When I’m getting p2pnet ready, I make a bunch of pages from a template already preformatted with header and footer data.
I put stories together in the free version of Jan Goyvaert’s Edit Pad, which I’ve been using for years, then I paste the copy into the WordPress edit page. Finally, I make the accompanying pic with an elderly version of Photoshop, which I’ve also had for years.
Why am I telling you this?
Because while I was building the current collection of ready-to-paste pages, I was listening to Greg Hale Jones tunes from the General’s Daughter soundtrack.
It’s great music and I realised I didn’t even know who he is. So I took a break to find out, to my sorrow, discovered he’d died in 2004.
A little while back, “I was was re-watching The General’s Daughter, a thriller, last night and I’d forgotten I really liked a couple of tunes from Greg Hale Jones’ soundtrack — in particular Sea Lion Woman at the front end and She Began to Lie at the back, and Rachel Rocket and Gonna Rise and Fly in between”, I posted on p2pnet. “And other pieces.”
After his his death, Jones, “was given the Buddhist name of Shaku Ho-on (Sounds of Dharma)”, says his bio, adding, “Greg lives on through his musical legacy.”
He does.
While I was reading up on him instead of working, I came across a write-up by Xeni Jardine on Boing Boing.
Among other things “His body of work included a number of film soundtracks, and a series of wonderful pieces that digitally remixed/rethought/reinterpreted old historic folk song recordings from the Library of Congress”, she says, going on >>>
Probably the most widely-exposed of these was a haunting tune called “Boll Weevil”.
One of the things that was so amazing about his work was the way he used these old recordings — he wasn’t just sampling them and slapping them on top of a techno beat, Moby-style. He was really turning them inside out, composing through them and around them and retooling both the original and the new elements in an incredibly sensitive way.
It was great work, and a fine reminder of the fact that valuable new art often owes its creative DNA to prior work.
When I interviewed him, he talked about what he went through to obtain permission from the Library of Congress to use some 60-year-old Alan Lomax field recordings of black southern folk singers — this permission came with an odd condition. Since he was planning to use these source materials to create a new song for a feature film (The General’s Daughter, starring John Travolta), some portion of the movie’s proceeds must go back to the heirs of the original singer. Greg agreed.
This resulted in a surreal scenario: after a long, challenging search to locate the descendants, a suited-up Paramount Pictures executive drives a winding road out to an overgrown southern plantation in disrepair, hands a check to an elderly woman, asks “So, what are you going to do with the money?”
The elderly woman replies, says Xeni, “I’m gonna finally go out and buy me one of them telephones, that’s what I’m gonna do.”
So I wrote this. Then I got back to work.
Jon Newton