Ed Kemmick | Spinning Yarns in Montana

A lot of myths and legends gathered around Jimmie Rodgers, as you might imagine, given his fame, his short life, his extraordinary biography. One common myth was that he was a railroad man who took up music only when his tuberculosis forced him to quit working.

In fact, Jimmie was born to entertain. I guess nobody knows exactly where he picked up his musical skills, or when he started playing the banjo, guitar, ukulele and mandolin, but he seems to have been interested in singing and generally in performing his whole life. By the age of 13 he had already organized two tent shows and took them on the road–dragged home reluctantly by his father. And he developed his music during his years of railroading–which he augmented by farming, washing dishes, driving trucks, anything that would put a few dollars in his pocket.

Over the years before he hit the big time, Jimmie traveled with “tent reps,” as they were known, medicine shows, carnivals and vaudeville troupes. He played theaters, town squares, picnics and resorts. He just loved music and wanted very badly to make a living at it. And long before anybody else thought of him as anything but a no-account bounder with a few small musical talents, Jimmie apparently was convinced that he was going to be reach and famous.

So he played wherever he could, for any size crowd, with any sort of company. Here, from his biography, were the people and acts he once shared a program with at the Tri-State Fair in Johnson City, Tenn.: “A Hungarian dancer named Suzanne Chalupka, Professor Brown Pelgery and His Sixty-Foot Balloon, an old fiddlers’ contest, a hoard of Charleston dancers, a hog calling contest, and four local couples who’d been persuaded to perform the exciting, death-defying feat of getting married in public during the week’s events.”

Even after he made it big, Jimmie couldn’t stand to sit still. He go into the theater of whatever town he was in and talk the owner into letting him do a show that night. To promote it, he’d set up in the street or in front of the courthouse, playing music and talking to whoever showed up. And of course the one thing he was always supposed to do was get rest, about the only way to relieve the painful effects of his consumption. Is it any wonder he died so young, at the age of 35?

It must have been about 20 years ago when I learned that David Crisp, a Texas native and at the time a colleague at the Gazette, was also a fan of Jimmie Rodgers. He had a couple of Jimmie’s 33s, passed down from his father, I think, one of which contained two magnificent specimens of Jimmie’s work that I’d never heard before–scripted set pieces recorded with the Carter Family, one supposedly involving a visit by the Carter Family to Jimmie’s house in Texas, and the other a visit by Jimmie to the Carters’ place, in the shadow of Clinch Mountain in Virginia.

Never mind that the two sides were actually recorded in Louisville, Ky., and never mind that the Carters sound as though they were “clutching their scripts and straining at every word,” as Jimmie’s biographer put it. As he also put it, the recordings “are guilelessly revealing and charismatic in their very artlessness.” As much as I love the film clip I posted the other day, Jimmie seems a little wooden there. In these Carter Family shticks, I think we hear the Jimmie Rodgers that his friends knew so well.

Partly because I was so pleased to have discovered David Crisp’s records (and to have put them on cassette tape, which I still listen to in my old Subaru), when David asked me if I’d learn his favorite Jimmie Rodgers song, I couldn’t say no. It might be the only time I ever learned a song at somebody’s request–and the only reason I have avoided it before is that it takes me so long to learn one that I have to really develop some strong connection to a song before I commit myself to it. But this was Jimmie Rodgers, and I soon loved the song myself and still roll it out on a fairly regular basis, if only when I’m playing by myself in the kitchen.

So what was I to think, reading Jimmie’s biography, to read that this song, “I’ve Ranged, I’ve Roamed, and I’ve Travelled,” was “so poor that it was held for release until long after Rodgers’s death, when Victor was scraping out the last bit of treacle–and pocket change–from the Blue Yodeler’s barrel.”

This doesn’t reflect so badly on Crisp. He doesn’t play an instrument and he likes to quote Ulysses S. Grant’s line about music: “I only know two songs; one’s ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other isn’t.” But me? Why, I’m a semi-professional musician. What I am doing falling for this dreck? Once again, I will not plead innocent, but I will plead innocence, meaning that I’m a complete sucker for Jimmie Rodgers. When I listened to him I never thought in terms of good or bad or inferior or superior. If it was good enough for Jimmie, it was good enough for me. Judge for yourself.

(What is this? Read all about it.)

