Blind Apple Strudel

I recently purchased an old accoustic archtop guitar that was owned by the famous Delta Bluesman, Blind Apple Strudel. Strudel, born Wilson Shartrell Strudel, was well known around the South. He played in juke joints and bars from Texas to Georgia and everywhere in between. Strudel was born to unwed sharecroppers, Willie Strudel and Monippe Calhoun in Egypt, Georgia in around 1902. Strudel also performed under the aliases Blind Lemon Meringue, Blind Rum Tonic, and James Johansonervickski.

Strudel was born blind, deaf and mute. He picked up the guitar at an early age and taught himself to play by senses of touch, taste and smell. By the age of six Strudel was making a little money playing gin joints around his home town. In 1910 Strudel hooked up with the "Traveling Skunk Band" and began to play all around the lower South. While on a gig in Huntsville, Alabama Strudel met and fell in love with Shi-Thead Membrain, a male stripper and jazz singer who billed him/herself as "Delores El Cajonies". Strudel and Cajonies started touring together billed as "Strudel and Cajonies." In 1923 the pair cut a record for Down and Out Records titled "The Cajonies Blues". It went straight to the top of the blues charts and stayed there for eighteen weeks. After that Strudel and Cajonies made record after record. They all sold well and Strudel and Cajonies became quite well off for the times.

Strudel and Cajonies continued to tour and play venues across the South until Cajonies death in 1933. While in a bar in Waco, Texas Cajonies died in a violent toilet paper accident. He/She was buried in an unmarked grave in Waco, Texas. After Cajonies tragic death Blind Apple Strudel was never quite the same. He continued to tour, but stopped recording. Strudel began to depend upon alcohol and drugs to get him through the day. He became addicted to Tylenol and Afrin Nasal Spray and was never able to kick the habit.

As his fortunes declined through the 1940's and 1950's Strudel became more and more reclusive. He toured only sporatically in the late fifties and began drifting around the South hopping freight trains and bumming rides from truckers in exchange for "special services". For a while in the early 1960's Strudel worked as a fudge packer for Asinine Industries in Nashville. He left that job after only a few months because of "artistic differences".

Strudel was found dead in a motel room in Cairo, Georgia in 1963. The only possessions that he had with him at the time were the above mentioned guitar, a picture of El Cajonies, seventeen empty bottles of nasal spray, a few empty bottles of Tylenol, an empty quart bottle of Schlitz Malt Liquor and thirteen cents.

The guitar changed hands from time to time and finally ended up in an auction in Augusta, Georgia in 2007 where I purchased it along with documentation and several pictures of Strudel and Cajonies. The guitar is a bit banged up. Due to Strudel's condition he often walked into objects and fell off stages. Inside the guitar is an inscription that reads, "Happy birthday to my blind, deaf and mute lover, all my love, huggs and kisses, Shi-Thead."

I plan to make a gift of this guitar to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, Georgia for their Blind Apple Strudel display.

Ten Things That Your Federal Government Has Done to Ruin Your Life Over the past 60 Years.

Over the past sixty years your federal government has been controlled most of the time by Democrats or liberals posing as conservatives. Only during the Regan administration was conservatism allowed to flourish. Those Regan years were some of the most prosperous and successful years our country has enjoyed. Other than those eight wonderful years liberals have pushed through some of the most wasteful, shameless and despicable programs ever to hamper the American citizen. Beginning with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration right up to the present Bush administration liberal politicians have been on a power trip unequaled in the history of man. Here are just ten things for which you can thank your liberal politicians.

1. The Social Security Program. A disaster from any view point. Money is confiscated from your paycheck by the federal government, supposedly to supplement your retirement income. It is then either approprated by the feds to cover Liberal give-away programs or invested by the feds so poorly that the program can't pay for itself. Your money would be better spent buying Haitian commemorative coins as a retirement investment.

2. The Payroll Deduction tax plan. The idea behind this program is that you are so stupid that you will not notice that the feds are stealing one-fourth to one-third of your income in taxes each year. The Feds get your tax money up front. You have to beg them to return a little of it through your yearly tax forms. Of course many people who vote for Democrats don't pay any taxes anyway, so who cares. You can thank Payroll Deduction for the IRS.

3. Government "Make Work Programs." This began under FDR's New Deal. Programs like the CCC took workers idled by the Great Depression and put them to work making ugly pieces of art, carving up the Great Smokey Mountains and building God-Awful pieces of Federal architecture. When the Great Depression ended did the make work projects end, too? Not on your life. They are still around sucking up your money like a Hoover on a dust pile. Look at the NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) as just one example. Has any really good art come from this program? Not so you would notice. We get only pornography and ridiculous art projects, (such as the guy who draped Central Part in NYC with colored sheets), for our money.

4. Wars we have no intention of winning, ie: The Korean Conflict, The Vietnam Conflict, the War Against Terrorism. These conflicts, all fought for good causes, were so miss handled by liberal leaders in congress that none, I repeat none of them has been brought to a successful conclusion. We still have troops in Korea after fifty plus years. The Viet-Cong lost every battle they fought against us but won the war with the help of Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy and other leftists. The War Against Terrorism is going in the same direction as Korea and Vietnam. We are mired in a war in a country that cannot or will not stand up for itself while our so called allies abandon us left and right. Now Congress seems destined to order a military pull-out before the job is done. What a bunch of cowardly, semi-human putzes!

