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Thursday, July 1, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Weekend Events
Opening ceremonies for the Prairie Chattaquua, a three-day celebration of the arts, will be at 12 noon in South Park. The afternoon's events are to include music performances from dixieland to rock to bluegrass. The day ends after a park dance at 9 o'm.
FRIDAY
The Jazz Band will give a concert at 7:30 p.m. in Swarthout Recital Hall at Murphy Hall.
Entertainment
The Kansas Union will be closed through Monday.
Theater, square dancing and the Lawrence Symphony will be featured at the second day of the Prairie Chauquaau at South Park. Events begin at 12 noon. The Art of Kansas in Music, Media and Poetry, a program funded by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, will be performed at 9 p.m.
Fifteen teams will compete in a Woman's Softball Double Elimination Tournament to begin at 8 a.m. at the Holcom Sports Complex. Two of the four diamonds will be used for the tournament play; the remaining two will be set aside for Little League practice sessions.
The bicentennial will be observed in special services at most Lawrence churches.
In conjunction with a simultaneous nationwide bell-ringing at 1 p.m., the Douglas County Bell at the Lawrence Arts Center will be follled as part of the Prairie Chauffeau program. A quilt exhibit at the Lawrence Arts Center and beep-beep softball game in South Park, both at 2 p.m. are the Chauffeau's final
Albert Gekert will perform a Carnation Reclamation from Sopramonti's "Sunflower Spectacular," a display of fireworks and musical performances by
Also at 2 p.m., the Senior High Camp Concert, featuring groups comprising participants in the Music and Art Camp, will perform in the Murray's Music Hall.
Albert Gerken will perform a Carillon Recital from 3 to 7:15 p.m.
**PROGRAMMING:** a display of fireworks by the 350 particulare and the 350 participale at Art Camp, which will be held at 8:15 p.m.
the concert tunes will be performed by two concert bands, the camp orchestra and
Ken Smith, professor of voice, will narrate "A Panoramic View of 200 Years" written by Calder, M. Pickett, professor of journalism.
The Lawrence Joycees will provide the fireworks display, as they do every year.
MANAGER FACULTIES
Allen Field House and Robinson Gymnasium will be closed. Tennis courts with lighting will remain lighted until 11 p.m.
(LOCATION)
The Lawrence City Swimming Pool will be open from 1:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. All city tennis courts with lighting will remain locked until 11 p.m.
Lone Star Lake will be open for pincicking, boating and use of rental equipment from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. It's advised that those wishing to rent equipment arrive
Perry Reservoir is open for camping, pinchicking, boating and swimming 24 hours a day. However, it's suggested that campers settle before dark so they won't be crowded.
Movies
GUYS AND DOLLIS-1955 musical stars Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, Frank Loesser and the graphic music of Michael Kidle provide most of the spark, but after Sinatra's "Adalene" number, the rest of the film seems
ICE—A lethargic, cinematically sterile film about little middle-class urban guerilla. Made for $12,000 for the American Film Institute, "ice" personally freezes the revolutionary position of the late '60s, for those who want it.
BARBARELLA—Roger Vadim
original French science fiction comic strip. Jane Fonda stars as the title character, but everything, including this one, was written by her.
ODE TO BILLY JOE-What the kids are asking, takes, if you think that the kids were throwing a rag doll off the roof, is Herman ('Summer of '42')
Raucher's script. Robbie Benson and Glynnis O'Connor play this like a Mickey Rooney Judy Garland backwoods traced.
THE OMEN-Gregory Plek plays foster father to the Devil's son. If you've managed to miss the TV campaign that urges you to give the Devil your dues, there are a few messages; otherwise, it's just stupefying.
LOGAN'S RUN—A manhunt in the 23rd Century provides the excuse for this futuristic nonsense. The effects of the drug can be felt by Peter Ustinov takes over with a charming bil that seems to have been inspired by Mister Magoo. With
GABLE AND LOMBARD-James Brolin plays Gable like he was a man. He doesn't reciprocate by embalming Lombard before the script does. Not only do they not love it like that anyone, they don't care as much about Hollywood feeding of itself.
ny BOB GILES Contributing Writer
at sundown on most evenings during the
year 1898, the "sporting belt" of Sedalia,
Nevada.
Ragtime's vitality born in Midwest
Gamblers, pimps, girls and the town's adventuresome males crowded into honkytanks and bawdyhouses like the Maple Leaf Club. The sounds of laughter that floated from the wooden sidewalks were mixed with the infectious strains of a syncopated music.
The music was ragtime, a rich new vein of culture that was being previewed for white America in the tenderloin district of this city and was railroad town in western Missouri.
LIVING IN Sedalia at that time were a number of gifted and sensitive black musicians. Among them was a markedly young serious man named Scott Joplin who was to be known as the most composer of the music and the most shape of its course.
