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18 plus. All the leaves on the giving tree have fallen. No shade to crawl in underneath. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. And the song you just heard was Giving Tree by Plain White Teas, a song based on the famous picture book that was written by Shel Silverstein.
Here's Greg Hengler with the story. Poet W.H. Auden once said, there are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
Children's picture books matter because they're a form of our first impression of literature and become the gateway towards our appetites for the written word and our knowledge of the world. This most distilled form of art expresses basic truths about life in such a poetic way that it assumes the form of intellectual mother's milk. The stylistic eccentricities of Marie Sendak, Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein form the bedrock of our childhood lexicon.
Shel's story is arguably the most eccentrically interesting among the big three. Born in 1930 on the northwest side of Chicago, Sheldon Alan Silverstein grew up in a second story apartment crammed with relatives. His Jewish parents, an immigrant father from Eastern Europe, and a Chicago-born mother opened an unsuccessful bakery on the heels of the Great Depression. Though Silverstein's mother encouraged his early knack for drawing, his father made it clear that he was expected to join the floundering family business. Silverstein discovered his passion for drawing when he was five. The lonely eccentric kid spent his K-12 years drawing, reading, and listening to the radio. They were his comfort and refuge from the perpetual boredom of school and his increasingly wrathful father. After a few unsuccessful attempts at college, he explained, I didn't get much attention from the girls, and I didn't learn much.
Those are the two worst things that can happen to a guy. But this delay in gratification would later reveal itself as a blessing in disguise. By the time I could get the girls, I already knew how to write poems and draw pictures.
Thank God I was able to develop these things, which I could keep, before I got the goodies that were my first choice. While serving in Japan and Korea, he found an unexpected outlet as an army cartoonist. When he was discharged and unemployed, Silverstein began submitting cartoons to magazines while hawking peanuts and hot dogs to fans at Comiskey Park in Chicago. His break came in 1956 when he visited the offices of a start-up magazine for men and met its editor, himself an avid cartoonist and army veteran, Hugh Hefner. During those Playboy years, Silverstein shuttled back and forth between Chicago and downtown New York. He frequented folk clubs and began making his own music, scribbling away songs on the back of cocktail napkins and tablecloths, performing folk and jazz numbers in a low, gravelly voice.
Silverstein was a prolific perfectionist. In 1964 alone, he published three children's books and one book for adults. Among them was The Giving Tree, whose breakaway success caught his publisher, who had printed a measly run of 7,000 copies, by surprise. Sales of The Giving Tree doubled every year in the decade following its publication.
They have since approached 10 million copies in sales worldwide. Here's Shell reading The Giving Tree. But then time passes and the boy forgets about her. One day the boy, now a young man, returns asking for money. Not having any to offer him, the tree is happy to give him her apples to sell. She is likewise happy to give him her branches and later her trunk until there is nothing left of her but an old stump, which the old man, or the boy, proceeds to sit on. This book has been described as one of the most divisive books in children's literature. The controversy concerns whether the relationship between the main characters, a boy and a tree, should be interpreted as positive, i.e. the tree gives the boy selfless love, or a negative, i.e. the boy and the tree have an abusive relationship. Lisa Rogack, in her biography on Silverstein, A Boy Named Shell, offered her take on The Giving Tree. Given Shell's disgust with the me first attitude among the folk singers and other artists who were creating art as a form of self analysis, he wrote it as a reaction to their own mushiness. Silverstein was continually asked to defend his children's picture book. It's just a relationship between two people, one gives and the other takes, he would often repeat.
Every year The Giving Tree appears on the list of top ten children's books of all time. Silverstein said that he had never studied the poetry of others and had therefore developed his own quirky style. Shell was no coward, nor was his goal to please the most amount of people. Or he was no fan of political correctness. He eats up Little Red Riding Hood too. It was a moral story, I don't know what the moral was really, but it meant something. He eats the grandmother and then he eats Red Riding Hood. By the time I was reading the story, he eats the grandmother, but he doesn't quite manage to get Red Riding Hood down completely because the woodsman comes in and kills him. Then as I was older I read the book again and what they turned it into this time was that he eats the grandmother, he doesn't get to Red Riding Hood, but the woodsman comes in and chops open the wolf's belly and the grandmother pops out.
Brand new. Well now I think it is, he comes in, he doesn't even eat the grandmother altogether. He just scares her and she runs away and then the hunter comes in. Well eventually the hunter and the wolf and the grandmother are all going to sit around and play gin rummy. Shell wrote hundreds of poems and verses for children in best-selling collections like The Fiercely Imagined Works, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic.
Translated into more than 30 languages, Shell's books have sold over 30 million copies. And when we come back, more on the life of Shell Silverstein, here on Our American Stories. Hello iHeart listener.
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You don't say no to him. World of Secrets from the BBC World Service is back with a brand new season investigating allegations surrounding the preacher TB Joshua. The culture of secrecy needs to be broken.
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Let's pick up where we last left off. The Beatles were on the cover. The Beatles. Silverstein produced over 1,000 published songs, many of which have been used in TV shows and movies, including classics like Doctor Hook's The Cover of the Rolling Stone, which was featured in Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's tender, semi-autobiographical film about going on tour with rock stars in the 1970s and writing about it for Rolling Stone magazine. Bell also wrote The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, which was featured in Thelma & Louise, and he was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his song I'm Checkin' Out, sung by Meryl Streep in the film Postcards from the Edge.
