MetaFilter posts tagged with Blues

Before the world knew his name

flapjax at midnite — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:27:59 -0800

In 1965 guitar legend Jimi Hendrix was doing the chitlin circuit with R&B acts, where he honed some of the guitar artistry as well as the showman skills that would soon set the world on fire. Here's a taste of that pre-rock star Jimi, as a member of the Buddy and Stacy revue, doing the Junior Walker classic Shotgun. If you want more pre-rock star Jimi, well, there's... Here's Traveling to California, featuring some absolutely killing blues guitar work and exquisitely Hendrixian vocal, from the Jimmy James days (the clip features lots of great old pics of Hendrix with various bands) And here he is sounding great on the Muddy Waters chestnut I'm a Man. He's singing the blues, but his guitar solo here was moving beyond, big time. Kickass, no holds barred. His eye was on the future.

Now the blues pile up on me, I brought it all on myself

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 05 May 2013 07:51:46 -0800

Hey y'all! Here's your waaaaay laid back, deeeep Southern blues for the day, and contrary to the title, it's an easy pill to swallow. You dig that? OK, then, there's... Red Cross Store Rabbit On A Log Sitting Here Studying As The Time Roll On My Three Women

Lookee here woman, what's the matter now?

flapjax at midnite — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:53:36 -0800

Let yourself be carried along, floating nice and easy down that slow, lazy river of American collective unconscious, when you hear Jack Owens singing Jack Ain't Had No Water.

“Music exists in nature to make you smarter."

zaelic — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:47:10 -0800

Bob Brozman, the undisputed master of the National Resonator Guitar, has passed away at age 59. Ethnomusicologist, virtuoso fingerpicker, musical historian, and anarchist philosopher Bob Brozman fell in love with National’s metal body resonator guitars as a teenager and made them his life’s passion. He began as a teenager mastering Delta blues, jazz and Hawaian slide styles, and then performing with cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders. Brozman went on to record with legends like Hawaiian Tau Moe, Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya, and Mauritian maloya accordionist René Lacaille. He was fascinated by the music of colonial regions – how colonizers brought music that had a rhythmic emphasis on the first beat (like a march) while the people being colonized preferred emphasizing the off beats and playing in open tunings. His most recent efforts had been to explore the world of Papuan string band music - and he always liked to bring a bag of Bolivian charangos as gifts to see how different cultures adapted them to their music. “Music exists in nature to make you smarter. Commercial music is designed to make people stupid.”

Around the Beatles: a one-off TV variety show from 1964

filthy light thief — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 05:42:35 -0800

In 1964, The Beatles put together a one-off variety show, with musical numbers specially pre-recorded for the show, presented in the style of theater-in-the-round. Around the Beatles was aired in the UK and later that same year in the US, but never commercially released. The show includes The Beatles performing a scene from A Midsummer's Night Dream, with Paul McCartney as Pyramus, John Lennon as his lover Thisbe, George Harrison as Moonshine, Starr as Lion, and Trevor Peacock (the only actual actor in the lot) in the role of Quince. A color clip of that was posted previously, but you can watch the entire (almost) hour-long show with The Beatles' segments accompanied by seven other musical acts, on Dailymotion or YouTube, though it's in black and white. The full show features performances from other hit pop artists of the time, including Long John Baldry, one of the first British vocalists to perform folk and blues, the brilliant mimic of other artists, P.J. Proby, the girl group The Vernons Girls, who were formed by the Vernons Football Pools, singer Cillia Black, Sounds Incorporated, the Kentish 'Wall Of Sound', and the young Jamacian singer, Millie (Small). More fun facts: This was one of Trevor Peacock's earliest performances in an adaptation of Shakespeare. He went on to perform in various BBC TV adaptations of Shakespeare plays throughout the 1980s. Though The Beatles covered a ton of songs over the years, this rendition of Shout, originally by The Isley Brothers, is longer than the version included on Anthology I.

