Tales of Waring: ten thousand a hole

[1] Dominance of his mother’s worldview over his father’s in Bill’s character makeup would probably have been multiplied by the fact that when his parents broke up, Bill spent more time with his mother than with his father, because he did not like his father. This too would come out during the second interview.

[2] An aerial view of Fred’s golf course and Shawnee Inn is presented within the Dr.'s Exactly How Mrs. Nixon's Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert. The creek flowing past the Inn and into the Delaware River is Minisink Creek.

[3] The traditional words for ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ are: ‘On top of Old Smokey, all covered with snow, I lost my true lover for courting too slow, For courting’s a pleasure and parting’s a grief.....’ Whereas the words mj hears are: ‘On top of Old Shawnee, all covered with golf, I lost my Fred Waring, when he tripped in the rough.....’ Apologies to the creator of the original lyrics, Mr. Anonymous. This musical arrangement by Stuart Churchill was a Waring perennial favorite, audiences demanding it as an encore whenever Fred left it out of the main program; and the song over the years was always sung by Fred’s highest tenor, whoever that was at the time. The version that informed mj's hearing – and seeing – the song at this point in the evening can be heard on Decca’s 33 1/3 two-record set, The Best of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, the incredibly high tenor soloist being Gordon Goodman.

[4] Portion of a drawing from Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 69.

[5] In the mythology of ancient Greece, satyrs were bands of fanatical male devotees of their favorite Greek god, Dionysus. In the religious comedies and tragedies presented in the Greek amphitheaters during the spring Dionysia, meaning days celebrating the god Dionysus, men costumed as satyrs danced and ‘sang’ as a ‘Greek chorus’, located in an area raised up above the action on the stage, a type of ‘chorus’ so historic and famous it has been referred to simply ever since (for four thousand years or more) as ‘the Greek chorus’. Satyrs of the Greek chorus could hurl words of remarkable wisdom and insight regarding the action on the stage, right in the midst of the drama, and they sang or spoke these intense, often shocking, pithy remarks accompanied by drums and other percussion instruments in an extremely complex and emotionally exciting poetic meter known as a dithyramb. Satyrs were almost universally helplessly oversexed and perennially horny, and on Greek vases which were kept in normal homes they routinely performed graphic sexual acts that would have given most of the Sunday School teachers in Fred’s audiences heart attacks immediately fatal (whether they understood the portrayed acts or not). A satyr was human from the waist up, and a very hairy goat below. All of which made perfect sense to the Greeks and still does make perfect sense to certain moderns who have studied ancient Greece thoroughly and have really given it all some serious thought, Friedrich Nietzsche having been the most famous. For more see Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, a classic in the field of comparative ancient religion which resulted in Nietzsche’s inventing the terms ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’, conceptual terms and frameworks which were then used by anthropologists and others to compare and contrast cultures, religions, societies, individual artistic styles, etc. In fact, mj lorenzo himself used the terms throughout the latter chapters of Part II of his first book, The Remaking, in order to compare the personality traits of his ‘Mortimer’ side (Apollonian) with those of his ‘Jack’ side (‘Diionysian’), in an effort to decide which side of his gravely split and hyperpolarized self to honor. By the time of Tales of Waring, as all mj lorenzo pundits said, critics and admirers both, he had clearly become a little more comfortable with his Jackian, or Dionysian, side. (Dr. Lorenzo's references to Nietzsche pop up here and there in The Remaking. Subsections that focus most on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy are 223 and 228 in 'seventh attempt' [last section of Part II].)

The main point, as all of the pundits agreed, and critics of mj lorenzo too, was that about this juncture in the evening mj was beginning to experience the Pennsylvanians’ music as a kind of ancient Greek chorus commenting on Bill’s stories about their godlike leader, Fred Waring, sometimes doing so blatantly, and at other times, hintingly.

[6] The problem here was that mj lorenzo assumed that the massive cash-wealth of earlier decades which had allowed Fred to buy the Inn and to fund china shop bulls, war canteens and a thousand other philanthropic or publicity gestures was still available to Fred at the time of this 1974 interview. It was an assumption terribly wrong, as Bill wanted to make clear.