As a child in Texarkana, Tex., Joplin was surrounded by music. His father, Giles Joplin, began playing the violin. His freeborn mother sang and played the banjo. Joplin left home in his early teens and became a wanderer toulourab, and became a gardener, toulourab, and finally, prying in Sedalia in 1894.
It was there that he published his first raga rags and fixed on sheet music a major song.
One of the hazards of Bicentennial worship is that it invites us to oversimplify complex historical patterns and to assign events to events beyond their importance.
NEVERTHELESS, IT is reasonable to suggest that rattime is the most American
Its development between 1895-1915 is an important point in the history of America's music industry. The concert hall of William J. Schafer and Johannes Riedel argue that it no exaggeration to say that the modern music industry "rose to full power on the tide of the rattime
By the turn of the century, black music was thought to be limited to quaint folk songs—the spirituals, worksongs and plantation songs that were left over from the old slave culture and the heritage of suffering.
This was, in effect, the black man being seen through the white man's eyes as a passive,folksy soul to be pitted because he was the victim of a hard fate.
RAGTIME CREATED a new and positive image of the black man, emphasizing his ability to conceive and score instrumental music. Ragtime composers served as collectors of the folk music that was in the archives; they wrote it to be played on the piano.
- is important in understanding the
routine to recognize that it is
based on
Schafer and Riedel, in their book "The
Art of Ragtime," explain, "The little melodies collected and integrated by black composers were primarily dance tunes; a piano raga is a keyboard dance suite, and the drum rythm is a percussion intended as accompaniment for dancing, for expressive physical motion. This fact, certainly clear in the era of ragtime's influence, helps explain why subsequent stereotypes about the music.
Ragtime was an important influence on the early development of American jazz, although the relationship of ragtime to jazz often is misunderstood.
EACH is a separate style; rattle to be played note-for-note as written while jazz is music of improvisation based on the principle of theme-and-variations.
Despite the differences, the emergence of jazz in its never-forming forms was heavily influenced by ragtime, part of a slow and confusing cultural evolution. Musicians created music from what they knew; and in the days when jazz was developing a
fascination of its own, much of it was inspired by or stolen from routine.
The whole music industry borrowed and adapted the ragtime idea. Sonsa's band played cakewakes and ragtime marches. The earlyolin's early songs identified with ragtime.
Most of the vitality and creativity of this American music form occurred in that pocket of the Midwest between St. Louis and Kansas City.
JOPLIN'S FIRST RAG, "Original Rags," was published by Carl Hoffman's music house in Kansas City. Hoffman rejected Joplin's second offering, "Maple Leaf Rag," which was published in 1899 by John Stark of Sedalia and became an instant hit.
James Scott, considered to be the second-ranking ragtime composer, lived for awhile in Kansas and did most of his writing in Sedalia and St. Louis.
After Jopin and Scott, the list of rattime writers, black and white, is dominated by Jimmy Clay, who writes about the
Kansas City and who contributed many pieces of enduring quality.
One of the best-known composers of rags in Kansas City was E. Harry Kelly. In 1901, Kelly, the son of an Irish alderman, wrote a tense colorful hardy Hearn," which he called "the song jaucer at Hoffman's music store. The song gained nation-wide popularity.
KELLY ALSO wrote marches. One of them, published in 1908, was called "Kansas" and was dedicated to Frank Strong, chancellor of the University of Chicago with experience of course, that includes the vocal trio with the "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" pepchant.
In the past 20 years, we have seen a rediscovery of ragtime. It has been accepted as a valid and respectable American music form. There are enough musicians, young and old, playing ragtime, listening to it, knowing to insure that the music will endure.
Take Burt—seriously
By CHUCK SACK
Contributing Writer
.
"Gator" is a sequel to one of Burt Reynolds's least notable roles. As Gator McKuskey in "White Lightning," Reynolds filled up ninety minutes of screen time with Southern style hanky-panky and high-speed, no-return garbage. Why revive such unpromising material two years later? The answer can be found in the credits. "Gator" was a role that Reynolds debut made possible when he arranged the services of actor Burt Reynolds.
The sequel is a combination of "White Lightning" and "Walking Tall." Moon-
Review
fering the roles. So now Burt is becoming a director.
II
shiner Gator is a two-time loser who is forced to work for the Justice Department. In exchange for immunity, he agrees to help get the goods on "Bama McCall (Jerry Reed), a country gangster who runs every vice racket in Dunston County.
EVEN IN repeating a character, as he does with Gator McKuskey, Reynolds expands his portrait. By now he's on the point, where he'd be perfect as one of Tom McGauley's Florida eccentrics, but McGuane, or someone like him, isn't off.
All the movie has is Burt Reynolds. Once again he fleshes out a flat character and makes this exceedingly minor film watchable. With his home-grown drawl, he's always on a ramp, down-home swamp-dwellers, without ever down-on that he's hit the territory before.