3 examples of great African-American music, with commentary and analysis

flapjax at midnite — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 06:53:40 -0800

Listening Guide to West End Blues by Louis Armstrong - Listening Guide to Backwater Blues by Bessie Smith - Listening Guide to Salt Peanuts by Dizzy Gillespie and His All Stars

Que estando triste, cantava

winna — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:56:20 -0800

Fado is a Portuguese musical genre which originated in the 1820’s in Lisbon. It has been enjoying a revival over the last twenty years, one of the most prominent recent voices being that of Mariza. In 2006 Simon Broughton did a documentary exploring the roots of the music. Via youtube, here is Mariza and the Story of Fado. The current historiography suggests that it was part of the cultural exchange between Brazil and Portugal which occurred when the Portuguese court fled Napoleon to Brazil in 1807. Fado was extremely popular in Portugal through the early twentieth century, but its popularity declined after the fall of the corporatist military regime in 1974 due to the way the regime had used the music to push their social agenda. Its revival is associated with a number of singers, among them Mísia, Cristina Branco, and of course Mariza herself. Men sing fado as well (of the two schools of fado, Lisbon and Coimbra, that of Coimbra is traditionally sung by men) - some of the men currently singing fado (both of Lisbon and Coimbra) are António Zambujo, Camané, Fernando Machado Soares (who is one of the great exponents of the Coimbra tradition) and Marco Rodrigues.

This Here is Rich Terfry: Forty One Odd Years (and a few days more)

filthy light thief — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 21:26:43 -0800

