Hi y'all,

I've a bit of catching up to do.

Ron, the Ella/Louis CD I have is called "Best of Ella Fitzgerland and Louis Armstrong on Verve." It has fifteen tracks selected from three albums recorded for Verve Records "in the interwar period,' and it's pretty darn fantastic.

Gerry Elmer, I am embarrassed to say I have never heard Ella sing "Hard Hearted Hannah," but I'll root around for a download or a recording tout de suite. In the meantime, can I be your dorky little brother anyway? My Ella faves are mostly from the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, with the Cole Porter and Harold Arlen Songbooks as a close second and third.

Conversation and coffee houses: In the 1700s in England, coffee houses were known as "penny universities," because for the one penny price of admission, you could sit all day and listen to enlightening conversations. Also, the coffee houses provided newspapers, and philosophers, politicos and others would communicate their ideas by publishing broadsides and distributing them in the coffee houses. (John Locke was one who did this.) Literate people would read the newspapers and broadsides aloud to the illiterates.

Today coffee houses often seem like places of isolation, with people sitting alone with headsets on, hunched over laptops.

Later gaters,

Elmer