![\"Halloween](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-my\/my-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3196\/2019\/10\/Halloween-reading.gif\")
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This Halloween, Vanderbilt UP is celebrating the holiday with eerie excerpts from several of our books. We hope you enjoy this summoning of spirits, wailing of wind, and explication of a not-quite-murder ballad. First, we have an excerpt from Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South <\/em><\/a>by Andrew Maraniss. In this passage, Maraniss describes the atmosphere on Vanderbilt’s campus in the spring of 1967, when a student-run speaker series, the Impact Symposium, brought Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, and Strom Thurmond to speak on campus during a two-day period. <\/span><\/p>\n As Maraniss described the event in a Vanderbilt Magazine<\/em><\/a> piece marking the fiftieth anniversary of the program in 2017, the speakers’ presence and speeches shook up the campus: “Four electric figures dropped in the middle of what remained a relatively sleepy and nonpolitical campus, confronting students with disparate views on the most polarizing issues of the 1960s: war, peace, poverty, racism, drugs, social justice, freedom of speech, and the role of authority.” <\/span><\/p>\n One of the Impact speakers even wrapped up the first day of the symposium with a lengthy s\u00e9ance in a student dorm: <\/p>\n Our second excerpt comes from Bobby Braddock: A Life on Nashville\u2019s Music Row<\/em><\/a> by renowned country music songwriter Bobby Braddock. Here, he reflects on the unusual qualities of his first marriage, which led to Braddock writing hit country music songs via a surprising conduit: The other strange aspect of our relationship was the Ouija board, which I knew very little about until Sue told me of the experiences she had had with one when she was a child. It was a large wooden board with the entire alphabet and numbers zero to nine printed across it, along with the words \u201cYES,\u201d \u201cNO,\u201d and \u201cGOODBYE\u201d at the top. The process required two participants placing their fingers on a planchette that had a little window in the middle, from which one could see the letters the piece stopped on as it moved rapidly across the slate, answering the questions being asked of whatever spirit happened to be present at the time. The objective was to receive spiritualistic or telepathic messages. It may have appeared to an onlooker that the movable indicator was being manipulated by one of us, but I knew I wasn\u2019t moving it, and I didn\u2019t think Sue was. Sometimes the answers would be information Sue couldn\u2019t possibly have known, and I came to believe that we were actually communicating with the spirits of the departed. The question is, how reliable is a spirit who has nothing better to do than hang out playing late-night board games?<\/p>\n \u201cWho do we have here tonight?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n \u201cWoogie,\u201d the board spelled out, referring to the nickname for \u201cOuija.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhere can I get a good song idea?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTurn on the TV and watch The Red Skelton Show<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n I did as I was instructed, and within two or three minutes, someone on the show said a line that included the phrase \u201cwhile you\u2019re dancing.\u201d I grabbed \u201cWoogie\u201d and shoved it into Sue\u2019s lap, and asked, \u201cShould I write a song called \u2018While You\u2019re Dancing?\u2019\u201d As we placed our fingers on the planchette, it zipped to the upper left-hand corner of the board and landed on \u201cYES.\u201d If I had a title I believed in, the rest of the song always seemed to fall into place. I ran to my electric piano, and within a half hour I had put together what would become, about a year later, my first song in the country charts, \u201cWhile You\u2019re Dancing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Finally, we have an eerie classic song for you to enjoy, along with insights about it from Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles<\/em><\/a> by David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren:<\/span><\/p>\n
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\n<\/span><\/p>\nAs King left campus and returned to the airport, the bearded man who had made his triumphant entrance to Nashville that morning capped off the eventful day in signature style. Repeatedly chanting \u201cAllah\u201d and jingling small cymbals, Ginsberg led a group of one hundred students in a three-hour s\u00e9ance in the basement of the Branscomb Quadrangle dormitory in\u00a0 which he \u201cextolled the virtues of LSD, the fantasy of masturbation and the complete awareness achieved during sexual intercourse,\u201d according to a [Vanderbilt] Hustler<\/em> account of the bizarre session. Impact \u201967 was only a few hours old and already it had stirred the campus like never before.<\/div>\n
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