Happy belated birthday to Jesus Murphy, Haslam, DJ Critical, Uncle Climax (NSFW audio), Stinkin' Rich (NSFW audio), Dirk Thornton, Buck 65, or as his mom called him, Richard Terfry. Born in the year of the rat, and he's a Pisces, which makes him a rat fish, but by trade, he's a turntablist/ MC/ producer/ broadcaster. Generally he makes some form of hip-hop (some NSFW lyrics), though as of late, he's been broadening his style, as heard in his cover of Leonard Cohen's Who By Fire (previously) and Paper Airplane (official "lyric" video). In tribute to his 41st birthday, there's a lot more music inside. Born in 1972 in the farming community of Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia, Rich Terfry's musical background starts in hard rock and heavy metal, when he was a "a child soldier in the Kiss Army," and a fan of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. At age 16, he was scouted by the New York Yankees, but his dream of being a major league baseball player ended early with a shoulder injury. In the 1980s, he heard hip-hop on the radio (or maybe from his babysitter's roller-rink DJ boyfriend), and his path was set. He headed to Halifax in 1989, ahead of the local hip-hop boom of the early 1990s. In 1990, he recorded his first track, which Terfry confesses wasn't very good at all (the audio link is dead, but this is a live link). Nonetheless, it got play on college radio, where Terfry DJ'd as Jesus Murphy for more than a decade. Rich Terfry's first official recording was under the name Haslam, and he had two tracks on a Phunky Lobster cassette in 1993. He released a few more tracks in the following years, using a number of different stage names, including both Uncle Climax and Stinkin' Rich on the '97 cassette Cock Dynamiks (which is now online via Bandcamp), and his first solo Buck 65 album, Language Arts, that same year (re-released in 2001; Grooveshark stream). That year or the next, a 120-minute cassette opus titled Vertex was released, and a year or two later, a shortened version was put on CD (YT Playlist; Discogs entry), and followed a few years later by Man Overboard (Grooveshark), and Synesthesia, which was originally mis-pressed without track breaks. In 2002, Terfry signed to Warner Music Canada, seeing a number of his original albums getting remastered and re-released (and untitled tracks given names), including old material going back to 1988 and features more rapper bombast than later releases, under the title Weirdo Magnet (YT playlist), which keeps with the style of many past releases and doesn't include track titles. In 2002, Warner also released the new concept album, Square (MySpace stream). The whole album consisted of four long segments, each containing a few songs, and much of it instrumental. The next year saw the release of Talkin' Honkey Blues (YT playlist), which consisted of "a continual thematic series of songs revolving around a single river." Those first six Buck 65 albums were part of what the Language Arts series (with Weirdo Magnet retroactively listed as Language Arts #1), spanning from minor to major labels. The seventh installation, Strong Arm, was released as a free mixtape online that has since disappeared from Buck's site, but it's on YouTube in 3 parts: 1, 2, and 3. That interesting lean towards country/rural themes that continued into This Right Here is Buck 65 (YT Playlist), in which old songs are recast as "honky-tonk parables," replacing the original samples with actual instruments. He went even farther backwoods with Porch, a tour CDr that paired Terfry with even more pared down instrumentation, consisting of guitar, banjo, dobro, and mandolin, depending on the track. Secret House Against the World (Grooveshark) continued the path beyond hip-hop, with some odd turn-offs into turntablism, though on the whole, there's a lot more folk, blues, and jazz than hip-hop beats, and where such beats are present, they sound more like Tricky's Maxinquaye-era trip-hop. But hip-hop wasn't gone for good, as Terfry teamed up with DJ Signify and Scratch Bastid for the next album, Situation, a concept album/ode to 1957 (Grooveshark stream). Originally it was a casual collaboration without intention, where Scratch Bastid (Paul Murphy) made beats and sent them to Terfry to rap over. Those tracks were passed around their friends, eventually making it to Warner, who liked it enough to want it to be a proper album. There was a serious problem with the songs in their current form: Bastid made his beats from loads of uncleared samples. So the album was re-recorded with studio musicians, and the original demos faded from view, until Scratch Bastid was kind enough to share them. Before the release of Situation, Terfry posted on Buck65.com (and his message spread elsewhere) that while he wouldn't stop making music, he didn't see music as a viable full-time job, that making money off of records is "hopeless now," and touring was fun, but a rough life. He even mentioned giving his music away and no longer making physical releases. He wrote "It’s just a thought. But if anyone wants to give me a job (I’ll consider just about anything), get in touch." Situation was released on a number of formats, so he hadn't foresworn physical releases just yet, but in 2008, he took a full-time job on CBC Radio 2, as part of the stations's shift from a strong classical music focus to more pop sensibilities. He's still there, more than four years later, and the show he hosts, Drive, features more pop/indie rock and folk than anything else. For a taste of the artists, here's a YouTube playlist of 58 live performances on Drive. Terfry, "known to the kids as Buck 65," shared his "fave books" as part of the CBC Book Club. But that day job didn't mean an end to Buck 65. True to his word, Terfry released some non-physical music, for free: three huge albums worth of music, about 70 tracks, written and produced in 3 months. Tell him a country and your email address, and the music (plus a PDF booklet) is yours. Or, stream and/or download them directly from Soundcloud: Dirtbike 1, Dirtbike 2 and Dirtbike 3. In that same year, Terfy collaborated with Symphony Nova Scotia, as you can hear in this YouTube playlist, or in a slightly different breakdown on Grooveshark. There is a nice bit of chatter between the songs, with both Terfry and conductor/director Dinuk Wijeratne, who composed a piece (Hymnpeace Remixed) that Terfry improvised with live. After two decades of making music, Buck 65 returned with 20 Odd Years, first as 4 EPs, then as an album (MySpace stream), featuring a diverse number of guest artists alongside the diverse sounds. There are also a number of videos to accompany the album, both music videos and odd clips with Terfry talking on collaborations. And speaking of collaborations, Terfry has done a number over the years, from limited work with DJ Flip as Dirk Thornton (stream tracks on MySpace), to the much more electronic project Bike for Three! with Belgian producer Joelle Le aka Greetings from Tuskan (Bandcamp) and their single album More Heart than Brains (Bandcamp stream). If this is too damned wordy but you made it this far, Tom Hull has his notes on the broad Buck 65 overview through 2003 by covering the Warner Music Canada (re)issues, and Robert Christgau (a serious Buck 65 fan since hearing the first 6 minutes of the fourth quadrant of Square) hits Man Overboard to present, including comments on Buck 65's two free downloads and the Dirtbike mixtapes. There's also Terfry's own discography, which includes links to his personal reflections on selected works (no longer on his own site, but Archive.org has some snapshots). Bonus links

In 1999, Terfry did some jazz poetry stuff as Stinkin' Rich, with drummer Jerry Granelli, recording the album Music Has Its Way With Me; see and hear more in A Granellian Encounter, part 1 and part 2
Five "Show and Tell" videos, produced to promote Situation
20 videos on Buck 65's YouTube channel, though only half are music videos (and there are 8 other clips on his YT channel)

I believe, I believe my time ain’t long...

flapjax at midnite — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:02:58 -0800

“Dust My Broom”: The Story of a Song

Fuck You Cholly Mac!

timsteil — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:22:12 -0800

Pig Roast. Fish Fry. Camping with the Bluesmobile. T-Model Ford’s Shade Tree. The undying Southern charm that is, Junior’s Juke Joint.

