Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

Soul and gospel singer Fontella Bass, whose 1965 hit "Rescue Me" endures as one of the most recognizable soul records of the '60s, died last week on the day after Christmas. She was 72 years old. Despite the success of "Rescue Me," it was the number one R&B single for four weeks, it took years of litigation before Bass could claim her share of songwriting credit and royalties. In 1993, she sued American Express for using the song in a commercial and received what she said was a significant settlement.

This interview was originally broadcast on March 14, 2011. Frank Calabrese's father, the Chicago mobster Frank Calabrese Sr., died on Christmas Day.

When Frank Calabrese Jr. was a teenager, his father came home one night and took him into the bathroom for a chat.

Update at 2:17 p.m. ET. Passage In The Senate:

The Senate just passed, by unanimous agreement, a bill that injects more than $9 billion into the insurance program that will assist those hit hard by Superstorm Sandy last October.

President Obama had urged passage and is expected to quickly sign the bill.

Our original post:

Louie talks with author Ken Hudnall.  Hudnall talks about the Chinese immigrant workers who came to El Paso in the 1880s to work on the railroad system.  Hundreds of Chinese immigrants remained in El Paso, creating El Paso's Chinatown.  After a Chinese exclusion law was passed by Congress in 1882, many El Pasoans began to illegally smuggle Chinese into the city.  Legends persist of a tunnel system hundreds of miles long and an underground city below Downtown El Paso which hid & protected many of these Chinese illegal immigrants.  Hudnall talks about his quest to map this complex series of tunnels and his search for the underground city.  http://kenhudnall.com  Aired Jan. 4, 2013.

UPDATED: 4:50 p.m. Looking for a little weekend reading? The Food and Drug Administration has just the thing. On Friday, the agency released two proposed rules designed to boost the safety of the nation's food supply, encompassing hundreds of pages.

Gopher.  Aired Jan. 4, 2013.

Historian Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the creation of women's studies as an academic discipline, has died in Madison, Wisc. She was 92.

A prolific feminist author, Lerner wrote texts that traced the history of patriarchy going back thousands of years to more modern topics, such as African American women's history. Her many books included a two volume work called 'Women in History': the first book examined the history of patriarchy and the second dealt with the start of feminist consciousness.

• In its annual December feature called "The Music They Made" commemorating artists who have died in the preceding year, the New York Times Magazine once again neglected to include a single classical musician.

This week's podcast is a bit more contemplative than most, as we go back to the New Year's resolutions we made last time it rolled around to January (we also made some in 2011!) and consider how we did.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is "looking forward to coming back to work next week," spokeswoman Victoria Nuland says.

Clinton, 65, was discharged from New York Presbyterian Hospital on Wednesday.