Behind the Scenes Minis: Music and Tomatoes

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye.

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Speaker 2: And I'm Tracy V.

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Speaker 1: Wilson, and we talked about Samuel Colerio. It's Taylor this week, who I love. I have to tell you if you go looking for pictures of him, he's so handsome.

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Speaker 2: I love that he's so handsome. I'm just like, so handsome.

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Speaker 1: I did a Yeah, I did a little check this morning, just because you know, sometimes there are not photos available of people, and there were lots, and I was like, yes, I.

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Speaker 2: Love all these pictures. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: We didn't get into it a whole lot, but when you read accounts of him written by people that knew him, they talk about how he was very like this incredibly kind and warm person. He was super well welcoming to everyone. He was very confident in dealing with people like he He was just like one of those people that people love to be around, which is pretty wonderful. And it's a little hard to work that into his life story. But the thing that I kept coming back to is all of the issues of identity that he was dealing with, because obviously, I mean, we talked about it, you know, this idea of racial identity and being black but in a completely non black culture. As much as anybody wants to try to support and protect him, like they don't know what his life is like, they cannot understand it. Yeah, And so he has that, which is hard enough on its own, but then he also has this weird situation where he is a celebrity but also an outsider because of it, and how weird that must feel. Yeah, that people love you but they don't they can't really know your life or understand it, which is a very strange place to be.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So just to make it like super clear, like just to listeners, because we've talked about this on the show before, there were black people in England, there were whole black communities in England. It's like England has never really been a monolithically no, no, never, But like that's not the circles that he was really.

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Speaker 2: That's exactly me too.

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Speaker 1: It And one of the things that comes up, and it's it's such a big topic with so many theoreticals that there wasn't a good way to work it into the episode proper is that he did not seem to connect as much with any of the black communities of England as he did with black communities in the US, which is a kind of a fascinating and interesting. There's no comment from him that I could find am I some one biographer say like, we don't know about things like, you know, Great Britain's colonization of a lot of black countries. He never seemed to have said anything regarding that, So those aspects we don't fully have a sense of. It's very, very very fascinating. There are a few other interesting tidbits about his his life, some of which are kind of funny and a little oddly coincidental. For example, that piece of music, that violin concerto that was on the Titanic had incorporated a spiritual that was entitled keep Me from Sinking Down, which people always point to you and go, that's weird, and it is. Yeah. One of the really, really, really interesting things to me is that we talked about how he had to hustle constantly to keep a steady income, and when he died, his friends and family were pretty shocked that he was not in a better financial situation. He wasn't like a person that left behind a ton of debt, but like he should have been wealthy for how well known he was, how popular his work was, and because of that coming out it was a scandal, and that is really one of the things that catalyzes the formation of the Performing Rights Society in Great Britain that lobbied for legislation to ensure that artists had rights and royalties tied into their work so that other people could not get caught in that situation where they take a little bit of money, especially when they're young, thinking like, I'll just keep making more, that'll be fine, not realizing yes, but you have made somebody else a whole lot more money than you're ever going to see. Yeah, so that was interesting that his life is really like a direct on ramp to some artist protections that happened later on. Yeah, there is a very interesting thing we talked about W. E. B. Du Boys being part of the Pan African conference that he was at, which was like a three day thing. It was not a huge one in that instance, and he was he did keep in touch with people in that movement and he was friends with Du Boys. And what's really interesting is that he also became very good friends with Booker T. Washington, who had very different ideologies about how black people could like make their way in the world and how they were going to survive, thrive, you know, really be given the opportunities and rights that they were they were entitled to you. And it's interesting because Coleridge Taylor was friends with both of them, but we don't know how much he sat in between, like how much he juggled those issues between them, or if that was like off the table and they were just friends separately and they didn't talk about each other.

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Speaker 2: We don't know.