From the Mississippi Delta to Dumfries and Galloway, and back again

Wordshore — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:56:32 -0800

Third Man Records, the US label owned by Jack White, is collaborating with Document Records to release vinyl-only remastered versions of blues artists. Document Records, run by Gary and Gillian Atkinson in Scotland, holds the largest known pre-1945 blues, jazz and country archive in the world, with 900 titles and around 25,000 tracks. Scotsman: Gary said he was taken aback by White’s apparent nervousness about speaking to him, until the singer explained how much the label meant to him: “He very, very excitedly told me about how, as a kid, the first bunch of albums he bought were from Document Records, and he had been a big fan of the label ever since. The thing is that his attitude reminded me of how I felt when I first started collecting as a boy.” BBC: "I had been looking for Blues records when I was a teenager and the older ones seemed to have been kinda swallowed up," Jack explained to 6 Music's Elizabeth Alker. "They were few and far between and the 78s were non-existent. At one point in Detroit a whole Blues collection was dropped off at this vintage record store, so that's when I first bought a whole batch of Document records - Tommy Johnson, Ishman Bracey, Roosevelt Sykes - I'd never seen those records on vinyl before." Deadline: The first three, vinyl-only albums, will feature remastered recordings by blues legends Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton and the Mississippi Sheiks ... Gillian said she thought White was “taking a chance” on the reissued recordings but added: “He told me there had already been 900 pre-orders per title.” Exclaim: Each of the records will be called The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, meaning that these releases will aim to collect all of the artists' respective recordings. Jack interviewed on NPR. Third Man Store online, and a promotional video and Charley Patton sample. Charley Patton - Spoonful Blues Mississippi Sheiks - Sitting On Top Of The World Blind Willie McTell - You Was Born To Die

J0hnny ''Gitar'' Wats0n - Livek0nzert 1977

y2karl — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:43:20 -0800

On tour at the height of his powers - a Young John Watson indeed: Johnny ''Guitar'' Watson - Livekonzert 1977 Here he covers Herbie Hancock and Grover Washington Jr, plays and sings Ain't That A Bitch, his current hit of the time, and a most operatic Gangster of Love in a very well shot concert from Radio Bremen back in the day. He is young, fresh and most definitely not phoning it in from the bar. This is the total showman at work. Not to mention being the funk fashion plate as well: dig that whole 1970s semiotic smorgasbord of those crazy platform shoes, that silver lame jumpsuit with that collar, the hair, the shades and that sparkling fedora. And did I mention it was well shot ? So, dig that Texas cheater -- like his fellow Lone Star blues guitar men Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Albert Collins and Guitar slim, he uses a capo -- and how he picks with his thumb. And you get to see it all. For quite a bit of biography, career overview granular in detail and a few sample licks, see Premiere Guitar's Forgotten Heroes: Johnny "Guitar" Watson and, for more analysis, also, Acid Logic: Interesting Mothers For Ya - Johnny "Guitar" Watson Also, here is The life and death of a guitar slinger, a memorial and meditation by Andy Gill of the Independent, written upon Watson's death, while singing Superman Lover or so the legend goes on stage in Yokohama, Japan in 1996. And, for the record, here is the cover of his A Real Mother For You. That is his real mother, too. Originally, there were ample servings of Watson in concert, usually in Europe and, anyway, back in the recent day, I was going to do a smorgasbord megapost featuring, among other things, at least three very different presentations of Gangster of Love from three different excellent concerts with Mr. Watson decked out three different sets of stylin' funky chic threads to boot. But alas, I came by to find almost all of it taken down -- apparently his heirs try to make YouTube pull them as soon as any live performances are posted. Which makes no sense to me -- it would seem the more exposure he gets, the more they should benefit in the end. So, um, enjoy your rosebud while ye may -- this just showed up and is so very fine and just too darn hip to not post.

The king of love is dead.

