Batavia salutes Flag Day with a nod to its special connection to the holiday
Adrienne Rufo of Batavia had a ringside seat on the lawn outside the bandshell in Batavia on Saturday for the city's annual Flag Day event.
'My husband plays in the band so I'm here to see him but also celebrate Flag Day with the community,' Rufo said. 'I think that fact that we have a connection to the day is kind of cool. It's a little piece of trivia for the town and a fun little claim to fame for it.'
The city of Batavia welcomed hundreds of locals as well as those from surrounding areas to its annual Flag Day celebration Saturday that included a few new attractions.
Before the main Flag Day ceremony began at the Flag Day Monument across from Batavia City Hall, the Boy Scouts offered a luncheon to honor local leaders at Water Street Studios in the city, followed by a program by Illinois author Tom Emery at City Hall, who spoke about his research about Batavia dentist Dr. Bernard Cigrand, who has been referred to by many as the father of Flag Day.
The main Flag Day ceremony at the city's Flag Day Monument included the Batavia Community Band, along with appearances by veterans, local first responders and patriotic organizations, the unveiling of new personalized bricks at the monument, the sealing of time capsules and guided tours of the site.
Marty Callahan of Batavia, who helped organize the event, said Flag Day ceremonies have been held since 2016 'even before the monument was built,' adding that this was the third year of the local celebration since the city's monument plaza was installed.
Like Rufo, Callahan admitted Batavia has a Flag Day celebration unlike any other in the country given Cigrand's connection to the city.
'We always get questions about this but Cigrand is recognized as the father of Flag Day as he lived in Batavia at the time of President Wilson's first official 1916 proclamation for Flag Day,' he said. 'That is why – here locally – that one man, it kind of gives us that bit of recognition. The only other place that can say that is Waubeka, Wisconsin, where he was born. They celebrate where he came from … but they don't have anything on this scale.'
Callahan highlighted another new offering this year during the Flag Day celebration that he felt would bring the community together.
'We've never had our new Red, White and Brews: Hanging with Heroes event where people can come down and hang out at the VFW on River Road,' he said.
The event was featured from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday at the Batavia Overseas VFW Post 1197, 645 S. River Road, and included games, presentations on American history, patriotic music and food trucks, with drinks for purchase at the VFW bar.
Jackie Buno of Palos Park and her husband Wayne came to the Flag Day event on Saturday.
'We just learned about Cigrand and it's very cool that there's no other town in America that can say what Batavia can about him,' Jackie Buno said. 'Flag Day is something that is not celebrated enough. We have the national holidays where people take time off and go on picnics and stuff, but Flag Day … we don't think about it much.'
'It's good to see this recognized,' Wayne Buno said about Batavia's Flag Day ceremony. 'As people have said, there's no where else that does this, and we're here.'