Why wasn't Burt Reynold's "Cosmopolitan" appearance discarded by America's throwaway culture? It's been five years since the former professional football player-turned-actor grinned and was able to watch all those many serious film-watchers have refused to look more than skin-deep at his talent. The truth is that Reynolds is a fine character actor who has made good without ever resorting to a stock set of ticks, tricks, quirks and kicks like many more highly skilled actors who repeat themselves in role after role.
When an automobile accident put an end to his sports career, Reynolds turned to acting, first on Broadway ("Mister Roberts") and then in Hollywood as a stuntman. His natural style, coupled with a dark resemblance to the young Brando, soon won him bigger, less strenuous parts. By the time he stripped for "Cosmo" he had starred in a TV series and had made films in India, Japan and China, adding to his many movies in this country. Yet one photograph made him a household off-color ioke.
Probably he fare much better than Marilyn Monroe, who confirmed her stardom in "Playboy" two decades earlier. Her career has given earnest consideration as an actor.
HE IS anathema to many liberated women, as well as to many chauvinistic men. Since "Deliverance" proved him a top xo-office attraction, he has been able to laugh all the way to his agent', and the hot scripts and top salaries waiting there.
III
State song of Kansas has colorful history
By LEWIS GREGORY
The song is known around the world. It was played in China for Presidents Ford and Nixon. It is "Home On The Range," the official state song of Kansas.
The song's history is about as colorful as that of any song ever written. It included a half-million dollar law suit and a nationwide search for the author.
The next day Kelley visited Cal and Gene Harlan to court their sisters, Lulu, and work on the song. The three men were the Harlan musicians in the opera that played for community dances.
"My Western Home," later known as "Home On The Range," was written in 1871 by Brewster M. Higley, a physician who served on the Corps along Beaver Creek, Smith County.
"Kelly put down notes to a tune he hummed and played on his violin until it was safely fixed in his mind," according to Nelson's book, "Home On The Home."
BORN IN Rutland, Ohio, Higley moved to Kansas after his fourth marriage reportedly drove him to drink. He wrote the lyrics to "My Western Home" in the autumn of 1872. In the spring of 1873 he showed his慰问 Dan Kelley a friend and former member in the Union Army and come to Kansas from his native Rhode Island in 1872.
IT BECAME popular with settlers, cowboys and school children across the country but more than five decades passed before the song reached national attention.
They sang the song for the first time publicly at a dance in Harlan one Friday morning.
Stories of the President's sentiment soon made the song one of the country's hits, according to Kirk Mechem, former secretary of the Kansas Historical Society.
"At its peak 'Home On The Range' was literally sung around the world, even in the Antarctic," Mechem said in a 1949 article in Kansas State Historical Quarterly.
If anything, Reynolds is too comfortable in his roles. He continues to waste his time and energy in the little pictures one expects from big stars with spare time between spectacles and sequels. Do he possess himself to these characters? Are they the best of what's offered?
The contradictions of his personality liven up his roles, so that if he promises the moon with his bearing and smile, he denies it with his eyes.
On the other hand, Reynolds's comic sense with a wry, more subtle type of humor is excellent. This is hardly surprising in view of his public, put-on personality, but he also has a great ability to capture the simultaneous tones of menace and pleasure in the grittily underbite of 'Bama's world. Jerry Reed makes a formidable villain, and Reynolds directs him with sure-footed ease. Unlike Weston, Reynolds' sense of style, and that makes all the difference.
SOMEWHAT RELATIVE to this, his comic timing in many scenes, particularly those in chase scenes and with Jack Weston's delivery, is poor. He settles for Disney-level cinematic clichés, and they don't pay off.
As a director, Burt Reynolds has used Burt Reynolds the actor with better results and greater flare than anyone since Peter Bogdanovich in "At Long Last Love." However, no other director has needed his services so much.
THE ARTICLE quoted Admiral Richard E. Byrd as saying he passed time during his six months alone at the South Pole by playing music on his phonograph. That music included his favorite "Home on the Range."
After his phonograph photocheek he said, "I found myself breaking the loneliness by singing "Home on the Range" against the cold, bleak darkness of the South Pole."
Past the rather perfunctory opening, Reynolds's strengths and weaknesses are readily apparent. On the negative side, he has a bad spacing. The film is too slow and too long.
Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society
There are no copyrights on the song. Everyone connected with the music business was making money on it because the author was unknown.
After searching in several states, he found Cal Harlan, then 86, the former member of the Harlan Brothers orchestra. Harlan was nearly blind but played the song on his guitar by memory. He told the lawyer that Hirley was the composer.
Then in 1934 a suit of infringement of copyright was brought against 35 individuals and corporations, including NBC, in a U.S. District Court in New York City by William and Mary Goodwin, Tempe, Arizona.
