St. Valentine's Day ~ February 14, 1929

Dickie Goodman[*] is considered one of the earliest proponents of sampling in music, through a series of "break-in" records he created starting in 1956. From a 45 rpm single in my collection, on the Mark-X Records Co. label, here's Dickie Goodman performing The Touchables in 1961. It's a 2MB MP3 file; pick the image to listen.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre provides a good example of why the state should not attempt to prohibit the citizens' simple pleasures. As Roger Q. Mills wrote:

"Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil-- only evil-- and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs."