Word: driftwood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most improbably successful tunesmith in the U.S. last week was a genial, buckskin-fringed character out of Timbo, Ark. (pop. 100) named Jimmie Driftwood. Six Driftwood royalty-winners-Soldier's Joy, Battle of Kookamonga, Tennessee Stud, Sal's Got a Sugar Lip, The Battle of New Orleans, Sailor Man-were riding the sales charts of pop or country-and-western tunes; in other versions most of them are sung and strummed by Driftwood himself...
...years ago, Jimmie Driftwood was getting along on $3,200 as principal of the Snowball, Ark. high school. Although he had been singing, composing and collecting folk material all his life ("I sometimes feel like a bunch of musical nerves without any steerage"), he did not try to go commercial until two years ago, when a local music-store owner heard him sing The Battle of New Orleans and sent him to a folk-song-conscious music publisher in Nashville, Tenn. The song took off in half a dozen different records, which stood to earn Jimmie more than...
...also started a craze for the pseudohistorical country-and-western ballads that the industry sometimes refers to as "saga songs." At odd hours of the day or night, 40-year-old Jimmie Driftwood takes up his guitar and plunks them out with the ease of a molting rattler shucking its skin. His most recent inspiration came to him via a radio newscast while he was touring the Ozarks in his air-conditioned Buick one hot day this summer. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, he heard, would soon be a visitor to the U.S. Jimmie began to sing, his wife Cleda...
...commuted to the cabin on weekends, when he gave the children their music lessons. Between schooling and chores, the children were introduced to the "liberal education" in the bright, challenging wilderness outside their cabin door. They rode horses, fished, watched wild animals, learned names of plants and trees, collected driftwood...
Today Sculptress Nevelson lives in a three-story house in Manhattan's East 30s, her works scattered among tons of boards, planks, branches and sawdust. She finds her own driftwood along the Maine coast, does most of the work herself, only occasionally hiring a carpenter. When her house began to feel crowded not long ago, she put all her furniture out onto the sidewalk, keeping only a couch, a table and three chairs. "I needed the room," she says, "because I plan my shows as an ensemble, as one work. Everything has to fit together, to flow without effort...