Here’s a funny thing about immersing myself in the life and music of Jimmie Rodgers: For 30-plus years, I listened to Jimmie Rodgers in the spirit of Jimmie Rodgers, openly, guilelessly, for nothing else but my own raw appreciation of his music. But now, reading this biography and listening to songs I’d never heard, and listening closely to songs I’d heard a hundred times before, new things are happening in my brain.

Just for instance. “Desert Blues” might have been the first Jimmie Rodgers song I ever heard, and I didn’t hear it from the horse’s mouth. I heard the 1975 Leon Redbone version, all tricked out and deliberately old-fashioned sounding. But I loved it, and was then probably still a few years away from following that tributary to its source.

And so when I did finally hear Jimmie Rodgers singing “Desert Blues,” I fell for it hard and listened to it God knows how many times and eventually learned it myself. (It’s good early Jimmie to learn, as it has just two chords.) That may explain why I was a bit shocked and a wee bit embarrassed to read in this biography that the orchestra scraped up for Jimmie’s recording of the song was “terrible” and “incredibly corny,” so much so that the recording “derives a certain notoriety and compelling charm from the very fact of its atrociousness.” I began to feel defensive, thinking maybe the biographer had veered inexcusably into snobbishness and was no longer fit to judge the music of my hero.

But then I did listen to the song again. … Wow. The biographer was absolutely right. How could I have listened to that song all these years and never noticed that the clarinetist sounds like a middle-school orchestra reject, that the trumpet player sounds like somebody whose meager talents had leaked out through the spit valve?

Well, all I can say in my own defense is that, like a few million fans of the Singing Brakeman before me, I rarely noticed anything beyond the infectious charm of Jimmie Rodgers, or his unselfconscious enthusiasm for swinging a guitar over his shoulder and letting loose with one of those clear-as-water yodels. In addition to all his other titles, he could have been known as The Man Who Could Save Any Material, With Any Band.

(What is this? Read all about it.)

The Dylan-produced tribute to Jimmie Rodgers album I mentioned in the last post is probably most notable for containing Jerry Garcia’s last studio recording — a creaky-voice, cracked-yodel rendition of Jimmie’s “Blue Yodel No. 9,” otherwise known as “Standin’ on the Corner.” Here’s the Garcia version.

The original recording is notable because it marked the only time Jimmie was accompanied by Louis Armstrong on trumpet. It wasn’t exactly a super-session matchup. Jimmie was used to grabbing sidemen wherever he could get them, sometimes off the street or from the nearest tavern. In this case, in 1930, Jimmie happened to be recording in Hollywood and Armstrong was there, too, and both men had done recordings for Ralph Peer, the legendary Victor Records man. And though there is some dispute about this, the piano player on the song seems to have been Armstrong’s wife, Lillian.

Here’s what Jimmie’s biographer had to say about Armstrong’s contribution to the song:

Jones and Chilton (Armstrong’s biographers) correctly assess the performance: “Restrained authority marks Louis’ solo; in the backings he sounds apprehensive whilst contending with the problem of following the singer’s markedly individual concept of bar lines” — a kind way of saying, as many of Jimmie’s accompanists did in less polite terms, that the Blue Yodeler couldn’t keep time. Despite the vague sense of uneasiness that one detects in both performances, “Blue Yodel No. 9″ is a signal achievement, one that fans of both musicians can justifiably cherish.

“Markedly individual concept of bar lines”! God, I love Jimmie Rodgers. Anyway, here’s the original version by Jimmie and Louis.

(What is this all about? All is explained.)

Everyone who knows anything about Bob Dylan knows how much he was inspired by and deliberately fashioned himself after Woody Guthrie. But how many people know how deeply he admired Jimmie Rodgers? I certainly didn’t have any idea before 1997, when Dylan produced “The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers,” a tribute album featuring, among others, Dylan, Alison Krauss, Willie Nelson, Jerry Garcia, Bono and Van Morrison signing Jimmie’s songs.

In the liner notes, Dylan was unusually extravagant with his praise. (And being Dylan, he was also sometimes incomprehensible and sometimes downright bad, as when he said Jimmie’s “message is all between the lines and he delivers it like nectar that can
drill through steel.”)

Here’s what else he had to say:

Jimmie Rodgers of course is one of the guiding lights of the Twentieth Century whose way with song has always been an inspiration to those of us who have followed the path. A blazing star whose sound was and remains the raw essence of individuality in a sea of conformity, par excellence with no equal. Though he is claimed as The Father of Country Music, the title is limiting and deceiving in light of today’s country music and he wouldn’t have understood it. In his time, he was better known as “The Singing Brakeman” or “Blue Yodeler” and hence in some circles, he has come to be known as the “Man Who Started It All” which is more to the truth for he was a performer of force without precedent with a sound as lonesome and mystical as it was dynamic.

