History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
Florence Foster Jenkins has been called many things, but "talented diva" wasn't one of them. She's regarded as the worst opera singer in history. And that's actually putting it nicely.
Who was Florence Foster Jenkins? Well, let's just say she wasn't exactly Maria Callas.
Born in 1868 to a wealthy family, she studied music and wanted to take formal opera training in Europe. Perhaps sensing something, her father refused to pay for it. After he died, she used her inheritance for formal singing lessons (I'm sure somebody tried to get this tone-deaf woman on key.) And she started public recitals in 1912.
And at this point, I'll just let you hear for yourself....
Her screeching voice had all the grace and subtlety of a vacuum cleaner. And to boot, she often dressed in angel costumes, complete with fake wings.
She often ignored the laughter from audiences, regarding it as jealousy. And she did have probably the best comeback ever to her critics. "People may say I can't sing," she said, "but no one can ever say I didn't sing."
She held yearly recitals at the Ritz-Carlton in New York to her loyal core of fans (yes, she did have fans.) But they were a select few. Just before she died, she did hold a public recital at Carnegie Hall in 1944. And tickets were sold out weeks in advance. She died a month later at 76.
Her recording career luckily has only been preserved on a few 78 RPM sides, which have been collected and issued posthumously on RCA in 1962. And covered only one side of the LP.
In the early days of cable TV, there weren't many channels. In fact, they were mostly your local over the air TV stations (with a few from the hinterlands, or over the border if you lived near Canada or Mexico.) The places where cable TV at that time was most frequently used were in areas too distant from cities with TV stations, where signals were too snowy and ghosty to watch - if they could be received at all.
That changed in the early '70s with the introduction of HBO and Showtime premium movie channels. By the late '70s cable began adding "super stations", over the air TV stations that offered their programming to nationwide cable (WTBS Atlanta - now known as simply TBS - the original Atlanta TV station was sold in the mid '80s. And WGN-TV Chicago and a few short-lived channels.)
The lineup was vastly expanded by 1980. And along the way, there were countless startup channels that grew and morphed into household names we know today: Lifetime, Fuse, MSNBC, Bloomberg, ABC Family and so on.
And now, let's take a look at the cable TV grid of yesteryear.......
- Cable Health Network (1982): Featured mostly medical and health related programming with some programming aimed towards women. Became Lifetime in 1984.
- SPN (Satellite Program Network, 1980-1988): Really low budget affair, ran mostly old public domain films from the '30s and '40s, some foreign programming and low budget, often politically biased programming. changed it's name to Tempo before being bought by NBC and relaunched as CNBC.
- The Video Music Channel (early '80s): One of the few pre-MTV video music channels and seen on selected cable TV systems as well. The VMC, like WTBS and CNN was based in Atlanta (but unrelated.) And it was one of a few major market over the air UHF TV stations that ran all music videos (others were in Boston and New York.) It's been said the original plan for Seattle's KTZZ-TV (now KZJO-TV) was to run primarily music videos, but the idea was scuttled after Viacom threatened to not carry the station on it's vast Seattle area cable system, lest it harm it's precious MTV.
- The Nashville Network: Cable TV's first video music channel aimed primarily at country music fans. The Nashville Network had some modest success, but later expanded into programming for men, adding wrestling, action movies and other fare and briefly rebranded as The National Network before becoming Spike TV. The Nashville Network however has been relaunched in 2012 as an over the air DTV sub-channel network.
- The CBN Family Channel: Launched by evangelist Pat Robertson as a "family friendly" TV channel Initially all religious, it moved towards mainstream classic TV with sitcoms and westerns from the '50s. It was eventually sold to Fox and later Disney/ABC. But as a precondition, the network MUST to this day carry Robertson's own show, The 700 Club. Why? Because Pat Robertson owns the word "Family" (as trademarked/marketed as a TV network.)
- FNN (Financial News Network) An early business news channel. A pretty interesting one I must say - you never saw Frank Zappa hosting a show on CNBC did you?
