It smells of vice, misery, thuggery, the lowest kind of crookedness

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The drunkenness of the poor became an object of nervous regard by the other half of the city, alternately condemned, fretted over, and rubbernecked. There was always a crowd eager for vicarious degradation. At the start of the twentieth century, Georges Cain took in Les Halles by night, heard the laughter and song at La Belle de Nuit and Le Chien Qui Fume and Le Caveau, and then went next door to L’Ange Gabriel, a notorious bistro, something like the Maxim’s of the apaches. The gigolettes and the toughs come here to swallow some snails and upend bowls of mulled wine. The big room upstairs is filled with worrisome characters, the heroes of knife fights or confidence tricks, with predatory eyes and thin lips, their girls pale with carmine mouths. All of them are smoking cigarettes, speaking in low tones while rapidly glancing to the sides, half listening to some poor devil of a violinist scratching out lugubrious waltz choruses ... a song that had just appeared anonymously that year: “If you want to be happy / Hang your landlord / Chop the priests in half…” The sheet music sold on the streets like chestnuts in winter, the vendors just a beat ahead of the cops, who seized all they could find.

it was alleged Little Egypt would dance the hootchy-kootchy in the nude

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Some of the flavor of their ambiguous attitude toward the law can be derived from their sole published work, the 1888 In Danger. It begins with their citing as an inspiration a sermon by one Dr. Guthrie, “The City, Its Sins and Its Sorrows,” which they quote at length, and then they proceed to describe the temptations in mouth-watering detail, and go on to discuss the ease and convenience of crime in New York. Under the guise of alerting the public to the dangers of big-city crime, they offer explicit directions for making burglars’ tools, explain the logistics of skin games, and give formulas for rigging cards. The booklet is, in fact, an advertisement for crime, couched in all the subtlety known to the science of publicity at the time: Having instructed the potential criminal on how to pursue the profession, they detail its rewards: the unbridled nightlife, the monetary advantages, and, of course, the fact that anyone could do it. Howe and Hummel bring nineteenth-century Manhattan into relief as a wide-open town dominated by two industries: larceny and entertainment, which often overlap.

Wanda Jackson sounded like she could fry eggs on her mons veneris

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It was the voodoo of radio and jukeboxes that brought the new music to the ears and feet of post war beboppers. No one knew what to call it, whether it were fish or fowl, but Dewey Phillips understood it instinctively. He talked that down home hipster jive and jumped to radio right out of a record shop on Beale Street. He never learned how to operate a control board, but his show Red Hot and Blue was a smash hit with the public. WHBQ put George Klein in the control room to make sure that Dewey didn't wreck the studio on his night time slot. Every declaration, expletive, hoot and holler Dewey spewed on the air was infused with rollicking tribal power. He played the rocking guitar picking, gospel shouting Sister Rosetta Tharpe right along side of the corn whiskey and amphetamine fuelled pumping piano of Jerry Lee Lewis. The records got into the hands of DJs with the compliments of Sam's brother, Jud Phillips. Due to the promotional efforts of Jud Phillips, the Sun label broke across the Mid South hotter than a fresh fucked fox in a forest fire. - Tav Falco