I just heard the news that Davy Jones, lead singer of The Monkees, died this week from a heart attack, in the company of his beloved horses, in his stable.

He held an amateur jump jockey’s license and rode as an apprentice jockey in Newmarket.  He won his first race as an amateur at Lingfield on Digpast.  He also owned several racehorses in England and in Pennsylvania.  His daughter Talia is a showjumper.

I grew up watching The Monkees on TV and I had a crush on Davy back in the day.  He was part of a sensation, and you can get a taste of it here, along with the chance to see Davy in a place where he was happy, on the back of a horse:

Do you ever look back on some of the things you did on horseback and think you must have been insane?  Do you wonder how you did them?  Or, if you were crazy enough to want to repeat them today, do you wonder whether you’d be able to?

A friend of mine — my old hunter/jumper trainer, in fact, who’s now retired — reminded me of one of those daredevil things I did, the other day.  It surprised him when I did it, and it surprises me now, looking back on it.

At the time, it made perfect sense.  I was riding my Thoroughbred rogue.  I know some may bristle hearing a horse referred to as a “rogue,” but they do exist.  They are rare.  I had one.  At that time, I’d only had him a few months.

I was schooling walk/canter transitions.  I knew it was no problem for my talented athlete.  He could do it only half-trying.  After all, he could come out of a starting gate, go wide and still win on a sloppy track at Belmont Park.  He could start and stop on a dime.  If he had been an airplane, he would have been the Concorde.

The turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner known as the Concorde

The first time I asked for canter, he sprawled forward lazily into the gait.  Not good enough.  So I asked again.  And that made him mad.

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Horse in a Landscape, 1910, oil on canvas

Horses Resting, color woodcut, 1911-1912, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

The Tower of Blue Horses, 1913, oil on canvas

It’s easy to see that Franz Marc loved horses as much as he loved creating art.

One of the leading figures in the German Expressionist movement, Marc believed in what he called the “animalization” of art.  In his opinion, animals had the unique ability to represent aspects of the spirit.

Franz Marc enrolled in the Munich Art Academy in 1900, and from 1910 onwards, animals became his favorite subject matter.  In 1911, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Marc co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, which was devoted to the cause of art which possessed a spiritual dimension.

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Today marks 5000 hits and counting on the blog.  That’s not a lot to some people (my ex is well over a quarter million on his and a friend gets over 10,000 hits a day but they’re busy talking about finance/economics). Nevertheless, my meager 5000 is a milestone for me (it’s not half pass but it is a square halt).  Time for a happy dance.

Ruth St. Dennis captured by Arnold Genthe, 1919

In 1929, Bessie Smith sang this song:

In the year Ms. Smith recorded that song, one out of four American families bought a car.  When the Great Depression hit, some of those cars ended up being towed by horses.  They called them “Hoover wagons.”

People who couldn’t afford a car could afford a horse if they were lucky.

And then, when things kept getting worse, most of them couldn’t.  There wasn’t a penny in their pockets.  Options had run out and hope wasn’t far behind.

What happened to all those horses when there wasn’t a penny to feed them?

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I’m not sure why, but it’s looking like nostalgia week here on the blog.

It’s been a long time — 34 years to be exact — since horses dove into the water at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  And now the diving horse is set to return this summer.

The act, c. 1930

The original act began in 1913 when Lorena (or Leonora) Carver became the first woman to dive off a platform into water on the back of a horse.

Lorena’s father, William F. “Doc” Carver, a show partner of “Buffalo Bill” Cody, invented the diving horse act in 1881.  What inspired him? He was riding across a wooden bridge when it collapsed and he and his horse fell into Nebraska’s Platte River.

Hotel developer Frank P. Gravatt brought the diving horse act to Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in 1928.  Over the 50 years in which the act was performed, over 19 women donned swimsuits and leapt into the water on the backs of over 14 horses.  The exact number of performers and many of their names, both human and horse, are lost to history.

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