Donnie Snow – The Mail & Guardian

Donnie Snow

/ 23 June 2006

Stetson still the hat of the American West

Few icons are as American as the cowboy hat: grandiose, utilitarian and a trademark of the West. The king is still Stetson, the original cowboy hat, created almost 150 years ago. Philadelphia’s John B Stetson headed west in the 1860s for health reasons. He fashioned himself a big hat to protect him from rain, sun and wind which he dubbed the ”Boss of the Plains”.

By Donnie Snow

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Article

/ 9 November 2005

Playing the blues to pay the bills

With a handful of albums and awards, Blind Mississippi Morris Cummings, a harmonica-wailing fixture in Memphis since the 1980s, is cut from the same downtrodden, wayward cloth as many bluesmen who came before. ”This morning before sunrise, them old blues came a calling/I lay alone in my bed/That sad and lonely, empty feeling makes you wish you were dead,” Cummings sings in Morning Before Sunrise.

By Donnie Snow