Isegoria

I have seen the number one movie of 1977, Star Wars, multiple times, but I somehow never caught the number two movie of 1977, Smokey and the Bandit, until recently.

The film stars Burt Reynolds, as Bo “Bandit” Darville, and four 1976-model cars, as his 1977 Pontiac Trans Am:

Hal Needham saw an advertisement for the soon-to-be-released 1977 Pontiac Trans Am and knew right away that it would be the Bandit’s car, or, as Needham referred to it, a character in the movie. He contacted Pontiac and an agreement was made that four 1977 Trans Ams and two Pontiac LeMans four-door sedans would be provided for the movie. The Trans Ams were actually 1976-model cars with 1977 front ends (from 1970 to 1976, both the Firebird/Trans Am and Chevrolet Camaro have two round headlights and in 1977, the Firebird/Trans Am was changed to four rectangular headlights, and the Camaro remained unchanged). The decals were changed to 1977-style units, as evidenced by the engine size callouts on the hood scoop being in liters rather than cubic inches, as had been the case in 1976. The hood scoop on these cars says “6.6 LITRE”, which, in 1977, would have denoted an Oldsmobile 403-equipped car or a non-W-72, 180 hp version of the 400 Pontiac engine.

The cars were 1976 models, the engines fitted to them were 455ci power plants, the last year these engines were offered for sale before withdrawal. All four of the cars were badly damaged during production, one of which was all but destroyed during the jump over the dismantled Mulberry bridge. The Trans Am used for said jump was equipped with a booster rocket, the same type that was used by Evel Knievel during his failed Snake River Canyon jump. Needham served as the driver for the stunt (in place of Reynolds), while Lada St. Edmund was in the same car (in place of Field). By the film’s ending, the final surviving Trans Am and LeMans were both barely running and the other cars had become parts donors to keep them running. This gives rise to various continuity errors with Justice’s patrol car, which during some chase sequences is shown with a black rear fender, which then reverts to the car’s bronze color again in later scenes. When it is finally torn off along with the car’s roof in the impact with the girder, the missing fender still reappears later on in the film.

[…]

After the debut of the film, the Pontiac Trans Am became wildly popular, with sales almost doubling within two years of the film’s release. It outsold its Chevrolet Camaro counterpart for the first time.

The premise of the film is that wealthy Texan Big Enos Burdette and his son Little Enos have sponsored a racer in Atlanta’s Southern Classic and want to celebrate in style when they win, so they bet Bandit and his truck-driving partner Snowman $80,000 that they can’t bootleg 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in 28 hours.

Wait, why do they have to bootleg Coors? Beer’s not illegal in Atlanta:

In 1977, Coors was unavailable for sale east of Oklahoma. Its lack of additives and preservatives meant that Coors could spoil in one week without refrigeration, explaining the film’s 28-hour deadline. A 1974 Time magazine article explains that Coors was so coveted for its lack of stabilizers and preservatives, and Coors Banquet Beer had a brief renaissance. Future President Gerald Ford, after a trip to Colorado, hid it in his luggage to take it back to Washington, D.C. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a steady supply airlifted by the Air Force to Washington. Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox would bring several cases after playing on the West Coast, by stashing them in the equipment trunks on the team’s plane. Frederick Amon smuggled it from Colorado to North Carolina and sold it for four times the retail price.

Coors is still brewed just outside Denver, Colorado. It is now sold in all states as Coors ships it in refrigerated train cars and bottled locally and sold in different parts of the country including the eastern US states.

During their run, Bandit annd Snowman are pursued by Texas county sheriff Buford T. Justice, played by Jackie Gleason:

“Buford T. Justice” was the name of a real Florida Highway Patrolman known to Reynolds’ father, who was once Police Chief of Riviera Beach, Florida. His father was also the inspiration for the word “sumbitch” used in the film, a variation of the phrase “son-of-a-bitch” that, according to Reynolds, he uttered quite often. Gleason was given free rein to ad-lib dialogue and make suggestions. It was his idea to have Junior alongside him throughout the film. In particular, the scene where Sheriff Justice unknowingly encounters the Bandit in a roadside diner (a “choke and puke” in CB lingo) was not in the original story but was rather Gleason’s idea.

