Irvin Cobb had drawn upon regional folklore to lend his title character a gift of supernatural communion with the wildlife, then our crew reckoned we must treat Cobb’s story itself as folklore – subject to sympathetic re-interpretation and elaboration as a condition of respect.

And otherwise, why adapt at all? Cobb would have done a greater service to scholarship than to popular literature if he had contented himself merely with compiling the various old-time rumors about reclusive souls presumed to possess spiritual bonds with the wastelands. The audacious job that Cobb called “Fishhead” backfired at first, accumulating rejections from one magazine after another on account of its unabashed gruesomeness and its sharp contrast with his gathering reputation as a sure-fire humorist. One editor, Bob Davis, of an adventurous magazine called The Cavalier, wrote to Cobb in 1911: “It is inconceivable how one so saturated with the humors of life can present so appalling a picture.”

But after Davis had relented and published the yarn in 1913, “Fishhead” proved a watershed, helping to trigger the so-called “bizarre pulp” explosion that would gerrymander the boundaries of mass-market fiction during the two-and-a-half decades to follow. By mid-century, when Cobb’s lighthearted and bucolic tales had become by-and-large forgotten, “Fishhead” was still reappearing as a magazine-and-anthology favorite.

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction connection

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction connection

  • News
  • September 16, 2007

Recycling-in-action: Herewith, an encore of a presentation I delivered earlier this month at Tarleton State University’s Langdon Weekend arts-and-farces festival at Granbury, Texas.

If it was good enough for Aesop and Shakespeare and Mark Twain, then it should suit the rest of us – as tradition-bound storytellers with roots in the Old World and in early-day Americana, that is – just fine and dandy.

I am speaking of folklore – the oral-tradition narrative medium that encloses and defines any and all cultures and stands poised as a chronic muse (often ill-heeded or, if heeded, ill-acknowledged) for anyone who attempts to relate a tale for popular consumption. This is a self-evident truth so obvious as to go overlooked.

Yes, and the barrier between folklore and commercial fiction is as slender as the upper E-string on a guitar, and just as sensitive. Pluck that string and watch it vibrate, and the blurred image suggests a vivid metaphor. The inspiration, at any rate, is as close within reach as air and water, and often less subject to pollution.

“So! Where do you-all get your ideas, anyhow?” The question, vaguely indignant, crops up every time a published author goes out communing with the readership. Stephen King has long since perfected a suitably snarky reply: “I get mine from an idea-subscription service in Utica.”

King is joking, of course, and even the most cursory reading of the humongous body of work that he represents will find King tapped into a deep lode of rustic folklore. Witness, for example, The Shining, a 1977 novel-become-movie in which a key supporting character takes prompt notice of a precocious child’s thought-projecting abilities: “My grandmother and I could hold conversations … without ever opening our mouths. She called it ‘shining.’”

I grew up in close quarters with two grandmothers like that – not in Stephen King’s sense of “shining,” as such, although with each I felt a communicative bond that ran deeper than articulated speech. Each, that is, seemed to sense what might be burdening my thoughts at any given moment, whether or not I might care to put any such thoughts into words. And each grandmother, too, was a prolific and spontaneous storyteller, dispensing colorful family-history tales, fables in the Aesopic tradition, and hair-raising horrors divided more-or-less equally between waking-life ordeals and dreamlike supernatural hauntings. With such living-history resources at hand, who needed Little Golden Books?

My maternal-side grandmother, Lillian Beatrice Ralston Wilson Lomen (1895–1982), characterized her ghostlier yarns as “haint stories” – haint being a back-country variant of haunt. She knew by heart James Whitcomb Riley’s famous moral-lesson poem of 1885, “Little Orphant Annie, (sic)” with its recurring admonition that “the Gobble: ’Uns’ll git you ef [if] you don’t watch out!” And she could concoct – or recollect, or fabricate from combined experience and imagination – stories and verses every bit as horrific, and as absurd and uproarious.

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