- Alpha Repertory Television Service (ARTS): One of the first highbrow fine arts cable TV channels (along with Bravo and The Entertainment Channel.)
One of the early predictions of the expanding cable TV boom of the early '80s was these channels would be so successful, there would be no need for government-funded PBS (which the Reagan administration and all Republicans afterward absolutely HATED.)
Unfortunately, advertisers for these channels were hard to come by. Commercial advertisers were never big on classical music, opera, ballet and the fine arts to begin with and most finicky arts-oriented viewers resented the whole idea. Period. ARTS merged with The Entertainment Channel to form - what else, Arts & Entertainment or simply, A&E.
Originally, ARTS aired on Nickelodeon's channel after Nick signed off. After A&E was formed, the evening hours formerly used by ARTS became Nick at Nite, originally running rerun sitcoms from the '60s and '70s.
- Kaleidoscope: A channel for those with disabilities. Looked like a great idea, but disabilities are far too wide ranging for one channel to specialize in.
- MuchMusic USA: MuchMusic (or simply Much) is a Canadian video music channel that stepped into the American market. with limited success. It rebranded as fuse in 2003 and has for the most part replaced MTV as the primary TV source of music videos, which the original MTV ended in the early 2000s to focus on solely on teen oriented "reality" shows.
- Fine Living Network: A network targeted to upscale viewers. It was replaced by The Cooking Channel.
- The International Channel: Became AZN, targeting Asian Americans. AZN folded in 2008.
- Trio: An unusual cable network. A joint venture of the CBC (yep, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and NBC, this channel specialized in American TV shows that were largely forgotten or unseen in most of America and Canadian and UK TV programs such as The Littlest Hobo, Follyfoot and Coronation Street and then-current Australian programs such as The Blue Heelers. It also showed the infamous American Pink Lady & Jeff show for the first time in nearly 25 years in 2002.
This is likely to be the first in a series. So many cable TV channels have come and gone, it's hard to name them all.
Yma Sumac "Voice of The Xtabay" (10" inch LP, 1952) Right here is where "Exotica" music began.....
Before Minnie Riperton and Mariah Carey, Peruvian singer Yma Sumac was considered to have the widest vocal range of any known singer, over FIVE octaves (that's a range going nearly the entire human vocal spectrum, from a gut-deep basso to an ear piercing C-note. The best opera singers can barely accomplish two octaves.)
But WHO was she?
She was reportedly descended from the last Incan emporer, Atahualpa (although no DNA evidence was ever presented, it's a claim supported by the Peruvian government.)
It was also claimed in the 1950s she was nothing more than a housewife from Brooklyn named Amy Camus (and "Yma Sumac" was this name backwards.) However, that rumor has been discredited by several Peruvian and Argentinian records she recorded for Odeon in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The shellac doesn't lie......
Her popularity peaked in the 1950s during the hi-fi craze. Her exotic look, music and voice made her very popular with young hi-fi fans. In fact, before the first formal hi-fi demonstration albums, it was her records that were the bench test of hi-fi enthusiasts.
One of her most famous was Mambo! (10" inch LP, 1955)
Folks in the Puget Sound and the Sacramento areas will remember this song as the sign off song of KCPQ-TV 13 Tacoma and KCRA-TV 3 Sacramento before the stations went 24 hours (and filled their overnight schedules with crappy, boring infomercials instead of those awesome old, black and white and made-for-tv movies Kelly Televison used to specialize in for KCPQ in the '80s before KCPQ affiliated with Fox.)
(Why am I suddenly craving Spaghetti-O's")
Jan Peerce was an awesome opera singer, ranking right up there with Mario Lanza, Luciano Pavarotti and Enrico Caruso. A really powerful voice - with style to spare. It was MADE for the theater.
And this song is PURE CLASS.
The version on the YouTube video seems to be the mono version. I'm thinking about buying a copy of the Living Stereo version. With the way RCA Victor mastered (and I do mean MASTERED) their old Living Stereo vinyl albums from the late '50s, I'll bet it sounds FANTASTIC!.......