Gleason’s Buford T. Justice follows quite clearly in the footsteps of Clifton James’ Sheriff J.W. Pepper, from Live and Let Die (1973):

When asked about the Blaxploitation element of the film, screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz said he invented Sheriff J.W. Pepper as a racist small-town southern sheriff, setting him up for mockery as a foolish pompous figure that the audience is meant to side against.

This reminds me that Bandit and Snowman are conspicuously non-racist, in contrast to Justice.

Anyway, Clifton James’ sheriff also falls in the footsteps of another:

Actor Joe Higgins, who was born in Louisiana in 1925, landed the role of Sheriff J.W. (and added his real name Higgins) for a series of Dodge commercials starting in 1969. He was prolific on American television for guest roles in many series including ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Hill Street Blues,’ ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘The Twilight Zone.’

Over the course of the TV campaign for the new Dodge Challenger, Sheriff J.W. evolves from pulling over drivers for having a “racing vee-hickle” in the city limits, learning of how affordable the new car is, to later schooling his younger deputies in slapstick fashion. The last spot from 1972 ends in his humiliation when flying chickens escape the trunk of a car and would have been a comedic moment right at home in the Roger Moore era.

Seeing success with the spots, Dodge anointed Higgins as the “Safety Sheriff” and Higgins would tour the country at motor shows and conventions, as well as speaking to high-school kids about driving and promoting the use of seat belts.

At the peak of his popularity, Higgins filmed a PSA for the Office of Traffic Safety with then-Governor Ronald Reagan.

In Aliens, loudmouth Colonial Marine Private Hudson asks his butch female squad mate, “Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”

“No, have you?”

All the Right Movies recently noted that Cameron took this from a story about the husky-voiced 1930s icon Tallulah Bankhead. A columnist said to her “Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” and she replied, “No, darling. Have you?”

This got me to track down a few more stories about Tallulah Bankhead:

Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead.

[…]

As a child, Bankhead was described as “extremely homely” and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father’s approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.

Bankhead’s famously husky voice (which she described as “mezzo-basso”) was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness.

[…]

She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the “Four Riders of the Algonquin”, consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead’s father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped “He didn’t say anything about women and cocaine.” The Algonquin’s wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming and I know because I’ve been taking it for years.”

[…]

After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him “How do you get laid in this dreadful place?” Thalberg retorted “I’m sure you’ll have no problem. Ask anyone.”

[…]

Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film’s leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said “Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper!”

[…]

In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only 70 lb (32 kg) when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!”

[…]

In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: “Dahlings, I was wonderful!”

[…]

Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31.

[…]

An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:

I’m serious about love. I’m damned serious about it now. … I haven’t had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. … If there’s anything the matter with me now, it’s not Hollywood or Hollywood’s state of mind. … The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! … Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!

[…]

For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Commission’s “Doom Book”, a list of 150 actors and actresses considered “unsuitable for the public” which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: “Verbal Moral Turpitude”. She publicly called Hays “a little prick”.

[…]

In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday.

[…]

Bankhead never publicly used the term “bisexual” to describe herself, preferring to use the term “ambisextrous” instead.

[…]

Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for “codeine … bourbon”.

[…]

Bankhead’s voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson’s work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures’ One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls “a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead”.

Greta Gerwig, the brain behind the new Barbie movie, considers herself a feminist, but…

But this movie is also dealing with [the idea that] any kind of hierarchical power structure that moves in any direction isn’t so great. You go to Mattel and it is really like, “Oh, Barbie has been president since 1991. Barbie had gone to the moon before women could get credit cards.” We kind of extrapolated out from that that Barbieland is this reversed world [where Barbies rule and Kens are an underclass]. The reverse structure of whatever Barbieland is, is almost like Planet of the Apes. You can see how unfair this is for the Kens because it’s totally unsustainable.

I hadn’t heard of Neil LeVang when I stumbled across this performance of Ghost Riders In The Sky:

As his bio notes:

Levang unknowingly created a new genre of music that would eventually be called Surf Rock with his 1961 arrangement of Ghost Riders In the Sky, performed on The Lawrence Welk Show.

I’m pretty sure I knew the song from Dick Dale’s 1963 cover, which is, of course, surf guitar, too.

There are many versions:

The original version by Stan Jones was recorded in late 1948 or early 1949. A recording by Stan Jones and his Death Valley Rangers was issued on Mercury 5320 in May 1949.

