From 1947, when Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke major-league baseball’s color barrier, to 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act, sports and rock music – rock n’ roll, as we called it then – did more than anything to change America’s culture and its attitude toward race.
That’s why […]

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I’m going to be interested to see how the HullabaLOU mega-concert is supported at Churchill Downs. The cheapest ticket costs $75, which pretty much eliminates the high-school and college kids who were attracted by the night racing programs (or could it possibly have been the ease with which underage drinkers could get beer?)
In addition, parking […]

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I don’t care how good University of Kentucky hoops recruit Enes Kanter may turn out to be, he can only hope to be the second greatest Enes to perform in Central Kentucky.
The first, of course, is the one and only Little Enis, which was the stage name of Carlos Toadvine of near Danville. Modestly billing […]

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A guy turns 66 and he thinks about a lot of stuff. Music is a big part of it. He ponders the career of Michael Jackson, dead at 50, and he has trouble reconciling the Bob Dylan he always has known and loved with the raspy caricature he saw in concert Wednesday night at Slugger […]

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The room in the funeral home was silent and empty yesterday morning, and Tommy Jolly’s silver trumpet sat on a stand near the casket. Around the room, there were easels with pictures of Tommy with Brenda Lee, probably the most famous singer he ever backed, and many of the various Louisville groups with which he […]

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A few days before the Kentucky Derby, former Governor Brereton Jones was standing on the backstretch at Churchill Downs, talking about trainer Larry Jones’ decision to run the filly Eight Belles in the Kentucky Derby instead of the Kentucky Oaks. Brereton applauded the decision, and not just because it meant that his filly, Proud Spell, […]

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My friend John Y. Brown III was just a kid back in the 1970s when his dad owned the Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association and his mom was chairman of the first, and still the only, all-female board of directors in the history of professional sports.
So when John saw the advance publicity about […]

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Early in their Monday night show at the Derby Dinner Playhouse, the Monarchs did their version of the Five Satins’ immortal 1956 hit, In The Still of The Night, and I frankly admit to harboring some decidedly ungrandfatherly thoughts.
Even in winter, a lion is still a lion, if you get my drift, and that music […]

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This decision stinks. It’s one of the biggest blows to our culture since Gannett cut back the C-J’s statewide circulation and folded The Louisville Times.

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It’s time to include everyone in the government process instead of just the lunch crowd at Vincenzio’s and Jeff Ruby’s. It’s time to start running Louisville as a city instead of as a private fiefdom for the social, cultural, and financial elite.

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