The Minstrel in the Gallery

Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to the pied-piper of English agriculture, inventor and poor old sod Jethro Tull, who died on this day (February 21, 1741). A war child from Bedfordshire, Tull attended St. John’s College in Oxford, where he became something of a minstrel in the gallery, singing tall tales from the Union balcony overlooking the campus quadrangle and playing the flute with his foot propped up on his opposite leg for balance when he was too bloody drunk to stand. Tull never properly graduated from university, but took his musical skillsets on the dusty roads, touring the countryside in a horse-drawn carnival carriage, where the multi-instrumentalist surprised everyone by taking an interest in the land and the tools necessary to run a successful organic farm in the face of larger agri-business interests. Eventually, the long-haired, wild-eyed troubadour decided that he was too old to rock ‘n roll, yet too young to die, much to the delight of his lovely, if cross-eyed, girlfriend Mary. Tull immersed himself in his newfound love of farming and engineering and soon created an actual planter that sowed marijuana seeds in neat little rows, along with a hoe that big box retailers like Lowes® and the Home Depot® initiated a bidding war over. He also was responsible for the initial drawings of a crude, aquatic lung that allowed French seafarers like Jacques Cousteau to snatch their rattling last breaths with deep sea diver sounds. According to the St. Cleve Chronicle, Jethro Tull is said to have inspired the name of 1970s southern rockers Leonard Skinner or possibly Marshall Tucker, but we suspect that thickheaded-as-a-brick editor Gerald Bostock was just having a bit o' fun with that claim. At any rate, Cheerio, Jethro!