HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I grew up listening to the Mills Brothers; think my mother had every LP they ever recorded. I love their music and love the memories that surface.
Fisk University opened in Nashville in 1866 as the first American university to offer a liberal arts education to “young men and women irrespective of color.” Five years later the school was in dire financial straits.
George L. White, Fisk treasurer and music professor then, created a nine-member choral ensemble of students and took it on tour to earn money for the University. The group left campus on October 6, 1871. Jubilee Day is celebrated annually on October 6 to commemorate this historic day.
A Social Drink The proliferation of coffeehouses established a pattern that continues through to this day. First, coffee is a social drink, often enjoyed in public. Second, countries whose climate doesn’t allow them to produce coffee are the greatest consumers of coffee beans (to use botanically incorrect term). Coffee grows at high altitudes within the tropics – think of mountainous countries that hug the equator, like Colombia and Kenya, or India and Indonesia – but coffee culture is strongest in United States, Europe (especially northern countries like Denmark and Sweden) and, in what might come as a surprise to many, Japan, which recently leapfrogged Italy and France to become the world’s third-largest coffee importer. The notable exception is Brazil, which is the world’s largest producer of coffee and the second-greatest consumer.
If you love jazz . . . as I love jazz . . you will find this piece so very moving . . .
Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in me.
John 15:4