The fearsome-looking, bald-bearded Jew wearing a long-flowing pirate shirt and leather jacket that Goodwill would have rejected was also adored by the country music community. He wrote One's on the Way and Hey Loretta, both hits for Loretta Lynn in 1971 and 1973. And 25 Minutes to Go, sung by Johnny Cash, about a man on death row, with each line counting down one minute closer to his execution. On February 23, 1969, the night before Johnny Cash was set to record his live album at San Quentin Prison, he held a party at his home.
The evening ended as it usually did, with his friends trying out their latest songs. Bob Dylan sang Lay Lady Lay, Kris Kristofferson sang Me and My Bobby McGee, and Shel Silverstein offered up A Boy Named Sue. Here's Johnny Cash's son, John Carter Cash.
Meryl brought my dad a poem named Boy Named Sue and dad read it and he laughed and he liked it. He put it in his pocket and this was right before he went to San Quentin to record the live album there. He got on stage for the live performance and basically remembered that poem in his pocket. He reached in and took it out and looked at it, turned around to the band and said, play something in A. And the band just began to play and just a little 12-bar walking blues rhythm and then dad recited the lyric, first time he'd ever recited it live, ever. And it was recorded and that was the big number one hit. Here's Johnny Cash singing A Boy Named Sue for the first time at San Quentin Prison. Well, my daddy left home when I was three and he didn't leave much to maw and me, just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. I don't blame him because he run and hid, but the meanest thing that he ever did was before he left, he went and named me Sue.
Well, he must have thought that it was quite a joke and it got a lot of laughs from lots of folks. It seems I had to fight my whole life through. Some gal would giggle and I'd get rid and some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head. I'll tell you, life ain't easy for a boy named Sue. Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean. My fist got hard, my wits got keen, roamed from town to town to hide my shame. But I made me a vow to the moon and stars, I'd search the honky-tonks and bars and kill that man and give me that awful name. Well, it was Gatlinburg in mid-July and I'd just hit town and my throat was dry.
I thought I'd stop and have myself a brew. At an old saloon on a street of mud, there at a table dealing stud, such a dirty mangy dog that named me Sue. Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad from a worn-out picture that my mother'd had and I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye. He was big and bent and gray and old and I looked at him and my blood ran cold and I said, my name is Sue, how do you do? How you gonna die?
Yeah, that's what I told him. Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes and he went down, but to my surprise, come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. Well, I busted a chair right across his teeth and we crashed through the wall and into the street, kicking and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer. I tell you, I've fought tougher men, but I really can't remember when. He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile. I heard him laughing and I heard him cussing. He went for his gun and I pulled mine first. He stood there looking at me and I saw him smile and he said, son, this world is rough and if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough and I know I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name and I said goodbye and knew you'd have to get tough or die and it's that name that helped to make you strong.
Yeah, he said, now you just fought one hell of a fight and I know you hate me and you got the right to kill me now and I wouldn't blame you if you do. But you ought to thank me before I die for the gravel in your guts and the spit in the eye because I'm the s*** that named you Sue. Yeah, what could I do?
What could I do? I got all choked up and I threw down my gun, called him my pa and he called me his son and I come away with a different point of view and I think about him now and then every time I try and every time I win and if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him Bill or George, anything but Sue. I'm doing my thing. Bill wrote A Boy Named Sue after hearing his close friend, Jean Shepherd, known for the film, A Christmas Story, which he narrated and co-scripted, complain about being teased for his girl's name as a kid. Oh, fudge. Only I didn't say fudge.
I said the word, the big one. A Boy Named Sue managed to become one of the most referenced country songs of all time. The song also became one of Cash's most requested. He played it at the White House for President Nixon and he played it on his own television show. On April Fool's Day, 1970, Johnny Cash sang a truncated version of A Boy Named Sue with Shell on The Johnny Cash Show. A lot of your writings have meant a great deal to me and for one song in particular that she wrote has been largely responsible for a lot of the success I've had lately. Shell wrote A Boy Named Sue. When it was Gatlinburg in mid-July and I'd just hit town and my throat was dry, I thought I'd stop and have myself a brew.
At an old saloon on a street of mud, bare the table, dealing studs, at the dirty mangy house, who named me Sue. Shell's voice has been compared to everything from a creaking door or a rusty gate to the yelp made by a dog whose tail had been stepped on. He agreed with the critique, although he liked the sound of his voice. Silverstein also co-wrote The Taker with Kris Kristofferson, which was recorded by Waylon Jennings. He's a helper, and he'll help her to open the doors that she can't on her own. Shell also advised Bob Dylan on album lyrics for what turned out to be Blood on the Tracks, released in 1975.
Only one morning the sun was shining, she was lying in bed, wondering if she'd changed it all if her hair was still red. Silverstein also wrote plays. He even co-wrote the screenplay Things Change with legendary playwright David Mamet.
Tiled up in blue. On May 10, 1999, Shell Silverstein died at age 68 of a heart attack in Key West, Florida. From best-selling children's book author to Grammy-winning Oscar-nominated songwriter, Shell Silverstein's unique imagination and bold brand of humor are beloved by countless adults and children all over the world. And great job as always, Greg. And what a story about a great Chicago voice and that Shell Silverstein and David Mamet worked together.
Thank goodness they did. Shell Silverstein's story, in a way an American story about storytelling. The life of Shell Silverstein, here on Our American Stories.
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