MetaFilter posts tagged with Blues and delta

No Lounld Music

netbros — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:33:33 -0800

As patrons begin to fill a room decorated with toy monkeys, beer posters and a silver disco ball, Mr. Seaberry emerges in a startling suit of red with white pinstripes and a snazzy white hat, and smoking a cheroot. “Po’ Monkey is all anybody ever called me since I was little,” he said. “I don’t know why, except I was poor for sure.” Transformed in the 1950s from a sharecropper shack that was built probably in the 1920s, Poor Monkey's Lounge is one of the last rural juke joints along The Trail of the Hellhound on the Mississippi Delta. Photographs of Po' Monkeys and other Delta Blues History Blues, Booze, & BBQ by Michael Loyd Young Po' Monkey's Juke Joint Flickr group American Music by Annie Liebovitz Early blues musicians you might hear covered at Po' Monkey's Juke Joint. [be sure to click the sound icon to the left of each name for sample music] Son House's place, not only in the history of Delta blues, but in the overall history of the music, is a very high one indeed. He was a major innovator of the Delta style, along with his playing partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown. No blues singer ever presented a more gentle, genial image than Mississippi John Hurt. A guitarist with an extraordinarily lyrical and refined fingerpicking style, he also sang with a warmth unique in the field of blues, and the gospel influence in his music gave it a depth and reflective quality unusual in the field. No two ways about it, the most influential slide guitarist of the postwar period was Elmore James, hands down. Although his early demise from heart failure kept him from enjoying the fruits of the '60s blues revival as his contemporaries Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf did, James left a wide influential trail behind him. Among the earliest and most influential Delta bluesmen to record, Skip James was the best known proponent of the so-called Bentonia school of blues players, a genre strain invested with as much fanciful scholarly "research" as any. If the Delta country blues has a convenient source point, it would probably be Charley Patton, its first great star. His hoarse, impassioned singing style, fluid guitar playing, and unrelenting beat made him the original king of the Delta blues. Like many of his contemporaries on the Chicago circuit, Muddy Waters was a product of the fertile Mississippi Delta. From the late '40s on, he eloquently defined the city's aggressive, swaggering, Delta-rooted sound with his declamatory vocals and piercing slide guitar attack.

Johnny Temple

flapjax at midnite — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:29:06 -0800

Those familiar with the plaintive falsetto of Delta blues great Skip James will surely hear Skip's influence in the much lesser-known Johnny Temple's Evil Devil Blues, recorded in 1935, which features some delightfully unexpected melodic twists. And though Johnny Temple "never achieved stardom", he does have a Wikipedia page. The Johnny Temple YT clip is from PreWarMusic, who's posted several clips well worth your time and attention from early American music figures who aren't exactly household names. I really like this one, for example: Bed Spring Poker. Skip James, of course, has been featured in a number of previous MeFi posts.

Howlin' Wolf on the YouTube and related links

y2karl — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:47:35 -0800

Howlin' Wolf - How Many More Years
Howlin' Wolf - Meet Me in the Bottom
Howlin' Wolf - Highway 49
Howlin' Wolf - Smokestack Lightning
Howlin' Wolf - Dust My Broom
Howlin Wolf - I'll Be Back Someday And here is Howlin' Wolf -A Personal Recollection from The (unofficial) Howlin' Wolf Web Site . Wolf sometime in the late 1940s. Howlin' Wolf, bluesman, force of nature, historic figure--where the soul of Man never dies. Not mention his second career as human mutate and Marvel comic book super hero.

Tommy Johnson - Cool Drink of Water

y2karl — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:21:57 -0800

Tommy Johnson - Cool Drink of Water From the accompanying entry on Mr. Dan Kelly's Blog:

Tommy Johnson was the original claimant to the legend of the bluesman who went down to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play the blues. Perhaps the appellation stuck more to Robert Johnson (who, apparently, never made such a claim himself) because, despite Tommy Johnson's unearthly falsetto and occasionally alien-sounding guitar work, his subject matter had less to do with Satan, hellhounds, and Judgment Day, and more to do with the usual tropes of bad hootch, life on the road, loose women, and so on. Little matter: Tommy Johnson was a bluesmen of the first stripe. Also, unlike growling, shouting, and hollering bluesmen like Charley Patton and Son House (whose power was one of their great strengths, of course), Johnson had a sweet voice.

Here are many more links regarding Tommy Johnson.

Cool Drink Of Water is one of the masterpieces of 1920s Delta blues. The song is unearthly, the blend of his voice, his and Charlie McCoy's guitars is just sublime. This is the first time I have seen the song offered gratis online.

In terms of songs covered by the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Houston Stackhouse, Robert Nighhawk and other postwar Mississippi born bluesmen, Tommy was by far the Johnson who counted the most to them. Howlin' Wolf, for instance, recorded Cool Drink of Water in two variations--Smokestack Lightning and I Asked For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline), both of which are about the most downhome songs he ever cut.

Now if one were to get a free password for the Blues and Gospel from the 1920s and 1930s section of the Roots Music Listening Room, which the noble crunchland brought to our attention years ago, one could download a whole lot more of Tommy Johnson and Charlie McCoy.

McCoy's Last Time Blues, for instance, is a wonderful bit of slide guitar...