Yeah, he kind of liked Jimmie. Here’s a bit more:

The artists on this compilation as diverse as ever, all have one thing in common — all have been amazed, moved and enormously affected by Jimmie like no other. Why? Because Jimmie was alive in a way that others were not and are not. … We love the man and we love what he did in the short time he was here and we know that he rose above insurmountable odds in giving of himself with Herculean effort to achieve it, that he worked against time with a disease that was a quick assignment to the cemetery. … His is the voice in the wilderness of your head…only in turning up the volume can we determine our own destiny.

The funny thing is, the song Dylan chose to sing on that tribute was “My Blue Eyed Jane,” but I had never heard the original version by Jimmie until yesterday, when I finally tracked it down. It’s one of those things; I didn’t have a recording of it and just never thought to give it a listen. The biographer of Jimmie, whose book I’m reading, said it was one of Jimmie’s most sophisticated recordings, with a solid jazz band and an uncommonly good arrangement. Here is Jimmie singing it. Here’s Dylan singing the same song on the tribute album. And I will figure out how to embed videos one of these days.

Things you might like to know about Jimmie Rodgers:

For one thing, he really hated when people misspelled his name. Jimmy Rogers? No!! Jimmie Rodgers. Do him that courtesy, at a minimum.

Jimmie was not what you’d call a trained musician. He didn’t really have settled notions about timing, consistency, pitch, and so forth. He worked out some pretty slick guitar parts, but they were all his own and some of his chords were definitely his own inventions. He was a working musician and he used whatever worked. But however much he may have bedeviled the people he worked with, throwing in unscripted notes or runs, changing his yodel, altering lyrics on the fly, he did labor at perfecting his own sound.

Early on he told his wife, “I’m gonna make that old guitar of mine obey me yet, so it’ll talk when I talk, and cry or laugh when I do.” Spoken like a true bluesman.

Jimmie Rodgers wasn’t famous very long because he struggled for many years and then died young. He was either broke or borrowing money for most of his life before he suddenly made it big. When he decided, more or less on the spur of the moment, to leave Asheville, N.C., to head up to Bristol, Tenn., in hopes of cutting his first record, he went to get his wife, Carrie. As a member of Jimmie’s troupe tells it, “This little house they had (in Asheville) must have been furnished because when we got back, he went in and told his wife we was coming to Bristol, and they put everything they had in suitcases. All they brought with ‘em was clothes. Took about fifteen minutes, and we were on the way.”

Within the year he was selling hundreds of thousands of records, and within a couple of years he was driving big touring cars and building a dream house in Kerrville, Texas, where he moved to get some relief for his consumption. More on that later.

How lucky am I? At noon on Thursday, Feb. 21, I get to make a presentation on the life and music of Jimmie Rodgers at the Western Heritage Center in downtown Billings. (It’s part of a monthly series this year, but the WHC’s somewhat inadequate website — get cracking, Kevin! — doesn’t give details.) I’ll give a sketch of Jimmie’s life and play a video or two and brother John and I will play five or six of his songs.

To get ready for the show, I’m finally reading a biography of Jimmie Rodgers by Nolan Porterfield, which John read years ago. I’ve been listening to Jimmie for at least 30 years and have picked up scraps of information about him, but reading this bio has been an amazing experience. I once read an R. Crumb review of a video full of old-time music clips, including a clip of Jimmie Rodgers. (This was long before YouTube, when such fragments were hard to come by and much prized.) In the review, R. Crumb said something like, “Is it possible to feel nostalgia for an era you didn’t live through?” I know just what he means. I’ve always loved Jimmie and old-time American music in general, but this book just makes my heart ache when I think how badly I want to go back and experience those times and hear that music when it was alive and fresh.

Anyway, the thing is, I’m so wrapped up in this book that I’ve got to share it, somehow, and I don’t think reading every third paragraph out loud to Lisa is going to satisfy me or entirely please her. So, from now through the 21st, as a way of gathering material for the presentation and letting off steam, I’m going to put down some of the most interesting things I run across.

By way of introduction, I suppose this first entry should answer any lingering questions, including “Who in the hell is Jimmie Rodgers?” Well, he was the Singing Brakeman, America’s Blue Yodeler, and, after his death, the Father of Country Music.