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Speaker 1: Right, there's a really awkward thing that has nothing to do with Samuel Coleridge Taylor, but his memory and how people were honoring it, which is that for about fifteen years in the twenties and thirties, the Royal Albert Hall had an annual what they called a Hiawatha season. Okay, and so it is a bunch of English kids dressed the way they think Native Americans were dress and it was like this big theatrical production where there were dancers, they put up you know, wigwams. Even just saying that word, I'm like, a oh yeah. There was allegedly at least one actual Native American involved in all of this, but like the one picture I saw, which is which I saw online, I was like, oh, this looks like those bad renditions of what people think a culture is and that they're celebrating it when really they're caricaturing it. And there's a lot of appropriation that's super weird. I mean, it's having grown up m you know, in a time where we had Thanksgiving celebrations that involved making Pilgrim hats and headdresses out of paper and yep. Knowing people today whose kids are in elementary school who have had fights with their school administration about like, hey, this thing that we're doing in the classroom for this is disrespectful. Like I have layers of yikes, is what I'm trying to say. Oh so much, so much. Yeah, yeah, I just want to point that out. Should you go looking for stuff about him, you're going to run into that have anything to do with that. It was it was started like more than a decade after he had passed. Yeah, yeah, And I mean I will say though you will also see pictures of his son, Hiawatha, in what is believed to be Native American costume on occasion as a kid.

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Speaker 2: You know, the.

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Speaker 1: Everything has weirdness. Thankfully we there. There's evolution of information, and we theoretically no more now than we did. I always presume that I still don't know anything. I take the Socrates approach of I know only that I know nothing, ha ha, Because you know, we talk about it all the time, what we know and understand, even outside of any like discussions of cultural appropriation or understanding people that grew up in ways we did not. Even things that happen in like societies that look exactly like us that we are a part of, we don't always understand, and new things come up and evolve our understanding of it. So I'm I know only that I know nothing, but I'm always willing to learn whatever comes next. I really hope people go listen to his work because it's awfully beautiful. Like I understand why Hiawatha's wedding feast was so popular. I don't have a sense of how he felt about the fact that he never had a success on that level. Again, right, like, when you're a young up and comer and your first big thing is really big and then nothing else lives up to it, that's gotta be tricky. But he seemed to just constantly be producing. There were other pieces he thought were as good as that in his ovra, but perhaps because he did die so young, he is spared the late in life looking back and feeling regretful about things. So yeah, anyway, Samuel Kohlers Taylor, please go listen to his music. It's so beautiful. There are people that like are dedicating their lives to reintroducing that to as many people as possible to. Yeah, really studying him in his life and his music, and I'm am grateful to all of them. We talked about tomatoes this week and whether they are foods or vegetables in the view of the court, including some incredibly silly court activity of just reading dictionary definitions as like the whole case. Yeah, read definitions out of the dictionary. A number of things came up during they're in the research for this that I wound up not putting in because, as we said, there's fifty something cases at least that's what came up in the search. Fifty something cases at least in state and federal court that specifically cite Nicks versus Head. There are are a ton of additional cases that are specifically about what words mean that don't actually cite Nicks versus Head, And originally I had some of them, and I was like, this is going to become.

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Speaker 2: A whole thing.

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Speaker 1: So there's toy Bis versus United States and Hasbro versus United States. They both involved whether action figures were toys or dolls. I mean that is playing out constantly in many.

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Speaker 2: Bill things that preoccupies people.

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Speaker 1: One of honestly my favorites, and also the seemingly absurd, which I was talking about this over Memorial Days. A friend of mine had a gathering out at their house and we were hanging out outside, eating some food, just talking, and I was talking about this whole thing about the vegetables and tomatoes and fruit and Supreme Court, and a team who was taking a constitutional law class at school, which I thought was really cool, brought up one of the ones that had been particularly intriguing to me, which was the twenty fifteen Supreme Court decision in Yates versus the United States that found that fish were not tangible objects. So what happened in this case was there was a fishing boat operator named John L. Yeates who was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission came up and inspected his boat and found that he had seventy two fish that were smaller than the legal limit, and so they were like, you got to keep these fish and bring them to port with you and we will assess things there. And what instead he apparently did was that he threw those fish overboard and replaced them with different fish. So they took him to court, ruling that he had destroyed a tangible object quote a tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence a governmental investigation. So this seems incredibly obvious, right that phish would be tangible objects. They are objects, They are tangible. However, the statute that was at play here was part of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of two thousand and two, which was about fraud and financial crimes, passed in the wake of the Enron scandal, and the Supreme Court found that, no, in this context, the tangible objects are things like financial records and not fish. So really it's almost like the problem was in what he was charged with, not yeah, anything else. I mean, having done some deep sea fishing and had that moment of we gotta throw this fish back.

