Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Two Times Sonny Boy in One Week

If you know me, you know that I am a retired English teacher who gave up reading books when I retired from teaching almost five years ago.

Believe me, I have tried to get through novels, but once I have passed the halfway point I lose interest. Even long airplane flights do not provide the impetus to finish a book.

Now magazine articles are another matter. They are usually short and sweet. Some can even be read from back to front, and I like that! Plus magazines can be tossed aside when you get tired and fall asleep, but books need BOOKMARKS :(.

The bookmark for my latest book endeavor has the same name as the book title. Who would have thought that in the same week I would have two Sonny Boys on our coffee table?

The book is written in Dutch, but it is non-fiction. Just as my former students loved "true stories," so do I. And I like that being written in Dutch keeps my language skills a bit sharpened. The setting of the book in Scheveningen, The Netherlands in the years before WWII is also appealing. And then the circumstances of Sonny Boy in the predominantly white Dutch society keeps my interest. So maybe Annejet van den Zijl wrote a winner, at least for me.

My mother gave me the white corn meal wrapper that I used as a bookmark in the photo below. When I was born, my father worked for Interstate Grocery Company (later Helena Wholesale, Inc.) in Helena, Arkansas. This wrapper came from the company before they went out of business. It would have been used to pack degerminated white corn meal. For years I heard about Sonny Boy meal and King Biscuit Flour, and now I have a wrapper to frame.

I found the following ad on the Internet:

"Seller's description: "Down in Helena, Ark. in 1941, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Junior Lockwood had a 15-minute show on KFFA radio daily at noon. They were so popular, their sponsor, King Biscuit Flour, created a Sonny Boy brand corn meal mix which the band promoted on their radio show and on rural tours of Arkansas. This is a never-used empty bag of the cornmeal. The cornmeal continued to be produced and sold at least into the '90s, when this bag was likely printed. We managed to procure a couple of these, purchased at Cat Head Delta Blues in Clarksdale some years ago and we're told there aren't any more."

These folks were asking $25.00 for their bag in 2009!


Now listen to Sonny Boy : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG3Z_R9wJ-w&feature=youtube_gdata_player
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG3Z_R9wJ-w&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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