Hell's Bells! Where have I been? I just discovered this thread.

In the process of writing up my reminiscences of the folk scene, I'm currently working on when Bob (Deckman) Nelson and I hit the Bay Area seeking fame and fortune, only to discover that we were actually better off in Seattle. We had a ball, though, and saw many marvels, wonders, and weird stuff. I recently finished the following:—

        One evening, a fellow named Coz tracked us down and told us, "You've gotta come down to the Anchor Steam Beer place and hear this guy! I can't figure out what he is. He's not exactly a comedian, and he's not exactly a preacher—but he's both! Come on. You've gotta hear him!"
        So we went.
        I think we were lucky to have had a chance to hear this person when we did. He was truly one of a kind. We saw him perform there a couple of times.
        Lord Buckley.
        Lord Richard Buckley was a tall, aristocratic looking man with a neat, elaborately trimmed mustache. When Bob and I saw him, he was nattily but informally well dressed, but I heard later that he often appeared wearing a tuxedo and pith helmet. His Lordship defies description in the usual terms. He has been described, though, as "His Hipness, His Flipness, the Guru of Gone, the Cardinal of Cool, the Bishop of Bebop, the Paganini of Prose, the Pope of Purple Poetry, and the Man with the Magical Mouth." (Whew!) And His Lordship could keep that sort of thing up all night.
        Years before linguists declared that African-American dialect is indeed a legitimate linguistic form and not just bad English, Lord Buckley's monologs consisted of Bible stories, Shakespeare's tales and soliloquies, and a variety if other stories and poems retold in the black idiom, occasionally switching abruptly to an English accent (a few writers and critics, who probably heard his records but never actually saw him, have identified him as black or as English, but he is neither). "Hip-semantics," is what he called it. I've also heard it called "word-jazz."
        What Bob and I heard on those two occasions were monologs that Lord Buckley aficionados consider classics: "The Nazz" (His Lordship's version of the story of Jesus of Nazareth), "Jonah and the Whale," "Willie the Shake" (Shakespeare, of course), "The Raven" (Edgar Allen Poe), "Black Cross" (a poem by Joseph S. Newman), and many others.
        Lord Buckley, the hippest of cats and the virtuoso of verbosity, was a nobleman in the best and truest sense. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of a monolog, spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the whole audience and say, "Milords and Ladies of the Court, would it embarrass you very much if I were to tell you that I love you?" Then he would smile sadly at the people sitting there feeling a bit uncomfortable and say, "Yes, I see. It does embarrass you, doesn't it?" Then he would go on to say, "People sometimes ask me why I address my audiences as 'Milords and Ladies of the Court.' I believe that there is a spark of nobility in everyone. In even the smallest, meanest person, somewhere down deep inside, no matter how faint, there exists a spark of true nobility. It is that spark that I am addressing."
        Not a bad thought. Not bad at all.
        A little over a year later, on October 12, 1960, Lord Buckley had an engagement at the Jazz Gallery in New York City. It seems that in the Big Apple, at least back then, entertainers had to be licensed by the police department. This was highly controversial, in that the authorities had used this police licensing of entertainers to harass Lenny Bruce and a number of other entertainers. Just as Lord Buckley was about to go on stage, the police confiscated his entertainer's license, preventing him from performing. They offered no explanation. Shortly after that, while still in New York City, Lord Buckley fell ill. On November 12th he was put in an ambulance and taken to Columbia Hospital. That night, His Lordship died.

Respectfully submitted,

Don Firth

You can dig His Lordship here.