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Speaker 2: I don't know why.

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Speaker 1: Usually have to fishes us it's not worth eating anyway, you know what I mean.

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Speaker 2: Well, this was a.

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Speaker 1: Commercial fishing boat, so like, I don't know, I don't know the details of like what method was being used to fish, whether they were.

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Speaker 2: Right, they may not have been sorting at that level, right, Yeah, I don't know.

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Speaker 1: But uh, but the fish not being tangible objects is the part that was really hilarious to me. I have a friend who used to work as an accountant at a hotel chain. One of the things that she would talk about.

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Speaker 2: Was that.

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Speaker 1: Big marshmallows and one of the states they were operating big marshmallows that's food, but little marshmallows that's candy. So when the hotel chain was like procuring marshmallows to use and you know whatever in the kitchen, they had to keep up with whether they were big marshmallows or little marshmallows because the tax rate was different on food versus candy. Can I just tell you, as a marshmallow person, that makes all the sense on earth?

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Speaker 2: Yeah?

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Speaker 1: I mean sure, I mean I will if I make a tray of marshmallows, I'll cut a big piece and kind of call it lunch sometimes. But I don't think I would do that with little marshmallows.

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Speaker 2: It's too much pain. Those are accoutramole. One of the.

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Speaker 1: Things that I noted to maybe talk about in the behind the scenes has nothing to do with this case. It only has to do with tomatoes.

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Speaker 2: Bring it on. I have feelings about tomatoes. Okay.

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Speaker 1: Well, years ago, I was on my honeymoon in Iceland and we had been given a map by the concierge at a hotel. And I'm not going to try to pronounce this name because it has some phonemes in it that are in ice Lambic and not in English. But it had this word written on it, like it was a printed map with places labeled to go. But then there was this one note written on there in pen and we were like, what is this and we drove past a sign for it. I was like, Oh, that's the sign for that thing that's on this printed out map that the concierge gave us. And we're like, well, tomorrow morning, we'll check it out. So we go check it out. It turns out that it is the Greenhouse Farm, where something like eighty percent of the tomatoes for all of Iceland are grown.

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Speaker 2: You are naughty. You have just been to Iceland. Did you get to go to this?

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Speaker 1: No? But I talked a lot to several locals about like their efforts, particularly in recent years, to be able to grow more of their own fruits and vegetables, and how you know that is not a hospitable climate for those kinds of things, right, There's there is a lot of game there that made except a lot of the diet, but in terms of fruits and vegetables, it all has to be imported and it's very expensive. So they have been working in like hydroponic gardening and all kinds of other very modern gardening approaches to try to make these. So I do know the place you're talking about. I did not go in.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, So you can just google Iceland Tomato Farm Restaurant and you'll find it right there. But you can go into the Greenhouse and they have a little restaurant there and they everything they serve, they only serve a couple of different different dishes. They're all made with tomatoes. I think Patrick got like a pasta with a tomato sauce. I got this bottomless tomato soup with as much delicious bread as you want. There's little little bee hives. I think they were like solitary bees that were mostly so there's like bees. You can see the bees pollinating the tomato plants. We had a great time in Iceland. We were there at the end of April beginning of May, so it was very cold and rainy and windy for a lot of the time and stuff bling onto this place that was a warm hot house full of tomato plants was magical. And tomatoes are not even like my favorite of the foods. I do love tomato soup a whole lot. I do love pastas that have tomato sauces that are I love that whole lot. But yeah, it was like this one of the most magical things that has happened, and I loved it and had a great time. Iceland is spectacular. I did not anticipate falling in love with Iceland as much as I did. The hot dogs.

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Speaker 2: I love them.

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Speaker 1: The reason we did not go to that place is because I hate tomatoes. Yeah, like, tomato soup to me is one of the grossest things on the planet. My husband loves it. It's just the acid taste of tomato to me utterly vile. As I have gotten older, sometimes tomatoes are a little more difficult for me in terms of like the heart right, like is it gonna be is this gonna be worth it? This particular TOMATOESH So I love tomato soup. I have come to love like a really well made bloody mary. That's not a thing that I liked when when I first tried one. And as I said, like pasta sauces that are made with tomatoes, that kind of stuff like shack chukua.

