David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

On February 21, 1978, electrical workers were putting down lines on a busy street corner in Mexico City when they discovered a 20-ton stone bas-relief of the Aztec night goddess, Coyolxauhqui. It is believed to have been sculpted in the early fifteenth century and buried prior to the destruction of the Aztec civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. The stone was moved 200 yards from the site to the Museum of the Great Temple.

In 1978 more than 500 movies dating from 1903 to 1929 were dug out of a hole in the ground in Dawson City, Yukon. Under normal circumstances, the 35-mm nitrate films would have been destroyed, but the permafrost preserved them perfectly.

Joanne Perez, the widow of vaudeville performer Pepito the Spanish Clown, cleaned out the area underneath her bed and discovered the only existing copy of the pilot for the TV series I Love Lucy . Pepito had coached Lucille Ball and had guest-starred in the pilot. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had given the copy to Pepito as a gift in 1951 and it had remained under the bed for 30 years.

A middle-aged couple in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked an art prospector to appraise a painting in their home. While he was there he examined another painting that the couple had thought was a reproduction of a work by Vincent van Gogh. It turned out to be an 1886 original. On March 10, 1991, the painting Still Life with Flowers sold at auction for $1,400,000.

In 1961 Barbara Testa, a Hollywood librarian, inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to her grandfather James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer who died in 1895. Over the next three decades she gradually sifted through the contents of the trunks, until one day in the autumn of 1990 she came upon 665 pages that turned out to be the original handwritten manuscript of the first half of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn . The two halves of the great American novel were finally reunited at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

A Philadelphia financial analyst was browsing at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, when he was attracted by a wooden picture frame. He paid four dollars for it. Back at his home, he removed the old torn painting in the frame and found a folded document between the canvas and the wood backing. It turned out to be a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence — one of 24 known to remain. On June 13, 1991, Sotheby’s auction house in New York sold the copy for $2,420,000.

For years, employees of the God’s House Tower Archaeology Museum in Southampton, England, propped their bikes against a 27-inch black rock in the basement. In 2000, two Egyptologists investigating the museum’s holdings identified the bike rack as a seventh-century BC Egyptian statue portraying King Taharqa, a Kushite monarch from the region that is modern Sudan. Karen Wordley, the Southampton city council’s curator of archaeological collections, said it was a ‘mystery’ how the sculpture ended up in the museum basement.

Jazz legend John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, October 21, 1917. After learning to play piano at the age of four he taught himself to play the trombone, but had switched to the trumpet by the time he was twelve. The leading exponent of ‘bebop’ jazz, Gillespie was famous for conducting big bands, playing trumpet (many consider him the greatest trumpeter in history), and for his work with Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and Charlie Parker, among others. Gillespie’s energy was so great that his career never stopped, and at least 10 biographies of the world-famous, beloved revolutionary of jazz have been published. Among his most famous compositions are ‘Salt Peanuts’, ‘Bebop’, ‘Guachi Guararo (Soul Sauce)’, ‘Night In Tunisia’ and ‘Manteca’, a pioneering piece in Afro-Cuban style. Gillespie had a stable private life and disdained the addictive drugs favoured by so many jazz heroes. He remained humorous and charming until the end of his life. He died on January 6, 1993, at the age of 75 and the world mourned the loss of a true jazz giant. In 1980, he prepared this list for The Book of Lists .

• Charlie Parker

• Art Tatum

• Coleman Hawkins

• Benny Carter

• Lester Young

• Roy Eldridge

• J.J. Johnson

• Kenny Clarke

• Oscar Pettiford

• Miles Davis

Johnny Cash, widely considered to be the greatest country music singer and composer in history, died in September of 2003 at the age of 71. Known as ‘The Man in Black’ (he always wore black), Cash was born the son of a poor sharecropper in Arkansas in 1932, and he sang to himself while picking cotton for 10 hours a day. Cash recorded more than 1,500 songs. He toured worldwide and played for free in prisons throughout America. Among his greatest hits are ‘Ring of Fire’ and ‘I Walk the Line’. His 1975 autobiography, Man In Black , has sold well over 1.5 million copies. Cash’s death was long and painful, and his last four albums are considered by many to be his greatest work, as they all examine a hard-working man coming to terms with the end of his life. Said Merle Kilgore, one of the co-authors of Ring of Fire , ‘It’s a sad day in Tennessee, but a great day in Heaven. “The Man in Black” is now wearing white as he joins his wife June in the angel band.’ June and Johnny were married for 35 years, and her death preceded his by four months. Cash contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1977.

• ‘I Walk the Line’, Johnny Cash

• ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, Don Gibson

• ‘Wildwood Flower’, Carter Family

• ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, Johnny Cash

• ‘Candy Kisses’, George Morgan

• ‘I’m Movin’ On’, Hank Snow

• ‘Walking the Floor over You’, Ernest Tubb

• ‘He’ll Have to Go’, Joe Allison and Audrey Allison

• ‘Great Speckle Bird’, Carter Family

• ‘Cold, Cold Heart’, Hank Williams

Andrew Motion is a poet and biographer. His latest collection of poems, Public Property, was published in 2003, and he has written lives of Philip Larkin, John Keats and the nineteenth-century artist and criminal Thomas Wainewright. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999.

For my money, songs accumulate an even larger baggage of associations than poems. The time I first heard them, the situations — intense or otherwise — in which I have listened to them, the people who introduced them to me, or who I know also like them: all these things become attached to the lyrics as well as the melody, at once broadening the experience of listening and making it more intimate.

Turning over the pages of Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–85 is like opening a Pandora’s Box crammed with my life’s delights, winces, blushes, broodings, geographies. Which in turn means that reducing his titles to any kind of list is seriously difficult. One song counted in means one (at least one) left out — and the choice is likely to change from day to day.

On the day I’m writing this, 24 May, 2004, my top 12, in album order, is:

• Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues — for the comedy in the anger and the wit in the satire