did you ever in your life

"Tape is rolling, on American history."
>  Malcolm Boyd


"Listen to the story now."
>  Tina Turner ("Proud Mary")


--------------------- [excerpt, Rythm Oil, by Stanley Booth] ---------------


As a boy on his family's farm in Alabama, Sam Phillips had listened to a man he called Uncle Silas...who sang, "Didn't he ramble..."  Sam's response to the old man's songs was so deep that it caused him to question who and what he was, where he came from, the nature of spirit and matter in reality.


The quality of Uncle Silas's voice remained in Sam Phillips's mind like a beacon.  In 1950 he started the Memphis Recording Service....After a couple of years he began releasing records on his own Sun label. 


He kept saying that if he could find a man who could sing with that...individuality and conviction, he could make a billion dollars....


Sam Phillips was saying that with such a singer he could change history.  [end excerpt]








-------------------------- [excerpt, JFK's Last Hundred Days, by Thurston Clarke] --------------------


Kaye Halle never forgot visiting him [John F. Kennedy] in a hospital room when he was twelve to see him hidden behind stacks of books, immersed in Churchill's The World Crisis. 


When he was a young congressman, his legislative aide Mark Dalton found him reading one of Churchill's early books.  "Just listen to this," he said in an excited voice.  "This is one of the most interesting things I have ever read." 


Referring to a leader in the Middle Ages who had to make a fateful decision, Churchill had written, "At that moment, all history stood still."  After repeating the passage out loud, he asked Dalton, "Did you ever read anything like that in your life?"











-----------------------------------


{Rythm Oil, by Stanley Booth.  Vintage Books / Random House.  New York-1991.}
{JFK's Last Hundred Days, by Thurston Clarke.  The Penguin Press-2013.}


-30-