ChuraChura — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:03:24 -0800

On April 7, 1968 - three days after Martin Luther King's assassination - Nina Simone performed the Martin Luther King Suite for the first time at the Westbury Music Festival in NY: Sunday in Savannah, Why (The King of Love is Dead), Mississippi Goddam.

"He was extremely difficult to try and trade records with."

Lorin — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:19:16 -0800

Yazoo Records was founded by J. Nicholas Perls not as a way to distribute Robert Crumb's music related artwork, but as an extension of a serious record collecting habit shared by himself and a handful of other 78-rpm country-blues afficianados. Following in the footsteps of trailblazer Harry Smith and his famous anthology, over the years Perls and a few employees (notably Stephen Calt who wrote many if not most of the brilliant Yazoo liner notes) released dozens of collections of rare sides—from the raunchy blues of Bo Carter to the Hawaiian guitar of Roy Smeck. Even in the age of YouTube, Yazoo releases retain some of their original obscurity. Nevertheless, an almost complete example of their LP-era "7 tracks per side" compilation format follows: Guitar Wizards 1926-1935 (Yazoo L-1016) SIDE A Carl Martin - Farewell to You Baby Carl Martin - Badly Mistreated Man Billy Bird - Mill Man Blues Blind Blake - You Gonna Quit Me Blues Blind Blake - Wabash Rag Tampa Red - Boogie Woogie Dance Tampa Red - Bumble Bee Blues SIDE B Blind Blake - Guitar Chimes Blind Blake - Panther Squall Blues Sam Butler - Poor Boy Blues Sam Butler - Jefferson County Blues Sam Butler - Some Scream High Yellow William Moore - Ragtime Millionaire Carl Martin - Joe Louis Blues Note: title quote from Gayle Dean Warlow on Nick Perls.

Whips, whiskey, women, work, weapons, cars and cadence. But no hockey.

Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:59:41 -0800

Jump steady, Black Betty! Bam-A-Lam!
Yeah, Black Betty! Bam-A-Lam!
Looky yonder Black Betty! Bam-A-Lam!
Whoa Black Betty! Bam-A-Lam!
Yeah, Black Betty! Bam-A-Lam!
She's so rock steady! Bam-A-Lam!
She's always ready! Bam-A-Lam!
Whoa, Black Betty! Bam-A-Lam! The earliest recordings of the American folk/work song "Black Betty” were made in the early 1930s by American folklorists/musicologists John & Alan Lomax, who first recorded Blues legend Leadbelly. Odetta recorded a version of the song as part of a medley with “Looky Yonder” and “Almost Done”. While several artists in the mid-20th century recorded the song, the 1977 version by Ram Jam became a hit and catapulted the song into much wider exposure, while also becoming the version most cemented in the public’s awareness. More recent versions include Sheryl Crow, Ministry, and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels (with Sebastian Bach & Mick Mars). Volkswagon’s 2001 Superbowl ad featured the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s take on the song. There are many suggested interpretations of the song’s lyrics. One is that it refers to an English marching cadence used by soldiers: Betty was a black flintlock musket, a precursor to the Brown Bess used by the British Army for over 100 years, with “BAM-A-LAM” being the sound of one being fired. Another possible origin is a name for a bottle of whiskey from the English/Scottish border region. In 1737 Benjamin Franklin wrote an article for the Pennnsylvania Gazette titled “The Drinker’s Dictionary” where “He has kissed black Betty” [sic] is listed as a descriptor (among very many) for someone who is drunk. “BAM-A-LAM” could also be evoking the sound of a bullwhip down South on plantations and prison farms like Sugar Land and Angola. The lyrics could also refer to the bumpy ride and/or the slamming doors of the horse-drawn prisoner transfer/police wagon known as the Black Mariah. Ever since the Ram Jam version, groups like the NAACP and the Congress on Racial Equality have considered the song racist for the literal interpretation of the lyrics, specifically that they refer to a black woman and are insulting to Black women in general. While the driving beat and call-and-response aspect of the rock versions are still used at sporting events to get the crowd fired up, in 2006, the University of New Hampshire discontinued the playing of the Ram Jam version before hockey games. The New Zealand A1 Grand Prix racing team uses a reworked cover of the Ram Jam version as a theme song for their car Black Beauty. “Black Beauty” is also the name of the Green Hornet’s car, a bestselling 1877 novel about a horse and kindness to animals, and an archaic street name for stimulants.