There is no better introduction to Jimmie — to his music, his amazing yodel, his easy-going guitar style, his big-hearted personality — than to watch this 10-minute movie he starred in, and which I believe was his only appearance on film that has survived. I’ll be posting lots more. Bear with me.

Installment No. 3 (What is this? Read Installment No. 1 for the answer.)

This was an entry in my book journal and also a newspaper column.

Mile High Mile Deep, by Dick O’Malley, finished July 25, 2005

During Dick O’Malley’s childhood in the 1920s, Butte was more than the most interesting city in Montana. It was almost a world unto itself, a tough, bruised place where Irishmen, Swedes, Montenegrins, Greeks, Chinese, Poles, Italians, Finns, Yugoslavs and Cornishmen fought and worked and drank and died.

It was a world populated by characters like Shoestring Annie, who furiously cursed at those who wouldn’t buy her laces; Reckless Cavan, a “mucker” who could shovel rock faster than any other miner; Puddinhead Van Pelt, a dim-witted cop; and Filthy McNabb, who tended pigs at the Poor Farm.

It was a world where miners died underground in fires, cave-ins and explosions, or wasted away above ground from consumption, referred to as miner’s con. They killed each other with guns and knives, drank moonshine and took rough comfort in the arms of Venus Alley’s painted ladies.

As harsh and violent as Butte might have been, O’Malley’s boyhood memoir, “Mile High Mile Deep,” makes Butte sound like the wildest, grandest place to have been a boy since Huck Finn launched his raft on the Mississippi. Writing decades later, O’Malley gave it all an aura of glory by describing Butte as he saw it as a boy, a boy who knows only the world in front of him.

“It’s deceptively simple,” said Russell Chatham, the Livingston painter. “For him to maintain the tone that he does … letting the innocence of the boy just report — it’s pure genius.”

Chatham discovered “Mile High Mile Deep” in a used-book store in 2002 and was so struck by it — “It just blew my head off” — that he re-released it this spring through his own independent publishing house, Clark City Press. Beautifully made, illustrated with rare photos of early-day Butte, with Chatham’s own painting of the Orphan Girl Mine on the dust jacket, this is an edition that does justice to O’Malley’s neglected masterpiece.

And O’Malley does full justice to his subject. He reminds us again that in Butte, home of the Richest Hill on Earth, the great stories, like the veins of copper, were seemingly inexhaustible.

“Mile High Mile Deep” was first published as a hardback in 1971 by Mountain Press Publishing Co. in Missoula, then issued as a paperback in 1986. It had been out of print for years when Chatham decided to revive it. It’s too bad that O’Malley, who died in 1999, didn’t live to see it.

O’Malley followed his father into the newspaper business, working at papers in Montana before joining the Associated Press. During a distinguished career with the AP, he covered the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Berlin Blockade, war in Algiers and a revolt in the Belgian Congo. He was working as the AP bureau chief in Paris in the early 1960s when he wrote his memoirs, getting to the office an hour early each day to transport himself back to his rugged boyhood.

You can tell what a reporter he must have been from reading this book. Each chapter is a perfectly composed yarn, with a beginning, middle and end, each detail given just the right touch, each of Butte’s many dialects rendered pitch-perfect.

It is also a story of great friendship. O’Malley and his pal, Frank Lardner, are together on almost every page, setting off together for one adventure after another. At first, theirs was a sunlit world, a succession of picnic lunches, streetcar rides, movies, parties and light-hearted explorations of the whole crazy hill. But the darkness was never far away.

There is a fight in nearly every chapter, some of them mere larks and the letting off of steam and some of them dead serious, as when striking miners savagely beat one of the mining company’s gun thugs. O’Malley became a connoisseur of fights.

“Lots of times men swear and yell when they’re fighting,” he wrote of one brawl between Butte miners and circus roustabouts. “But when they don’t say a word and just slug, that’s a fight where somebody usually gets hurt bad.”

This was one of those fights: “There wasn’t much noise. Just the sound of fists and clubs and then people coming out of the circus got mixed up in it whether they wanted to or not.”

O’Malley was almost as matter of fact when he described how Tony, a Montenegrin, avenged his brother’s death as part of a feud that stretched back to the Old Country. In full sight of O’Malley and his friend Frank, Tony coldly gunned down his brother’s killer, then threw his empty revolver at the corpse.

“Frank and I ran down to where the man was lying on the sidewalk and he was deader than a mackerel,” O’Malley wrote. “You could tell. Somebody came out from the Carlisle rooming house and threw a blanket over him and pretty soon an ambulance came and took him away.”

