Susan Orlean & Gregory Porter

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2018

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

First up this week, a guest we're always thrilled to welcome: Susan Orlean! One of the greatest writers around. You might know her from Saturday Night, Rin Tin Tin or the Orchid Thief - the book that was turned into the Academy Award nominated film Adaptation. She has a new book. It talks about the history of public libraries in the US and a catastrophic fire that almost destroyed one of the nation's largest. The title? The Library Book! It drops this week. Then a conversation with Gregory Porter. He's a Grammy winning jazz singer, the pride of Bakersfield California and, until his junior year of college, an aspiring football player. He recently recorded an album of standards made popular by Nat "King" Cole, and he'll tell Jesse about his deeply personal connection to one of America's most iconic voices. Finally: sometimes you don't need much to make a great comedy sketch. Just a simple premise and about seven hot dogs. Or more. Yeah, actually... probably more than seven hot dogs.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:12.2	I'm Jesse Thorn. So this singer Gregory Porter recorded a great album a little while ago.
0:18.0	It's all covers of songs that were popularized by Nat King Cole. Porter called it Nat King
0:23.2	Cole and me. It's a very beautiful record. And it wouldn't surprise you to know that
0:27.5	Porter spent a lot of time researching the music of Nat King Cole. His records, his books,
0:33.5	watching documentaries. Cole, who was black, recorded a lot of his biggest hits in the
0:39.0	1950s, right when the Civil Rights Movement was heating up. And those songs were beautiful
0:44.1	affecting songs, but they weren't explicitly political or socially conscious. And Cole's
0:50.1	legacy has taken some heat for that. But Gregory Porter says it's not that simple.
0:56.1	People think about his lyrics and he's like, oh, he's in the sky and he's just so milk
1:03.3	toast and sweet. But think about a song like Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off, and
1:11.3	start all over again. Think about that song for somebody who had been pushed down, who
1:17.4	had been mistreated, who had been punched or kicked or bitten in the Civil Rights struggle.
1:25.4	Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again. Mean something totally different
1:30.0	to them. Totally different. It means something totally different to my mother. It's Bullseye.
1:43.1	Coming up, I'll talk more about Nat King Cole with Greg Reporter. He'll also tell me about
1:47.1	his mom, a street minister, and one of the most generous people he's ever known. She
1:51.5	would meet people and if they seemed like good people that just had fallen down for some
1:56.9	reason. They were coming to the house and my mother was going to clean them up and
2:00.8	give them good food, and get them physically and mentally try to get them back on their
2:07.2	feet. And there was so many of those episodes.
2:11.8	But before that, Susan Orleen, one of the greatest reporters of our time, and I mean
	...

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