ODDS & ENDS No. 41

Chubby Checker twisted 70 yesterday. (He was born Ernest Evans in Spring Gulley, South Carolina, on October 3rd, 1941.) Bob Dylan's emergence as an artist, back when he and Chubby were both 20 years old, immediately made Chubby's kind of music sound as silly as it was. But I still have a fondness for some of this stuff - and inevitably the footage is so interesting now. (I'd never seen it before.) And anyway the simplicity of his pun on the name Fats Domino makes me laugh.

Yesterday also marked the 35th anniversary of the death (in NYC) of the great pre-war blues figure Victoria Spivey, who recorded Bob performing with Big Joe Williams on her Brooklyn-based record label, Spivey Records, in March 1962, and who is the woman seated at the piano in the photo on the back cover of New Morning. She has an entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia  -  but her recording career began 15 years before Bob was born.