The Voices Of Oklahoma

A stray comment over at Batesline has put me in the mood to listen to a bunch of the old Texas Playboy recordings from their heyday (1935-1945, say). And, since I live right next door to the old transmitter tower, I had to ruminate a bit about the impact of KV00, the "Voice of Oklahoma".
Between cable TV and the intertubes, it is probably easy for us to forget that how profoundly local the so-called "mass media" was for most of the Twentieth Century. Heck, even when I was a teenager it was still possible for a pop record to be a big hit in Tulsa while dying up in Kansas City.
But KVOO was true mass media....when it went to 50,000 watts in the mid-1940s on a clear night it could be heard west to the Sierra Nevadas and north to Canada. This immense reach virtually ensured the success of a hot band like the Texas Playboys.
The usual riff on the origin or Rock n' Roll is that it was the result of the shotgun marriage of R n' B sounds with country music and a disproportionate amount of credit goes to Worthy musicians such as Elvis and Bill Haley, over looking the country/blues/boogie collision that Bob Wills had already popularized.

Take their version of "Ida Red", which is almos' the same tune as "Maybelline". Or better yet listen to "Three Guitar Boogie". Forget about The Allman Brothers or The Yardbirds, The Bob Wills bands had a patent on dueling electric guitars. Often on these recordings guitarist Eldon Shamblin would just hop right past the blues and head off into jazz territory.
Wills himself recognized the connection to the Rock explosion back in 1957 in an interview with the Tulsa Tribune:""Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928!...We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."
To his credit, Wills always acknowledged his debt to other, earlier performers who married jazz-pop stylings with country music, such as Jimmy Rodgers.
Seems like everyday I manage to walk right past the Ida Red Boutique here in Brookside without remembering to set foot in the place. Maybe I'll rectify that omission today.

Dan Murdock

I am saddened to see that Dan Murdock is stepping down as OBA counsel. While I have little reason to be fond of the Oklahoma Bar Association, in my experience Dan was very fair-minded and was often helpful.

As a friend of mine said when the allegations broke, "You need to pay the lady before you bite her, Dan."

Maybe someday he and I and Judge Harris can all sit down and discuss the unfairness of things. We're not inviting Judge Thompson, though....ya gots to have some standards, after all.

The Mendacity of John Sullivan

I can hardly contain my nausea at John Sullivan's shameless commercial extolling his thriftiness before the ink is even dry on the banking bailout - even Inhofe had the decency to vote against it. I won't even get into his support for the "off-budget" conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. His claims to fiscally conservative credentials are the biggest sham since Potemkin villages.

Speaking Of Surrender....

....John Sullivan has announced that he will support the new version of the Bailout Bill when it comes before the House today.

What has changed? Well, the Bill itself is even worse than it was the first time around. This one is a true Christmas Tree, with presents for many new and different special interests in addition to the banking entities and hedge fund mangers that are the primary beneficiaries.

Since the only remaining reason to vote for a Republican is the fading hope that some of them will not be quite as complicit in expanding the deficit, everyone should be very comfortable voting for Georgiana Oliver in the upcoming election, as she will not be a whit more fiscally irresponsible than Mr. Sullivan as well as being more socially progressive.

Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.

Here is some characteristically disgusting crap from that bastion of freedom, McAlester, Oklahoma.

Secret Justice

Public 'left out' as Oklahoma court records sealed

This is quite pitiful.

There are good reasons to seal records, but normally (as with juvenile matters, mental health affairs, etc.) these are already defined by statute or by court rule.

Occasionally a Judge will seal a record as a matter of forbearance, taste, or mercy. However, forbearance, taste, or mercy, while not unknown downtown, are in extremely short supply.

Corruption, or it's cousin "good-old-boy-ism", is rather prevalent.

I will say more when I stop grinding my teeth.

Michael Bates and BatesLine

A lot of my liberal friends can't abide the Michael Bates column in Urban Tulsa, and to be honest I would say that I'm in vociferous disagreement with him on about 95% of his opinions (except that I like Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys almost as much as he does) but he is the go-to guy when it comes to issues surrounding land use and urban planning....if you want to dispute his points you had best have your ducks in a row because he has thought long and hard on these matters and his arguments are often deep and multi-layered. So I decided to add his BatesLine to my list of preferred blogs.


What makes Bates unusual is that he will actually get down into the nitty-gritty.....do his research, read the statutes and relevant codes, familiarize himself with the agenda of administrative boards that most Tulsans don't even know exist....and then he does a yeoman's job of explaining all of that to his readers,and usually without over-simplifying things. He is also without fear when he determines to pick a target. His nose for smelling out bullshit is remarkable. It's been a long time, if ever, since the Tulsa World did comparable work (I'll make an exception for Janet Pearson's reporting, but her best stuff is generally concerning social agencies and not the development industries that constitute the World's power base).

In short, he's not just an opinion hack, he works as a reporter - and he might be the best one in Oklahoma, either in-print or online.


Am I giving short shrift to anyone? Does anyone have an Oklahoma journalist that deserves a shout-out?