5. Miranda Rights If you don't warn criminals that what they say can be used against them then the criminals get a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. The Miranda ruling has done more harm to law enforcement in this country than almost any other piece of legislation. Liberal judges use Miranda as an excuse to toss perfectly good criminal cases out of court due to minor technicalities. Criminals walk free to prey on American citizens while our police are made to look like ineffective clowns.

6. The Nanny State: Thank Lyndon Johnson and the "Great Society" for the idea that the "State" should see to our every need from cradle to grave. Johnson's Great Society has created two generations of people who live off the kindness of strangers. With the Great Society we got such ideas as income redistribution, where the "Haves" must share with the "Have Nots" even if the "Have Nots" refuse to work or do anything to support themselves. Furthermore, the Great Society is firmly in operation as evidenced by the most expensive health care bill in history recently pushed through Congress by Liberal politicians. Most citizens did not want this health care plan and would not have voted for it had they been given the chance. One of the candidates for president , Hillary Clinton, promises to expand this boondoggle even more should she be elected in 2008. What happens when the country runs out of money? What then, Hillary?


7. Public Education: As a part of President Kennedy's race to the moon and President Johnson's Great Society the Federal Government began to stick its rather lengthy and ugly nose further and further into the institution of public education. The feds lured gullible and greedy educators into selling their collective souls for the prospect of federal tax dollars. But, those dollars came with more strings than a "Punch and Judy" show. As fast as one silly federal education program was forced upon local educators and it proved to be a waste of money, then liberal educators came up with another equally bad and usually more expensive program. Federal reading programs failed to teach children to read. Pre-school and kindergarten programs took children as young as four years old away from their homes and began indoctrinating them in the religion of political correctness and anti-Americanism. Stupid self-esteem programs taught children that nothing they did was their fault, and that they could not fail because failure might damage their little egos. Inclusion programs forced mentally and physically handicapped children to try and compete with non-handicapped students in the regular classroom setting. Inclusion did not raise the standards of the handicapped, but it did lower the standards for the non-handicapped. Forced busing for racial balance fostered hatred and distrust among the races while busing children far beyond their neighborhoods to attend schools where they immediately achieved minority status.

After 30 plus years in the education business I can not think of one federally funded education program that lived up to the promises that were made by its creators, not one. This includes the latest programs written by Senator Ted Kennedy during the present Bush administration.


8. The United Nations: Had our leaders tried they could not have come up with a more anti-American, and useless organization than the UN. Since the Second World War the US has provided housing for and supported this corrupt organization. The UN has become the preferred meeting ground for the World's dictators and Third World potentates. Scandals like the oil for food program have run rampant. Billions of dollars annually are wasted on corrupt programs that do nothing for the people they were suppose to help but do a lot for the corrupt politicians that run them. UN leaders like Kofi Annon have shown a decidedly biased attitude toward Socialist and Communist states at the detriment of the Western Nations that provide much of the monetary support the UN wastes.

9. Government Handout Programs: Free money for all, unless you are a hard working, tax paying citizen trying to earn an honest living. There are so many federal give away programs that a list of them all would take reams of paper to print out. Each of these programs caters to a special interest group that pays lobbyists huge sums of money with which they can bribe legislators to insure that their group gets the federal tax dollars they think they have coming. Programs such as the Federal Farm Subsidies Program hand out billions of our tax dollars to farmers to encourage them not to plant crops or raise cattle. Anyone can apply for these dollars. All you need is some idle land and a good lawyer. The more you don't produce, the more you earn. It all makes so much sense to the liberal mind.

Other federal programs give away great sums to fund research on such diverse topics as the mating habits of fish and why people get testy when they have to wait in a long line. Research is very lucrative work if you can get it.

10. Laws, Laws and More Laws! You may not realize it, but every aspect of your life is regulated by legislation. From your birth to your death each minute of each day you run the risk of breaking some Federal law. In fact, it is impossible to leave your house without running afoul of some federal law or another. Legislators love to enact laws. It is their life. What else are our elected officials good for? Each term of congress produces law on top of law to be added to the laws we already have on the books. Rarely, if ever, are laws retracted. Even asinine laws that were known to be asinine when they were proposed will stand on the books forever. There are dozens of books written about the silly laws we are expected to obey, and still more laws are made. If a legislator sees something going on that displeases him he will immediately propose a new law to bring the despicable act to an end, whether anyone else finds the act offensive or not does not matter. Usually the law will pass because other legislators have their own list of laws they want to enact, and they will need this legislator's vote to get them passed. Tit for tat, so to speak. Will the feds ever get enough laws? I doubt it as long as we allow our elected officials the free reign to do as they please that they now seem to take for granted. Meanwhile we citizens must run the federal law maze every time we try to accomplish anything useful.

Well, that is only ten wonderful things that our Federal Government has given us over the years. I am sure that you can think of dozens of equally odious acts. Remember them the next time you go to vote for that good ole boy legislator or president.