Tommy Dorsey ... Fallacious Forward

Trombonology's tribute to Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader who did everything right, reminds me of one of those heart-tugging e-mail forwards I got not long ago. Well meaning friends are always sending me things they think I need to know, whether for inspiration, patriotism, warning about some awful virus or who knows what. This one was presented a lot like one of Paul Harvey's "rest of the story" tales. The punchine was that Tommy Dorsey wrote the gospel song, "Take my hand Precious Lord" when his wife and daughter died. Thomas A. Dorsey did write it under those very circumstances. But he was an important, African American blues,jazz and gospel musician who worked with Mahalia Jackson among other stars. I wrote an article for our local senior paper about those legends and hoaxes that are partly true at best and most often totally false. But folks will go right on believing what they want to and the forwards keep piling into my mailbox. Oh, the junk we must wade through to find the good stuff the internet has to offer. Oh boy, I just had a dreadful thought. Do my blogs sometimes contribute to the cyberjunk that's piling up? Oh well, You know what they say. One man's junk is another man's treasure. Did anybody really say that or is that just another legend?