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Atlantic
35 minutes ago
- Atlantic
When Mick Jagger Met the King of Zydeco
The story I'd heard was that Mick Jagger bought his first Clifton Chenier record in the late 1960s, at a store in New York's Greenwich Village. But when we talked this spring, Jagger told me he didn't do his record shopping in the Village. It would have been Colony Records in Midtown, he said, 'the biggest record store in New York, and it had the best selection.' Jagger was in his 20s, not far removed from a suburban-London boyhood spent steeping in the American blues. I pictured him eagerly leafing through Chess Records LPs and J&M 45s until he came across a chocolate-brown 12-inch record—Chenier's 1967 album Bon Ton Roulet! On the cover, a young Chenier holds a 25-pound accordion the length of his torso, a big, mischievous smile on his face. Bon Ton Roulet! is a classic zydeco album showcasing the Creole dance music of Southwest Louisiana, which blends traditional French music, Caribbean rhythms, and American R&B. This was different from the Delta and Chicago blues that Jagger and his Rolling Stones bandmates had grown up with and emulated on their own records. Although sometimes taking the form of slower French waltzes, zydeco is more up-tempo—it's party music—and features the accordion and the rubboard, a washboard hooked over the shoulders and hung across the body like a vest. Until he discovered zydeco, Jagger recalled, 'I'd never heard the accordion in the blues before.' Chenier was born in 1925 in Opelousas, Louisiana, the son of a sharecropper and accordion player named Joseph Chenier, who taught his son the basics of the instrument. Clifton's older brother, Cleveland, played the washboard and later the rubboard. Clifton had commissioned an early prototype of the rubboard in the 1940s from a metalworker in Port Arthur, Texas, where he illustrated his vision by drawing the design in the dirt, creating one of a handful of instruments native to the United States and forever changing the percussive sound of Creole music. Within a few years, the brothers were performing at impromptu house dances in Louisiana living rooms. They'd begin playing on the porch until a crowd assembled, then go inside, pushing furniture against the walls to create a makeshift dance hall. Eventually, they worked their way through the chitlin circuit, a network of venues for Black performers and audiences. They played Louisiana dance halls where the ceilings hung so low that Cleveland could push his left hand flat to the ceiling to stretch his back out without ever breaking the rhythm of what he was playing with his right. Influenced by rock-and-roll pioneers such as Fats Domino, Chenier incorporated new elements into his music. As he told one interviewer, 'I put a little rock into this French music.' With the help of Lightnin' Hopkins, a cousin by marriage, Chenier signed a deal with Arhoolie Records. By the late '60s, he and his band were regularly playing tours that stretched across the country, despite the insistence from segregationist promoters that zydeco was a Black sound for Black audiences. He started playing churches and festivals on the East and West Coasts, where people who'd never heard the word zydeco were awestruck by Chenier: He'd often arrive onstage in a cape and a velvet crown with bulky costume jewels set in its arches. Chenier came to be known as the King of Zydeco. He toured Europe; won a Grammy for his 1982 album, I'm Here! ; performed at Carnegie Hall and in Ronald Reagan's White House; won a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in 1987, at age 62. This fall, the Smithsonian's preservation-focused Folkways Recordings will release the definitive collection of Chenier's work: a sprawling box set, 67 tracks in all. And in June, to mark the centennial of Chenier's birth, the Louisiana-based Valcour Records released a compilation on which musicians who were inspired by Chenier contributed covers of his songs. These include the blues artist Taj Mahal, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, the folk troubadour Steve Earle, and the rock band the Rolling Stones. In 1978, Jagger met Chenier, thanks to a musician and visual artist named Richard Landry. Landry grew up on a pecan farm in Cecilia, Louisiana, not far from Opelousas. In 1969, he moved to New York and met Philip Glass, becoming a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, in which he played saxophone. To pay the bills between performances, the two men also started a plumbing business. Eventually, the ensemble was booking enough gigs that they gave up plumbing. Landry also embarked on a successful visual-art career, photographing contemporaries such as Richard Serra and William S. Burroughs and premiering his work at the Leo Castelli Gallery. He still got back to Louisiana, though, and he'd occasionally sit in with Chenier and his band. (After Landry proved his chops the first time they played together, Chenier affectionately described