“I grew up around a banjo”

Author(s):  
Thomas Goldsmith

Chapter tells the story of Earl Scruggs’s childhood and school years in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and of the early death of his father, George Elam Scruggs. Members of the family, including his mother, Lula Ruppe Scruggs, played organ, fiddle, banjo, guitar and other instruments. Scruggs had five brothers and sisters. While expected to take a full part in the backbreaking labor on the farm, Scruggs was also very occupied with music. While he was plowing, musical thoughts ran through his mind over and over. Cleveland County, where he grew up, was a thriving center of business, cotton-dominated agriculture, politics, and music.

10.3386/w1476 ◽  
1984 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bound ◽  
Zvi Griliches ◽  
Bronwyn Hall

1956 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 100-116

Lewis Leigh Fermor died on 24 May 1954, at his home in Horsell, Surrey. He was born on 18 September 1880, the eldest of six children of Lewis Fermor and his wife Maria James. His father, a bank clerk in the London Joint Stock Bank, was obliged to retire prematurely due to ill health, and as a result the education of the family was a major problem. The young Fermor was taught by his mother up to the age of seven but was sent to the Goodrich Road Board School when the family moved to Dulwich. During the first term his education cost 4d. per week but by the following term elementary education had become free, and from this time his parents had nothing more to pay towards the education of their eldest son. From this school, to which Fermor always paid high tribute for the excellence of the teaching, he obtained a scholarship to Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell, and here he was fortunate in having the late Sir Percy Nunn as science master. It was largely due to the encouragement given by Nunn and Sir Thomas Kirke Rose (a cousin of Fermor who was at that time Chemist and Assayer at the Mint) that Fermor decided to try for a National Scholarship to the Royal College of Science and thereby to enter the Royal School of Mines, and work for an Associateship in Metallurgy. The competition for these scholarships was severe, and Nunn warned him that he would have little chance of success unless he was prepared to undertake a special course of additional reading which would have to last two years. A scheme was drawn up whereby he was to rise at 5 o’clock each morning, take a cold bath, do two hours’ work before breakfast, work another two hours in the evening, and always be in bed by 9.30 p.m. In his later years in some autobiographical notes which he wrote for the interest and amusement of his wife, he mentions that there was no hardship in this. The hardship was in the summer, turning into bed whilst the brothers and sisters were still out in the garden. Fermor kept to this regime loyally and was rewarded for his perseverance by obtaining his scholarship and entering the Royal School of Mines in October 1898. Here he obtained a first class in each year’s course and won the Murchison Medal for Geology, a prize of books to the value of £15, and secured his Associateship of the Royal School of Mines in metallurgy.


Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Scaff

This chapter examines Max Weber's journey through five states—Atlanta, Georgia; Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee; Asheville and Greensboro, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Washington, D.C.—that gave him an opportunity to meet American relatives. Max and Marianne Weber's ten days in those five states included visits with descendents of Georg Friedrich Fallenstein and his first wife, Elisabeth Benecke, as well as a meeting with Max's mother, Helene Weber. The condition of the “colonial children” (as the family referred to them) and their prospects in the New World had been under discussion in the family for years. The chapter describes the Webers' itinerary, which included an off-season vacation retreat in Asheville and a trip to Mt. Airy, where Weber was able to observe religion in action. It also explores Weber's notion of what he called the “cool objectivity of sociation.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 5-8

This chapter sets the scene for Ti difé boulé. The text begins with a folkloric tone: it is nighttime after people in the village have finished work. Fireflies are flitting about. A woman called Lamèsi announces that Grinn Prominnin, who has been absent for a long time, has returned with news and ideas. This visionary calls a gathering to find out what happened to the narrator’s brothers and sisters—that is, to understand the crises that have occurred within the family over the past two hundred years and to identify “the traces they have left in our blood” (14). The narrator has learned to speak “tongues” and emerges from “the realm of the past” to tell his audience the story of Haiti’s history and what went wrong. The narrator situates the book’s focus in the revolutionary crucible of the years 1789-1820 when the ascendant indigenous elite snatched up the unprecedented successes of the self-emancipated revolutionaries and freedom fighters.


2020 ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Joseph B. Atkins

Harry Dean Stanton spent early formative years in West Irvine in central Kentucky, a land explored by Daniel Boone, torn by the Civil War, long dependent on tobacco, textiles, and for a time oil, first carried to markets by flatboats and later by railroad. Sheridan "Shorty" Stanton was a North Carolinian who grew tobacco and operated a barbershop. The much younger Ersel Moberly married him at least in part to get away from her crowded household only to find herself soon in another with three strapping boys and later Shorty's two daughters from an earlier marriage. It would be too much, and she abandoned the family, leaving a nearly lifelong legacy of tension in her relationship with her oldest son, Harry Dean. However, he inherited from her and his father's family a love of music, expressed in his early years in a barbershop quartet that included his brothers. After a disastrous stint down in Shorty's native North Carolina, the family returned to Kentucky, this time to the city of Lexington, where Harry Dean would attend high school and after military service college. By that time, Ersel had left, and Shorty was barbering fulltime.


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