'The Last Waltz' is a Thanksgiving go-to. There's also a loose West Virginia connection.
The Thanksgiving Day Extra for Thursday, November 28, 2024
Happy Thanksgiving from the Weakly editorial board.
First and foremost, we’re thankful for friends and at least some of our family. (If you’re being honest, you probably also have some family you’re not-so-thankful for…) Without them we wouldn’t be the people we are.
We’re also thankful for the more than 1,140 people who have given us their email addresses to stay up on West Virginia news each week. We’ve been having a good time with this endeavor — and we appreciate folks paying attention. So, if you’ve enjoyed reading along, tell your friends about us.
But, as we warned you, we’re taking off this coming Saturday — as in, we won’t have a newsletter for you this weekend. In lieu of a regularly scheduled Saturday Weakly Reader, we figure might as well celebrate today’s holiday.
Chances are you’re scarfing down turkey and all the fixings, maybe taking a nap (or three) and watching football. All perfectly good ways to celebrate Thanksgiving, as far as I’m concerned.
But being a music lover, I also can’t think of holidays without some sort of soundtrack. At this point, a lot of readers are probably thinking of one Thanksgiving-oriented song in particular. And if you’re thinking of the same tune I am, it was in the news recently — more than week before everyone’s birds went in the oven this morning.
NPR’s newscast unit aired a story about Alice Brock — as in the Alice that inspired Arlo Guthrie’s 1965 anti-Vietnam, anti-establishment anthem “Alice’s Restaurant” — who died at the age of 83.
I feel like anyone who’s listened to classic rock, FM-radio in the past 30 years on a Thanksgiving Day has heard “Alice’s Restaurant” at some point. It’s one of those songs that seems ingrained into a large part of the American culture.
While I can appreciate Guthrie’s 18-minute narrative hooked around Thanksgiving, I have always publicly advocated that The Band’s The Last Waltz should become the must-consume Thanksgiving Day piece of culture.
I mean, it’s Martin Scorsese directing a blowout of a group — stepping away at the top of it’s game on Thanksgiving night 1976 — with the biggest names in rock and pop and blues sitting in on some of the most memorable tunes of the last century.
It’s kind of impossible for me to pick a favorite song from this film, it’s simply just a flawless document.
But in the context of Thanksgiving, I’m going with The Bank backing Neil Young on “Helpless” (with a shadowy and hidden-from-the-audience Joni Mitchell on background vocals).
It’s just a song that feels like this time of the year.
Believe it or not, there’s also a bit of a connection with The Band and West Virginia. The Canadian-American rock legends performed on Mountain Stage in Charleston a couple of times — once in 1994 and another in 1996. Once you’ve filled yourself up with The Last Waltz, you can listen to their set from 1996 on NPR Music’s website and read Mountain Stage co-founder and host Larry Groce’s recollection of that performance.
Years ago, as I was producing an hour of radio to mark the 30th anniversary of Mountain Stage, Groce told me the show’s heart and soul was effectively derived from the sound of The Band and their friends who joined in the The Last Waltz.
“In many ways, The Last Waltz — if you look at that movie — you see the birth of Mountain Stage,” Groce told me. “All of the acts that are on there — from that well — has come a lot of the stuff that has been on Mountain Stage.”
But, wait, there’s more.
Giles — being the studious and focused editor he is — sent me a Thanksgiving poem from West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman. The New York Times published “Dispatch from the Mountain State” on Thanksgiving Day 2020.
In case you don’t have a subscription, you can also check out this video of Harshman reading it himself.
As Harshman mentions while introducing his poem, the Times had asked poets across the United States to muse on being thankful and what that might mean in their home state.
To wrap things up and let you get back to your nap, I want to point out that the image at the top of this post is from David Hunter Strother, a journalist, artist and explorer-type (often working under the pen name Porte Crayon) who documented the landscapes that would become West Virginia in the mid 19th Century. After getting started on Substack a few years back with the Porte Crayon Applejack Society, Giles ultimately roped me in for what’s now The West Virginia Weakly.
So I guess I’m also grateful for Strother — for his work and for inspiring Giles who roped me into this project.
Happy Thanksgiving, folks.
Nice! Happy Thanksgiving y’all!