Hundreds of performers have recorded versions of the song. Vaughn Monroe reached number 1 in Billboard magazine with his version (“Riders in the Sky” with orchestra and vocal quartet).

I don’t think I realized that the melody is based on the Civil War-era song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”.

Misha Saul suggests that Daenerys Targaryen is modeled on Moses:

• Born into royalty.
• Led her people out of destitution.
• Freed slaves.
• Works miracles.
• Suffers trials and doubts and betrayals on the way to the Promised Land.
• Ends up a hardened warrior, dictator and self-righteous killer of men, women and children.

Frank Patrick Herbert Jr. was not born into an aristocratic family and did not receive specialized training as a mentat or Bene Gesserit witch:

His paternal grandparents had come west in 1905 to join Burley Colony in Kitsap County, one of many utopian communes springing up in Washington State beginning in the 1890s. The Burley communards printed their own currency, paid everyone an identical salary, and championed gender equality. Eventually, the socialist aspects of the community faded away, and the Herberts ran a general store there.

Herbert’s father, Frank Patrick Herbert Sr., had a varied career including operating a bus line, selling electrical equipment, and serving as a state motorcycle patrolman. His mother, Eileen Marie McCarthy, was from a large Irish family in Wisconsin. According to unsubstantiated family lore, during Prohibition, Frank Senior, Eileen, and another couple built and ran the legendary Spanish Castle Ballroom, a speakeasy and dancehall off of Highway 99 between Seattle and Tacoma.

Herbert’s childhood included camping, hunting, fishing, and digging clams. At 8 he is said to have jumped on a table and shouted, “I wanna be an author.” His parents were binge alcoholics, and young Frank often had to care for his only sibling, Patty Lou, who was 13 years younger. He had a checkered career at Tacoma’s Lincoln High School, including dropped and failed classes. But his career as a writer had already been launched. He was an enthusiastic reporter on the student newspaper. A classmate remembered him rushing into the “news shack” behind the school, shouting: “Stop the presses! I’ve got a scoop!”

In May of his senior year, he dropped out. The following summer he worked on the Tacoma Ledger as a copy and office boy, doing some actual reporting as well. In the fall he went back to school, writing feature articles and a regular column for the school paper. At 17, he sold a Western story for $27.50. He was elated, but the next two dozen stories he wrote were all rejected. In 1938, worried about his parents’ drinking and his 5-year-old sister’s safety in the unstable home, he and Patty Lou took a bus to Salem, Oregon, where they sought refuge with an aunt and uncle.

After graduation from Salem High School in 1939, Herbert moved to California and got a job at the Glendale Star as a copy editor. Barely 18, he lied about his age and smoked a briar pipe to seem older. By 1940 the 19-year-old was back with his aunt and uncle in Salem, and talked his way into an “on-call” job with the Oregon Statesman as a photographer, copy editor, feature reporter, and in the advertising department.

In the spring of 1941, he and Flora Parkinson drove three hours north to Tacoma, where they got a night court judge to marry them. Back in California, he worked once more for the Glendale Star, and in February 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, he registered for the draft. The next day the couple’s daughter, Penelope Eileen, was born. By July he had enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to Portsmouth, Virginia as a photographer. There, tripping over a tent tie-down, he suffered a head injury that resulted in an honorable discharge. He went back to California, where he discovered his wife and daughter had vanished. His mother-in-law in Oregon wouldn’t tell him where they were. Flora and Frank Herbert were subsequently divorced, and she was given custody of baby Penny.

From 1943 to 1945, Herbert worked as a reporter for the Oregon Journal in Portland. He was writing fiction as well. In 1945 he had his second sale, a suspense story set in Alaska that appeared in Esquire magazine and earned him $200. By August of 1945, he had moved to Seattle and was working on the night desk at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Lex Fridman’s reading list doesn’t include William Makepeace Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair, but Steve Sailer’s review has me intrigued:

It’s extremely enjoyable. Despite a fairly rambling plot covering almost 800 pages from roughly 1813 to 1828, it’s a page-turner because the characters and situations are interesting enough that you want to find out what happens.

