On You Tube, near videos of the song "Rock Island Line," there is a video titled, "Rock Island Line - The Song That Made Britain Rock." 53 minutes. It was good.
The narrator said "Rock Island Line" is skiffle music. He said everyone, in the 1950s, (in the U.K.), played skiffle for about a year and a half: the Beatles, he said, the Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie - "all began playing skiffle."
Today's song to find on You Tube and play is
Return To Me - Bob Dylan
uploader / channel: DevinfromNJ2000
♪♪♫
Dylan covered this Dean Martin single from 1958 specifically for an episode of The Sopranos in 2001.
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Watching The Sopranos recently, I thought about sayings that we have -- expressions that are figurative ways to describe a situation:
"counting your chickens before they're hatched"
"several sandwiches short of a picnic"
"kicked him when he was down"...
During a scene where someone was beating someone else up, I thought, 'The phrase - he kicked someone when he was down, is just an expression, it's figuratively speaking. But in this scene, he's literally kicking him when he is down.'
And I wonder, How could you really do that to somebody? Wouldn't you be worried you would break his ribs? Wouldn't you be afraid that he would die?
Different world.
In one episode of the show Tony Soprano's daughter Meadow starts explaining the origins of Cosa Nostra - from the point of view of defending them, like they had no other way to make a living, and there was poverty - she says, "the mezzogiorno"...
So I go to look up mezzogiorno - it means Southern Italy.
That led to an article showing up from the December 1958 issue of The Atlantic.
--------------- The Problem of the South: The Redevelopment of the "Mezzogiorno"
by Umberto Zanotti Bianco
1
The depth and intensity of the problem of the Italian South must be seen to be believed. Roughly a third of the country, the lower end of the peninsula, which is usually called the "Mezzogiorno," has suffered for centuries a condition of severe economic depression and social distress.
I well remember my visit to the South after the earthquake of 1908. It took me nine hours of walking over primitive mule paths to reach the chosen typical village, lost in the barren hills behind the Ionian coast of Calabria. It was set on a hilltop, surrounded by lonely fields devoid of any tree or house. The earthquake had left only fifteen out of more than a hundred hovels standing. The concrete and steel allocated for the construction of new houses could not be brought for lack of roads, so the inhabitants had set up housekeeping among the ruins.
The school-less teachers held class in their windowless bedrooms, leaving the door open for light and air. The nearest physician was six hours away by mule path; the functions of pharmacist and midwife were filled by an old woman with shaking hands.
Because there was no bridge, the peasants, to reach their fields, had to crawl on a long narrow board over a deep ravine. Nine had already fallen to their death. With a cadastral register untouched since the time of the Bourbons, many a wretched goatherd was unjustly fined when he took his animals to pasture. The visibly ill-nourished children lived on a bread made of lentils, chick-peas, and barley.
Since the Risorgimento, when Italy was unified in the 1860s, and especially in recent years, great efforts have been made to raise the Mezzogiorno from its backwardness. Yet any traveler even today sees whole regions of such hamlets wasting away in inhuman degradation. Is it surprising that such conditions often led to riot and rebellion, such as the violent, and futile, uprisings which spread throughout Sicily in 1894?
The problem is not new. Though vast woods, mentioned by Greek and Latin writers, once made the climate more temperate and the rainfall more normal, and regulated the rivers, even during the Roman Empire latifundia -- the large landed estates worked by slaves or tenants who were little better than serfs--were spreading, slave revolts were frequent, and malaria raged everywhere.
The region's inhabitants were the constant prey of conquerors, from the Byzantines on; unending wars of succession, pillage, and massacre denied them any continuum of civilized development. Understandably, they developed the defects of servility, duplicity, boastfulness, and a mixture of pugnacity and cowardice, till a sixteenth-century proverb said, "The Kingdom of Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils."
Until the unification of Italy there was but little change. The post-Risorgimento encounter of North and South was a collision of two worlds so different that Cavour stated that achieving harmony between them presented as many difficulties as the war with Austria and the struggle against Rome.
What the South was then like was well described in a report sent to Cavour by Costantino Nigra, the Governor of Naples: "...under the Bourbons [the Spanish princes who ruled most of the South from Naples from 1734 to 1860] every branch of public administration became infected with the most revolting corruption.
Criminal law is simply an arm of the Prince's vengeance; civil law is less tainted, but it too is obstructed by arbitrary government. There is no liberty whatever, either for individuals or communities. Honest citizens are thrown into prison along with notorious criminals. The exiles cannot be counted. As for public servants, there are ten times the number required.
High officials are granted huge salaries, whereas common employees get a pittance, with the result that widespread corruption and stealing are accepted as a matter of course. Newborn babies are put on government rolls, thereby receiving credit for service from earliest infancy.
There is no elementary education at all; secondary schooling is meager; university training is even less adequate, while the education of girls is slighted still more. The poorer classes wallow in ignorance. Means of communication are few. Streets are not safe; nor is property; nor are lives.
"The provinces are neglected. There is little commerce and less industry...As a consequence, hunger and poverty are piled on ignorance ... Richly-endowed charitable institutions are impoverished by huge armies of clerks ... Brigandage is rampant in the provinces, while larceny thrives everywhere. The freedom and good name of citizens is in the hands of a brutal and arrogant police. Public works are authorized, paid for, and not executed . . .
With few exceptions, and especially in the parishes of Naples, the clergy is numerous, ignorant, utterly bereft of dignity and a sense of its office. The populace is superstitious. All classes of society, including the higher ranks, engage in some form of begging. There are neither books nor newspapers..."
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