But this is no aimless series of recollections. It builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, as the boyish innocence and sense of wonder evolve into a mature realization of how ruthlessly the mines chewed up good men and destroyed good families.

The late Montana historian Michael Malone, writing in “The Battle for Butte,” said an Eastern newspaper described early-day Butte as “simply an outpost of hell;… the few women and children there looked with indifference upon crime of every kind.”

The first part of that description might have been true. O’Malley’s memoir makes it clear that the second part did not fit his mother. After O’Malley witnessed the murder described above, his mother said to him, “This terrible town. This terrible mining camp where a man can be shot down in the streets like a dog.”

O’Malley’s simple, straightforward narrative makes you believe that Butte really was a terrible town, an unwholesome, unholy place — even while it makes you wish with all your heart that you could go back and see it for yourself.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that the book ends on a note of almost unbearable tragedy, as do those two other Montana classics, “The Big Sky” and “A River Runs Through It.” And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say “Mile High Mile Deep” deserves to stand in the same company as those two books.

I’m already looking forward to reading it again.

This is sad. Ken Staninger, a prominent Missoula sports agent and real estate broker, has died of cancer. He was just 63. The article doesn’t mention another of his accomplishments: forming the Missoula Flying Mules hockey club, of which I was a charter member, in the winter of 1975. I wrote a column about the club, and Ken’s role in starting it, but it’s so old (it ran in 2000) that I can’t link to it. I did find it in the Gazette’s internal archives, though, so I’ll copy and paste it.

Here’s a picture of Ken from the Missoulian, taken just about the time I met him. He was a handsome devil, and a guy always ready for some kind of devilment. I will miss him.

Update: Somehow, I missed this sidebar, which does mention Ken’s association with the Flying Mules.

Here’s the column:

I haven’t done much in my life worth bragging about, but I was a charter member of the Missoula Flying Mules, which is something.

We gathered in the back room of the Stockman’s Bar 25 years ago this winter to plan how to bring hockey to Missoula, or, rather, to take ourselves to hockey in Spokane, Butte, Billings and anywhere else that would have us.

Logistically, we succeeded. Tactically, we were phenomenal failures. Typical scores in the first few years were 18-0, 23-1, 15-2. I think we settled on the Flying Mules name by way of advertising our dubious prospects.

But even laughably bad teams have their specialties, and ours was getting thrashed on a Friday or Saturday night, staying up till nearly dawn celebrating our loss and then playing twice as well in the morning, sometimes even beating the team that had drubbed us so badly the night before.

They all wondered how we did it, but it seemed simple to us. Missoula didn’t have a hockey rink then — nothing but a pond with a warming house, and people with sticks and pucks were not welcome there. As a result, we viewed the first game of each traveling weekend as our practice session, and the game the next day as the real contest.

The team was pretty much the creation of one person, Ken Staninger, a real estate developer and in recent years a sports agent of some renown in Missoula. Twenty-five years ago, Ken was just a Montana kid who somehow fell in love with hockey — even more improbably with goaltending — and figured he’d have to start a team if he ever wanted to play.

Ken was a good athlete with a world of good intentions, but I think he was under the impression that goalies didn’t need to know how to skate, at least not very well. In fact, good goalies are excellent skaters, strong and quick on their feet, able to maneuver and respond instantaneously to a very fast game.

It might have been that Ken’s first Flying Mules game was also his first time on skates. He compensated for his lack of skating ability by dropping to his knees as soon as the puck crossed our blue line, and he generally stayed there until the puck left the zone or the ref blew a whistle. Ken stopped so few shots from the kneeling position that he might as well have been praying while he was down there.

Not that any of his teammates minded. A few of us had had some hockey experience, but generally of the unschooled kind, more given to feats of freelance scrappiness than disciplined teamwork.

Others could barely skate at all and would just huff along in hopes of getting close enough to hit somebody. At least two of our defensemen had never mastered that essential aspect of the art of skating known as stopping, which threw them back on the necessity of crashing into the boards, or perhaps another player.

We didn’t have much luck raising money in those early years, either. We thought the Flying Mules name had a nice ring to it, but somehow it didn’t click with potential sponsors. Nor did they like the idea of sponsoring a team that played nothing but away games.

Since most of us were broke college students, we packed ourselves into bald-tire cars and rusted-out vans, slept eight or 10 to a motel room and descended on buffet-restaurants like an army of locusts on a field of grain.