I’d describe Vanity Fair as the precursor to Gone With the Wind, in that it centers around two young women, the nice but mopey Amelia (the precursor of Melanie Hamilton, played by Olivia De Havilland) and the not nice but more interesting Becky Sharp (Scarlett O’Hara, played by Vivien Leigh).

[…]

The male characters in both tend to be army officers who go off to a big battle, Waterloo in VF and Gettysburg in GWTH.

Overall, I’d say that GWTH is the new improved VF, with more memorable characters and settings. Margaret Mitchell always denied having read Vanity Fair, but Gone With the Wind sure seems like a punched up version of Vanity Fair, with Mitchell raising the stakes wherever Thackeray was inclined to let them ride.

For instance, while the British win at Waterloo and so English society mostly goes on as before, the Southerners lose at Gettysburg and soon the old society is, like the title says, gone with the wind. The Southerners need to learn a lot of hard new lessons about life. Melanie and her husband Ashley Wilkes fail to adapt to the new world, while Scarlett, despite her self-centered sense of entitlement and general knuckleheadedness, eventually succeeds.

In contrast, from the first page of Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp, a poor orphan, is smarter than the rich people around her. Thackeray points out near the beginning of the book that when she claims to love children that she would soon learn not to make claims so easily disproved. “The little adventuress” seldom learns over the 800 pages because she was already supremely worldly wise from a tender age.

In contrast to Scarlett, Becky is always rational to the point of being cold-blooded. Becky wants material comfort and to rise in status, but she lacks particular passions (until late in the book when she starts to develop a gambling problem). She has no Ashley Wilkes to pine over.

Indeed, Becky is so reasonable that she often behaves surprisingly nicely to the other characters because, having calculated all the factors, she doesn’t see how it could cost her much.

And Mitchell takes Thackeray’s admirable but stiff Captain Dobbin, who is lovelorn over Amelia throughout who foolishly ignores him, and turns him into the pirate king Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), who instead of being lovelorn over Melanie is lovelorn over Scarlett. This creates the 20th Century’s most popular fictional couple.

With the Avatar sequel coming to theaters, I was reminded of Poul Anderson’s 1957 story, Call Me Joe, which inspired the avatar element of James Cameron’s movie. The story opens like this:

The wind came whipping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.

He clawed all of his four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down, and groped for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead, where clouds boiled with night.

As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The ground beneath him shivered.

Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in his muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and into his dugout.

It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun — remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed onto every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smokehole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.

Anglesey sprawled his slate-blue form on the floor, panting. It was no use to swear at the storm. These ammonia gales often came at sunset, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. He was tired anyway.

It would be morning in five hours or so. He had hoped to create an axehead, his first, this evening, but maybe it was better to do the job by daylight.

He pulled a decapitated body off a shelf and ate the meat raw, pausing for long gulps of liquid methane from a jug. Things would improve once he had proper tools; so far, everything had been painfully grubbed and hacked into shape using only teeth, claws, chance icicles, and what detestably weak and crumbling fragments remained of the spaceship. Give him a few years and he’d be living as a person should.

He sighed, stretched, and lay down to sleep.

Somewhat more than one hundred and twelve thousand miles away, Edward Anglesey took off his helmet.

###

He looked around, blinking. After the surface of Jupiter, it was always a little unreal to find himself here again, in the clean, quiet orderliness of the control room.

His muscles ached. They shouldn’t. He had not really been fighting a gale of several hundred miles an hour, under three gravities, and a temperature of 140 Absolute. He had been here, in the almost nonexistent pull of Jupiter V, breathing oxynitrogen. It was Joe who lived down there and filled his lungs with hydrogen and helium at a pressure which could still only be estimated because it broke aneroids and deranged piezo-electrics.

Nevertheless, his body felt worn and beaten. Tension, no doubt — psychosomatics — after all, for a good many hours now. he had, in a sense, been Joe, and Joe had been working hard.

With the helmet off, Anglesey held only a thread of identification. The esprojector was still tuned to Joe’s brain but no longer focused on his own. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew an indescribable feeling of sleep. Now and then, vague forms or colors drifted in the soft black — dreams? Not impossible, that Joe’s brain should dream a little when Anglesey’s mind wasn’t using it.

