Nine: A number of uncanny connections
John Lennon and the number nine are connected in startling ways, says Liverpool musician
*This is the final episode in our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time. Listen to more episodes.
In the early part of the pandemic, during the spring of 2020, Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi made an announcement to shore up the spirits of the nation.
On April 5 of that year, Indians were asked to turn off their lights for nine minutes at precisely 9:00 p.m., and to stand in their doorways or on their balconies and light candles. It was to be a gesture of solidarity with health care workers — and a sign that even in an unprecedented lockdown, people would know they were not alone.
It was also a political gimmick, meant to remind voters that the man in charge was indeed a powerful leader, with quasi-mystical knowledge about numbers and their secret powers.
"Modi alluding to this [the number nine] in 2020, actually started an internet buzz that he must have access to some higher knowledge, and that Modi was a genius in identifying this precise time for defeating the virus," said Dheepa Sundaram, a professor of Hindu studies at the University of Denver.
But why 9:00 pm, and why nine minutes? Because of the "auspicious nature of the number nine" in Hindu religion and Indian culture, said Sundaram. "What Modi is doing here is playing on an age-old popular tradition within Hinduism, coupled with numerology" to invent a new ritual.
It worked. Millions went along with it. In fact, that night saw the country's electricity demand drop by 25 per cent. Still, the gesture had its critics, who saw it as a blatant case of political theatre, and as a poor substitute for more aggressive, science-based health care measures during such a crisis.
Number nine train songs
It turns out that the "auspicious nature of the number nine" is also found in many other times and places.
It crops up throughout Western arts and culture, with uncanny frequency.
In America at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, train songs became a key genre in folk music, stemming— it's assumed — from the romantic appeal of the railway and its connection with escape and freedom — not to mention its aura of high-speed danger.
The Wreck of the Number Nine, written in 1927 by Carl Robison, was a hit for Jim Reeves, and was later recorded by Hank Snow, Marty Robbins, and Doc Watson. It told the story of a doomed engineer and the love he left behind.
Then in 1965, Roger Miller released Engine Engine Number Nine, a riff on the nursery rhyme — the chorus is quoted in a 1991 hip-hop song by Black Sheep. Tarheel Slim recorded Number 9 Train in 1959.
Beyond the train songs, Julius Daniels recorded 99 Year Blues, a ballad about an innocent Black man facing an impossible prison sentence, in 1927. It's included in the influential Anthology of American Folk Music.
Dress to the nines
In the 1935 screwball comedy Top Hat, Fred Astaire was dressed, as he was in many of his musicals, "to the nines." Like many long-lasting idioms the exact origins are elusive. Why nines? We understand that it means more than merely formal, more like a kind of Hollywood-Irving Berlin formal that only Fred Astaire could pull off. But is there a connection to "the whole nine yards," a phrase we take to mean full effort and hard-won progress (derived most likely from American football)?
There is a theory that nine yards refers to fabric used to make a proper suit, for a properly dressed man like Fred Astaire. Although the problem is that's far too much fabric for one suit. And yet, it has echoes of another proverb, that it "takes nine tailors to make a man," meaning — we have to assume — that a lot of work goes into dressing your Astaire-type-man until he's dressed to the proverbial nines.
But there's yet another possible source.
The 1934 Dorothy Sayers novel The Nine Tailors is actually about nine tollers, who rang the church bell nine times whenever a man in the village died (women received six tolls). What emerges is a kind of recursive thread: every nine, whether in music, literature, history, or religion leads yet to more nines, in a kind of synchronicity, as Carl Jung called it: our tendency to connect things that have no causal relationship with each other, but which appear to embody a deeper or higher meaning.
The Beatles' Revolution 9
In music, the most famous nine song, besides Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, is surely The Beatles Revolution 9, known also, according to Barry Faulk, an English professor at Florida State University, as "the track on The Beatles' White Album that people skip over."
The chaotic runs eight minutes and twenty-three seconds (almost nine), and is a study in tape music, or musique concrète, a Modernist genre of the 1940s and 1950s in which French artists like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry used sounds, either natural or electro-acoustic, to replace musical instruments in a composition.
But why Revolution 9?
"John Lennon and the number nine is a very interesting thing," Paul Abbott told IDEAS. The Liverpool musician is a co-host of The Big Beatle Sort-Out podcast.
"He's born on the ninth of October. He lives at 9 Newcastle Road [in Liverpool]. Ninth of February 1961: first time The Beatles play The Cavern. Ninth of November 1961: Brian Epstein meets them. Ninth of May 1962: George Martin offers them a proper recording test. Ninth of February: they're in America for the Ed Sullivan show. Ninth of October: John's birthday; his son Sean is born; and John will eventually go on to record the song #9 Dream from the album Walls and Bridges, the cover of which has a childhood drawing of John's, showing a football player with the number 9 on his jersey."
Abbott adds that the synchronicites keep coming.
"It gets to Number 9 on the American charts, and it's the ninth post-Beatles single on his ninth post-Beatles album."
But there's one glitch. Revolution 9 is the seventh track on the album.
"So you can't have everything," said Abbott.
As mentioned in this episode:
In 2019, the journal American Psychologist published a study by the University of California, Berkeley. An audio library was created using the non-verbal sounds humans make to express emotions like: confusion, interest, fear, elation, embarrassment. Then, an online map was created using hundreds of these sounds as you sweep your mouse over its coloured dots.
Here is the map and the report.
Guests in this episode:
Dheepa Sundaram is a professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver.
Amit Chaudhuri is a singer and the author of Sojourn, A Strange and Sublime Address and Finding The Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music.
Barry Faulk is a professor of English at Florida State University.
Paul Abbott is the co-host of The Big Beatles Sort Out podcast.
Jennifer Iverson is an associate professor of music and the humanities at the University of Chicago.
Martin Iddon is a composer and a professor of music and aesthetics at the University of Leeds.
Amy Beal is a professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Giacomo Fiore is a lecturer in the music department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Louis Niebur is a professor of musicology at the University of Nevada in Reno.
Jeremy Barham is a professor of music at the University of Surrey (UK).
Carolyne Larrington is a professor of Medieval European literature at the University of Oxford, St. John's College.
Christopher Berard is a visiting assistant professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.
Zoe Woodbury High is a PhD candidate in humanities, South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago.
*This episode was produced by Tom Jokinen.