I was reminded of all these things last weekend, during the first-ever Mules reunion in Missoula. All things considered, the years had been good to most of us. There was some gray hair and some evidence of wear and tear, but the level of hockey actually seemed to have improved, and the ability to celebrate afterward had not diminished much.

Contrary to expectations, many of the Mules had gone on to lead productive lives. We were all proudest of Skip Madsen — proud and envious. Skip, a goalie who came along after Staninger’s retirement, somehow managed to land what all of us would have considered the dream job in those days. He is now the head brewer for the Boundary Bay Brewing Co. in Bellingham, Wash.

There was one painful recollection last weekend. The charter members among us remembered how, in our first year, we loved telling other teams that the Mules had everyone from a 16-year-old kid, Doug McKenna, to a 40-year-old rancher, Reed Marbut, neither of whom made the reunion. Twenty-five years ago, we marveled that anyone as ancient as Reed could still play hockey.

Well, several of us passed that advanced age more than a couple of years ago. I guess I have something else to brag about.

Installment No. 2 (What is this? Read Installment No. 1 for the answer.)

This leafing through the book journal has been interesting. I keep running into books I had no recollection of reading. I have also been finding more bad “reviews” than I remembered having written. Here’s one:

History Begins at Sumer, by Samuel Noah Kramer, abandoned on about Feb. 25, 1990

I picked this book off my shelves in some desperation, having found nothing else that excited me in the least. This book didn’t either, but I figured at least I would learn something about Sumer. Well, I did make it to page 88, but Prof. Kramer’s wooden, lumpish style was so laughably bad that I just couldn’t go on. He apparently was motivated to write this book in order to help the hopelessly dense “layman” penetrate the mysteries that heretofore had been penetrated only by “scholars” and “specialists” like himself.

I use the quote marks only as Kramer would have done–where they are useless and condescending. He seems to have been under the impression that no other specialist in any field had ever written a popular book before. He is constantly emphasizing how terribly arcane his field is, e.g.: “Sumerology, as the reader may surmise, is not reckoned among the essential disciplines even in the largest American universities, and my chosen path was hardly paved with gold.” And he leads off the introduction thus: “The Sumerologist is one of the narrowest of specialties in the highly specialized academic halls of learning, a well-nigh perfect example of the man who ‘knows the mostest about the leastest.’” He repeats formulas of this same ridiculous idea three and four times a chapter, and these are very short chapters. (And I love that “academic halls of learning.” Maybe he should have checked with colleagues in the Department of Redundancy Department.)

Probably the worst example of his style is the beginning of Chapter 4, where he goes into a boring, detailed description of the palace he had gone to in order to study some cuneiform tablets. He goes on to describe “the broad-faced, sad-eyed Ataturk, the beloved founder and hero of the new Turkish Republic.” A little later he finally gets to the point: “But it is not with modern ‘heroes’ that I am concerned, no matter how epoch-making their achievements. I am a Sumerologist, and my business is with the long-forgotten ‘heroes’ of the far-distant past.” Try to imagine anything worse!

OK, I have found something worse. In Chapter 5, titled “The First Bicameral Congress,” Kramer actually tries to build some suspense by pretending that the reader doesn’t remember what book he is reading. He begins by talking about the history of the political assembly, and says we often think of it as a new, and a Western, innovation. “But the patient archaeologist digs deep and wide,” he says, “and he never knows what he will come up with. As a result of the efforts of the ‘pick and spade’ brigade, we can now read the record of a political assembly that took place some five thousand years ago in–of all places–the Near East.” Now, that passage on its own is a piece of stupid writing. But then, after spilling the beans that we’d all seen already, he tries again to build the suspense by pretending we don’t know just where in the Near East this idea of the political assembly began. He goes on and on with a description of this assembly, talks about Greece and Rome and then, at last, reveals that it “was in the land known in ancient days as Sumer, situated north of the Persian Gulf between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. …”

I wasn’t prepared to be this hard on the book, but a week or so has passed since I finished it, and reviewing it this morning made me see more clearly just how awful it is. One more thing: he refers time and again to three or four fellow Sumerologists, and each time he does so he not only repeats their first names, but usually says again what university or foundation they are associated with, and also tacks on an adjective like “distinguished” or “the brilliant.”

Maybe Prof. Kramer should not be blamed, being a poor “specialist” in his “highly specialized” field. Maybe he needed a “specialist” in the field of “editing,” someone with the sense and the courage to make him readable.