A light flickered red on the esprojector panel, and a bell whined electronic fear. Anglesey cursed. Thin fingers danced over the controls of his chair, he slued around and shot across to the bank of dials. Yes — there — K-tube oscillating again! The circuit blew out. He wrenched the faceplate off with one hand and fumbled in a drawer with the other.

Inside his mind he could feel the contact with Joe fading. If he once lost it entirely, he wasn’t sure he could regain it. And Joe was an investment of several million dollars and quite a few highly skilled man-years.

Anglesey pulled the offending K-tube from its socket and threw it on the floor. Glass exploded. It eased his temper a bit, just enough so he could find a replacement, plug it in, switch on the current again — as the machine warmed up, once again amplifying, the Joeness in the back alleys of his brain strengthened.

Slowly, then, the man in the electric wheelchair rolled out of the room, into the hall. Let somebody else sweep up the broken tube. To hell with it. To hell with everybody.

Jan Cornelius had never been farther from Earth than some comfortable Lunar resort. He felt much put upon that the Psionics Corporation should tap him for a thirteen-month exile. The fact that he knew as much about esprojectors and their cranky innards as any other man alive was no excuse. Why send anyone at all? Who cared?

Obviously the Federation Science Authority did. It had seemingly given those bearded hermits a blank check on the taxpayers’ account.

Our protagonist, from his electric wheelchair, controls a slate-blue alien form with a prehensile tail on a hostile planet — using an esprojector from the Psionics Corporation. As I read this, in my copy of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two A, I suddenly realized that psionics wasn’t simply a word for psychic powers, the way it was used in the D&D books of my childhood, but was a portmanteau of psi (“psychic phenomena”) and the -onics from electronics:

In 1942, two authors — biologist Bertold Wiesner and psychologist Robert Thouless — had introduced the term “psi” (from the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet) to parapsychology in an article published in the British Journal of Psychology. (This Greek character was chosen as apropos since it is the initial letter of the Greek word psyche, meaning “mind” or “soul”.) The intent was that “psi” would represent the “unknown factor” in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, experiences believed to be unexplained by any known physical or biological mechanisms. In a 1972 book, Thouless insisted that he and Wiesner had coined this usage of the term “psi” prior to its use in science fiction circles, explaining that their intent was to provide a more neutral term than “ESP” that would not suggest a pre-existing theory of mechanism.

The word “psionics” first appeared in print in a novella by science fiction writer Jack Williamson — The Greatest Invention — published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1951. Williamson derived it from the “psion”, a fictitious “unit of mental energy” described in the same story. (Only later was the term retroactively described in non-fiction articles in Astounding as a portmanteau of “psychic electronics”, by editor John W. Campbell.) The new word was derived by analogy with the earlier term radionics. (“Radionics” combined radio with electronics and was itself devised in the 1940s to refer to the work of early 20th century physician and pseudoscientist Albert Abrams.) The same analogy was subsequently taken up in a number of science fiction-themed neologisms, notably bionics (bio- + electronics; coined 1960) and cryonics (cryo- + electronics; coined 1967).

I recently heard the famous Minuet in G major, but I had to ask what the name of the piece was — which wasn’t very helpful — and the name of the composer — which was rather confusing:

The little keyboard student said it was by Christian Petzold. That can’t be right. Isn’t it by Bach? Ah, therein lies a tale!

The second Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach was started in 1725. It opened with two harpsichord suites, that is, the Partitas BWV 827 and 830, composed and written down by Johann Sebastian Bach. Anna Magdalena Bach likely received the notebook from her husband in the autumn of 1725, as a present for either her birthday (22 September) or their wedding anniversary (3 December). Nos. 3 to 11 in the notebook are keyboard pieces written down by Anna Magdalena, likely shortly after she was given the volume. No. 3, the first piece after the two seven-movement Partitas, is a Minuet in F major by an unknown composer (likely not Bach), adopted as No. 113 in the second annex (German: Anhang, Anh.), that is the annex of doubtful compositions, in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV). Petzold’s Minuets in G major and G minor, BWV Anh. 114 and 115, are the next two entries in the notebook (Nos. 4 and 5). These pieces may have been brought back from Dresden by Johann Sebastian when he visited this city in September 1725.

Bach likely intended the simple binary dances contained in Anna Magdalena’s notebooks, including the Minuets entered without composer indication, as teaching material, likely rather for his younger children than for his wife.