him as 'that white boy from Cecilia who can play the zydeco.') Landry became a kind of cultural conduit—a link between the avant-garde scene of the North and the Cajun and Creole cultures of the South. From the July 1987 issue: Cajun and Creole bands are conserving native music Landry is an old friend; we met more than a decade ago in New Orleans. Sitting in his apartment in Lafayette recently, he told me the story of the night he introduced Jagger to Chenier. As Landry remembers it, he first met Jagger at a Los Angeles house party following a Philip Glass Ensemble performance at the Whisky a Go Go. The next night, as luck would have it, he saw Jagger again, this time out at a restaurant, and they got to talking. At some point in the conversation, 'Jagger goes, 'Your accent. Where are you from?' I said, 'I'm from South Louisiana.' He blurts out, 'Clifton Chenier, the best band I ever heard, and I'd like to hear him again.' ' 'Dude, you're in luck,' he told Jagger. Chenier was playing a show at a high school in Watts the following night. Landry called Chenier: 'Cliff, I'm bringing Mick Jagger tomorrow night.' Chenier responded, 'Who's that?' 'He's with the Rolling Stones,' Landry tried to explain. 'Oh yeah. That magazine. They did an article on me.' It seems the Rolling Stones had yet to make an impression on Chenier, but his music had clearly influenced the band, and not just Jagger. The previous year, Rolling Stone had published a feature on the Stones' guitarist Ronnie Wood. In one scene, Wood and Keith Richards convene a 3 a.m. jam session at the New York studios of Atlantic Records. On equipment borrowed from Bruce Springsteen, they play 'Don't You Lie to Me'—first the Chuck Berry version, then 'Clifton Chenier's Zydeco interpretation,' as the article described it. Chenier was in Los Angeles playing what had become an annual show for the Creole community living in the city. The stage was set at the Verbum Dei Jesuit High School gymnasium, by the edge of the basketball court. Jagger was struck by the audience. 'They weren't dressing as other people of their age group,' he told me. 'The fashion was completely different. And of course, the dancing was different than you'd normally see in a big city.' The band was already performing by the time he and Landry arrived. When they walked in, one woman squinted in Jagger's direction, pausing in a moment of possible recognition, before changing her mind and turning away. Chenier was at center stage, thick gold rings lining his fingers as they moved across the black and white keys of his accordion, his name embossed in bold block type on its side. Cleveland stood beside him on the rubboard. Robert St. Julien was set up in the back behind a three-piece drum kit—just a bass drum, a snare, and a single cymbal, cracked from the hole in the center out to the very edge. Jagger took it all in, watching the crowd dance a two-step and thinking, ' Oh God, I'm going to have to dance. How am I going to do this dance that they're all doing? ' he recalled. 'But I managed somehow to fake it.' At intermission, a cluster of fans, speaking in excited bursts of Creole French, started moving toward the stage, holding out papers to be autographed. Landry and Jagger were standing nearby. Jagger braced himself, assuming that some of the fans might descend on him. But the crowd moved quickly past them, pressing toward Clifton and Cleveland Chenier. Before the night was over, Jagger himself had the chance to meet Clifton, but only said a quick hello. 'I just didn't want to hassle him or anything,' he told me. 'And I was just enjoying myself being one of the audience.' The next time Mick Jagger and Richard Landry crossed paths was May 3, 2024: the day after the Rolling Stones performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. During their set, the Stones had asked the accordion player Dwayne Dopsie, a son of another zydeco artist, Rockin' Dopsie, to accompany the band on 'Let It Bleed.' A meal was set up at Antoine's, in the French Quarter, by a mutual friend, the musician and producer C. C. Adcock. Adcock had been working on plans for the Clifton Chenier centennial record for months and was well aware of Jagger's affection for zydeco. He waited until the meal was over, when everyone was saying their goodbyes, to mention the project to Jagger. 'And without hesitation,' Landry recalled, 'Mick said, 'I want to sing something.' ' As the final addition to the album lineup, the Stones were the last to choose which of Chenier's songs to record. Looking at the track listing, Jagger noticed that 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' hadn't been taken. 'Isn't that, like, the one?' Adcock recalls him saying. 