Dr. Brewster Higley, lyricist for "Home on the Range"
A copy of the Smith County Pioneer of 1873 containing the original published words couldn't be found to verify Higley's authorship, but an article written in the paper in 1914 mentioned the song and Higley.
A nationwide search for the author was begun by a New York lawyer Samuel Moanfield, employed by the Music Publishers Protection Association to investigate the plaintiffs and find the origin of the words and music.
A RECORD of the song sung by Harlan and the newspaper account were used as evidence to prove that Higley and Kelley wrote the songs.
The Goodwins lost the case and the July
10, 1945, issue of "Life" magazine identified
the suspect.
This week is "Home On The Range" week
"Home on the Runge" was officially adopted as the state song two years later.
known around the world and written in our home state." Woman said Tuesday.
SMITH COUNTY, where Higley's cabin remains, also proclaimed June On The Moon.
in a few counties in Kansas, Sedgwick County proclaimed "Home On The Range" week because S. H. Womer and Muriel Wirtman of Wilford, Carliana, are long-time residents of Wichita.
It is time to give Reynolds his due and recognize him for what he onescreen, sees.
The cabin was restored and dedicated by Governor Edward F. Arn, 25 July, 1954.
"Since it's the Bicentennial year, I think it's fitting that we honor the song that is
The key to his portrayals is his mischievous smile, a blend of Newman's boyish beam and Nicholson's cocky grin. He wears it like a billboard, but employs it variously for deceit, humor, camouflage and occasionally to express pleasure.
From "The Longest Yard" to "Lucky Lady," Reynolds has not been led down to a macho, solemn, look at-me-when-I'm-pleased. She was unlike those who have developed a loathing for the cardboard character represented in the foldout, Reynolds has steadfastly refused to do so.
In short, the directing debut of Burt Reynolds has some mixed blessings. He is not as pretentious as Maximillian Schell, another actor-turned-director. But neither is he as proficient as director Paul Newman or Jack Nicholson.
COUPLED WITH this is a smoothy style that can be switched from "good-doe-bij" folkness to penthouse perfection. As one of the lines in "W.W. and the Dixie Dan-ceykings" put it, he has "that rare combination of horse manure and sincerity."
YET IF Reynolds has hopes of doing more as a director, he will have to make the transition from apprentice to master more quickly. "He's got directing, it takes more than being charming and effective, as George C. Scott found out. For without Burt Reynolds in the lead role, 'Gater' would reveal that a director is just a character actor gone bad.
Like many actors before him, Reynolds has recently expressed his dissatisfaction with acting. He spent too much time as an unappreciated journeyman and too often the movements have been overlooked because he was effective, rather than historic.
Comedy lacks direction
Rv GREGG HEJNA
A plot that portrays a war in Brazil, the murder of the President's wife, soldiers dying from nerve gas, and a presidential election hardly seems the basis for a national crisis. The Case" is humorous, even if its humor is the type that grows thin after prolonged use.
Staff Writer
The play, written by political cartoonist Jules Feiffer, opened at the University Theatre last night. The murder case the play is based on curated by the President's office at the White House.
The complicated plot shifts locations between Brazil, where nerve gas has backfired on American troops at war with Brazilian guerrillas, and the White House, where the President and his aides are trying to explain the gas attack and, at the same time, to upgrade the number of the President's wife because of a forthcoming election.
DUANE LADAGE as Lieutenant Culter is singularly impressive as he deliriously rattles on manhood, humanity and how many enemy soldiers he'll take with
Ladage's vocal performance seems even better when contrasted with Marcia Grund's portraital of the first lady, Mrs. Hale. Grunde appears to have only one manner of speaking, which would be beautiful. She relies heavily on her stage presence and a repeated series of stage moves that resemble marches.
As her husband, James Paul Ivy is brilliant. He carries the characterization of the President to its fullest. Relying heavily on his charm, Ivy is clearly the dominant figure.
command figure.
ALAN GORDON as Professor Sweeney, the government's head of research and development, steps into the pitfall of overacting. Although he tries to incorporate social media and online behavior, Gordon doesn't know where to draw the line. He uses hand movements and voice inflections as props, backing on them
Ind direct contrast, Tim Connors's General Pratt is anything but overacted. Connors underplays his part, the loyal Army officer who has been crippled, blinded and killed by enemy damage he caused or justified attack he made. Justified. Connors's character, although minor, comes close to stealing not just scenes, but the whole play.
UNFORTUNATELY, Foeiner's humor is at its best when delivered in small doses. The script represents little more than disjointed ideas swett together with a very thin thread. The basic message, and war-in itself, is pounded into the viewer relentlessly.
One of the most serious problems of "The White House Murder Case" is its lack of direction. Director Rufus Cadigan said he liked to give his actors room to develop characters, but in this play, the actors apparently directed themselves.