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Speaker 2: We talked about sometimes I will make that as a dinner. Love that.

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Speaker 1: When I was a kid, there were a lot of food textures that I just could not deal with, and one of them was like big chunks of tomato.

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Speaker 2: So it was like my mom would make.

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Speaker 1: This pasta sauce like spaghetti sauce that had tomatoes. She would like cook all day and had these chunks of tomatoes in it, and I just could not deal with them.

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Speaker 2: No. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And even today, if I have like a salad that has big chunks of tomato or a sandwich that has a big slice of tomato, that's not my favorite part of it. But I it's no longer quite the issue that it was when I was a child. Yeah, I mean I could still eat tomatoes, and I do when they show up on a salad, because I recognize they have things that are beneficial to humans.

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Speaker 2: But I would never ever ever choose it.

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Speaker 1: If I go to someone's house and they're like, we made dinner and it is tomato based, I will eat it and they will not know that I hate tomatoes.

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Speaker 2: But I mean.

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Speaker 1: No, do you remember on the Splendid Table. Okay, this is a ways back when Lynn Rosetta Casper was still the host and a tomato developer. I'm not sure what the right word is there, basically like developed a tomato, yeah, just for.

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Speaker 2: Her name, the tomato for her, Yeah, I remember.

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Speaker 1: It's the Lynn Rosetto Casper tomato. And she got to pick from like fifty different types that they had cultivated which one was her tomato. And I loved that up a so so much. It is stuck with me as much as I do not love tomatoes. Listening to her speak so beautifully and poetically about the flavors of different tomatoes, I was like, I should give these another try, and then this happens to me repeatedly. I never learn where I'll hear someone talk about tomatoes like they're just oh beautiful, and I'm like, I'm not giving them a chance. And then I have a tomato and I go, no, I still don't like that, Like what was I thinking? I'm pretty words don't make tomatoes taste good to my baladce.

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Speaker 2: This is me and every melon rights.

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Speaker 1: As we have discussed, I do not like any melon tomatoes. I just like the idea of a lot of people reading words to each other from the dictionary.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and I.

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Speaker 1: Feel like this is emblematic of like a thing that if everyone could just accept it, particularly a non legal context, life could be ease, both easier and more. They're full of delight and wonder because words have different meanings to different people.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And if instead of arguing over who's right, you just sort of listen to people talk about their version of it, usually that's very interesting, right. Yes, I actually love these distinctions, and it irritates me a little bit when there's a like on TikTok, when a term like moves out of one group and into a different group, and or people are acting like the first group is wrong.

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Speaker 2: And where I see this all the time.

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Speaker 1: Is bodybuilders talk about being on PREP as being when they are on like a very low carb, high protein diet preparing for a competition or something similar to people who are on PREP as HIV prevention. That has a totally different meaning. And so occasionally the TikTok algorithm will show me some admittedly hilarious responses, but I'm also like, these two things mean two things, and it's fine for it to mean two things. Do you remember also the whole ketchup as a vegetable controversy? Yeah, I thought about putting something in there. It has several waves, Like there's one that happened during the Reagan administration where there was a discussion about potentially, you know, giving it was described as flexibility to school lunch programs, they could count it as a vegetable under the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service. And then there was another thing that came up more recently about tomato paste and pizza being allowed to be counted as a vegetable serving starting amount of tom Yeah, yeah, yeah that. I can't say what my mother would have called that, because it's foul language, but it makes me laugh, but it is a little pick and knits at that point, yeah, I don't know.

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Speaker 2: I don't have a kid in school, so I feel.

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Speaker 1: Like I can't really Yeah, I'm not a school administrator and I do not have a child in school, so.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 1: I thought about putting something in there about that, and it was along with fish not being tangible objects. I was like, this is a whole other thing.

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Speaker 2: Yes.

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Speaker 1: So anyway, Happy Friday. Whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it's great. If you love tomatoes, I hope you get to eat some delicious tomatoes. And if you hate them, I hope nobody tries to feed them to you. Uh. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.