'The one the whole genre is named after? If the Stones are gonna do one, shouldn't we do the one ?' The word zydeco is widely believed to have originated in the French phrase les haricots sont pas salés, which translates to 'The snap beans aren't salty.' Zydeco, according to this theory, is a Creole French pronunciation of les haricots. (The lyrical fragment likely comes from juré, the call-and-response music of Louisiana that predates zydeco; it shows up as early as 1934, on a recording of the singer Wilbur Shaw made in New Iberia, Louisiana.) Many interpretations of the phrase have been offered over the years. The most straightforward is that it's a metaphorical way of saying 'Times are tough.' When money ran short, people couldn't afford the salt meat that was traditionally cooked with snap beans to season them. The Stones' version of 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' opens with St. Julien, Chenier's longtime drummer, playing a backbeat with brushes. He's 77 now, no longer the young man Jagger saw in Watts in 1978. 'I quit playing music about 10 years ago, to tell the truth,' he said when we spoke this spring, but you wouldn't know it by how he sounds on the track. Keith Richards's guitar part, guttural and revving, meets St. Julien in the intro and builds steadily. The melody is introduced by the accordionist Steve Riley, of the Mamou Playboys, who told me he'd tried to 'play it like Clifton—you know, free-form, just from feel.' It's strange that it doesn't feel stranger when Jagger breaks into his vocal, sung in Creole French. His imitation of Chenier is at once spot-on yet unmistakably Jagger. From the May 1971 issue: Mick Jagger shoots birds I asked him how he'd honed his French pronunciation. 'I've actually tried to write songs in Cajun French before,' he said. 'But I've never really gotten anywhere.' To get 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' right, he became a student of the song. 'You just listen to what's been done before you,' he told me. 'See how they pronounce it, you know? I mean, yeah, of course it's different. And West Indian English is different from what they speak in London. I tried to do a job and I tried to do it in the way it was traditionally done—it would sound a bit silly in perfect French.' Zydeco united musical traditions from around the globe to become a defining sound for one of the most distinct cultures in America. Chenier, the accordionist in the velvet crown, then introduced zydeco to the world, influencing artists across genres. When I asked Jagger why, at age 81, he had decided to make this recording, he said, 'I think the music deserves to be known and the music deserves to be heard.' If the song helps new listeners discover Chenier—to have something like the experience Jagger had when he first dropped the needle on Bon Ton Roulet! —that would be a welcome result. But Jagger stressed that this wasn't the primary reason he'd covered 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé.' Singing to St. Julien's beat, Jagger the rock star once again becomes Jagger the Clifton Chenier fan. 'My main thing is just that I personally like it. You know what I mean? That's my attraction,' he said. 'I think that I just did this for the love of it, really.'
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
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Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Trump Connection: White House Takeover Of Army Birthday Celebration Proves Boon To Hollywood Prop Houses
EXCLUSIVE: Donald Trump's vainglorious birthday parade masquerading as a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army may get drenched in a rainy DC this Flag Day, but the financial sun is shining a bit brighter for some suffering Hollywood vendors. A plethora of prop houses in and around LA received a much-needed injection of cash the past month from the federal government for the massive march set to kick off soon in the nation's thunderstorm anticipating capitol, Deadline has learned. Specifically, the parade organizers made rentals orders of vintage guns, rifles, period piece helmets, and other hardware and outfits from industry prop houses on the West Coast. More from Deadline Protesters Fill Streets As Part Of "No Kings" Demonstrations To Oppose Donald Trump; Police Try To Clear Crowds In Downtown Los Angeles - Update Mark Ruffalo, Kerry Washington, Julia Louis-Dreyfus & More Celebrities Attend "No Kings" Protests: "Our Democracy's In Real Trouble" Donald Trump, At Army's 250th Anniversary Parade, Says "Every Other Country Celebrates Their Victories; It's About Time America Did Too" Though the Army celebration has been on the calendar for over a year, things really kicked into gear when the longtime parade desiring Trump returned to office in January. To pinpoint the timeline, everything became a 'mad rush,' as one Hollywood vendor put it, the past four weeks. To get a sense of the scale, the flood of orders came in to kit out an estimated 6,000 chosen troops and others in contemporary and historic garb and weaponry. Accompanied by marching bands, flyovers, armored personnel carriers, and a parachuting finale, the troops on display are set to pass Trump and the likes of UFC boss Dana White up in a reviewing stand on the Ellipse this evening. By sheer coincidence (and if you believe that I have a bridge and several aging hipster cafes in Brooklyn to sell you), the parade for the brave men and women of the Army is taking place on the exact day Trump (who bragged online Saturday about his birthday call from Vladimir Putin) turns 79. At an estimated price tag of $40 million, the first such DC parade since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, also comes a week after Trump federalized the California National Guard over the belated objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom to clamp down on LA protests of harsh ICE raids on the undocumented that hit the city and county. Former Trump aide Megan Power, who also was behind organizing the Ellipse rally on January 6, 2021, was put in place as the general contractor for the Congressional created America250 earlier this year. Also now running the show, literally and figuratively over at America250, is Trump friendly logistics firmEvent Strategies Inc., who were a part of the infamous January 6 event five years ago. As well, ex-White House and Virginia Gov. Youngkin aide Hannah Salem Stone and ex-Nixon aide and Fox News talking head Monica Crowley, who now serves as the State Department's chief of protocol, are on board with America250 too. It seems that the multi-location ISS Props, who specialize in weapons for film and TV production, were the point of contact for the DC parade rentals, according to several companies I spoke to. Individual prop houses were contacted by ISS, informed what that orders were for and asked if they wanted to participate. ISS is a division of sound stage and studio services giant the MBS group, who, in turn, are owned by LA-based real estate investment firm Hackman Capital. While the company itself seems not to hand out donations to politicians, founder Micheal Hackman has been a fairly reliable contributor to the Democrats over the years. Representatives for ISS Props did not respond to Deadline request for comment on the parade rentals and orders. The White House and the Pentagon also did not reply to request for comment on the matter. Though various Tinseltown prop houses understandably asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential backlash from customers in the Blue-ish industry, everyone to a man and woman at the companies and warehouses Deadline reached out to stressed how vital the orders were to keep them above water in a troubled time in Hollywood with few productions and an increasingly uncertain future. 'I'm no fan of Trump, hate him in fact, but this was a real life raft for us,' one DTLA prop house manager said, pointing out because the extensive orders came in so close to the much-criticized parade today, many of the businesses charged premium rates. 'If we weren't going to take the business, someone else would have, we all need it' the manager explained on a practical level. 'Every little bit helps right now,' he added, noting the dire straits many below-the-line workers and adjunct businesses like prop houses have been experiencing the past three years. 'Money, cost, did not seem to be an option,' an employee at a prop house in the Valley admitted with some self-declared 'embarrassment' of the flurry of the past four weeks to fulfill the federal parade orders. 'I'm okay with my tax dollars going to help out Hollywood businesses, even for this,' said one strident Never Trumper industry vet of the parade cash that the prop houses picked up the past few weeks. 'Everything Trump does is for how it looks on TV, so this tracks 100% for me,' a studio exec also stated of the ex-Celebrity Apprentice host. With Newsom stymied on June 12 in an attempt through the courts to regain control of the Guard, Trump's essentially nationwide and legally questionable order remains in effect Saturday as huge No Kings demonstrations take place in Southern California and all over the nation. The presence of the thousands of Trump troops in LA, the violent removal and handcuffing of Sen. Alex Padilla at a LA presser by DHS Sec. Kristi Noem on Friday, and the shooting of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota today, has left many on edge. As my esteemed colleague Ted Johnson noted earlier today: Trump has threatened that those who protest the parade 'will be met with very big force,' though White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later clarified that the president 'absolutely supports peaceful protests.' Still, as the No Kings protests were taking place in DC and elsewhere, the biggest threat of disruption to Trump's parade appeared to be the weather. Local forecasters have been predicting showers, although they may be off and on. 'Our great military parade is on, rain or shine. Remember, rainy day parade brings good luck,' Trump himself wrote on Truth Social earlier Saturday as various fundraising requests went out this afternoon from the MAGA GOP on the back of the birthday. Ted Johnson contributed to this report. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More