Revelator is a Revelation!

spock — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:02:40 -0800

You may remember this oldie but goodie from 1969: Everybody’s Talkin’ (Harry Nilsson) Now, let’s blues it UP. Zowie! Surely I can't be the last person in the world to hear about the Tedeschi Trucks Band (or can I be?).

"the arts are just a part of the weapons of life"

Kattullus — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 10:08:19 -0800

The poet Jayne Cortez passed away this past December 28th in New York City (New York Times obituary). She started publishing her poems in the late 1960s and in the 70s began performing her poetry backed by music, first in collaboration with bassist Richard Davis, and then backed by her own band The Firespitters. Some of their tracks have found their way to YouTube: I See Chano Pozo, If the Drum Is a Woman, There It Is, Maintain Control & Economic Love Song I, Everybody Wants to Be Somebody, Takin' the Blues Back Home, Talk to Me (for Don Cherry), I've Been Searching, You Can Be and Endangered Species List Blues. Just two years ago she performed solo with her son by Ornette Coleman, drummer Denardo Coleman: Find Your Own Voice, I'm Gonna Shake and She Got He Got. In 1997 she was featured on University of California television network in the series Artists on the Cutting Edge where she read poems and discussed her work. Finally, here's a brief clip from the 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, where she was interviewed.

Scenes from a Curriculum Vitae: Ike Turner & Associates

y2karl — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 03:43:03 -0800

On piano at 71: Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy
On piano at 20: Howlin' Wolf - How Many More Years
On guitar at 34 and on fire at 26: Ike and Tina Turner - Shake·A Fool in Love·It's Gonna Work Out Fine·Please, Please, Please·Goodbye, So Long In his time, he performed with more than one force of nature.

Shit. What? Rollers. No. Yeah. Shit.

Frayed Knot — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:28:31 -0800

The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers.

Excello Records roundup

flapjax at midnite — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:07:34 -0800

From the early fifties to the mid-seventies, the Nashville based Excello Records released the kind of raw blues, R&B, and rock & roll that maybe wasn't ever going to make it to the Top 40, but was full of grit and sweat and soul, for those who liked their American roots music unadulterated. Their most well-known release was probably Slim Harpo's Baby Scratch My Back, but rocking blues like Lazy Lester's I Hear You Knockin' and Leroy Washington's Wild Cherry are little unpolished gems which deserved their place on any self-respecting cheap bar's juke box. Lowdown blues like Lonesome Sundown's My Home Is a Prison also found a welcome home at Excello, as did tunes that blurred the distinctions between country/rockabilly and R&B, like Lazy Lester's I'm A Lover Not A Fighter, and latin-tinged swamp-rock chuggers like Charles Sheffield's It's Your Voodoo Working. Then there were the straight up country tunes (reminiscent of that classic early Johnny Cash sound) like Al Ferrier's I'm the Man, or rough-hewn, raucous rockabilly like Johnny Jano's Havin' A Whole Lotta Fun. In short, Excello Records was a microcosm of the sound of the South, and though their artists mostly never achieved much in the way of wider national fame, they are an important part of the patchwork quilt of American pop music history. The tunes included in this post are just the tip of the iceberg: there's so much to explore from this one amazing little label. Happy searching!

Xmas Eve Eve Eve 2012 Xmas Present: Johnny ''Guitar'' Watson

y2karl — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 14:34:50 -0800

Some say that surf guitar started here: Johnny Guitar Watson - Space Guitar
Young John Watson's first appearance on wax: Chuck Higgins & his Mellotones - Motor Head Baby
Also back in the day: Johnny "Guitar" Watson - The Bear
And not so far back in the day - a Frank Zappa jam with Tuva throat Singers, Chieftains and Johnny ''Guitar'' Watson And for the meat and potatoes part of the post: Johnny "Guitar" Watson - In Concert

Ry Cooder and the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces - Let's Have A Ball, a film by Les Blanks

y2karl — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 18:42:58 -0800

Ry Cooder and the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces - Let's Have A Ball, a film by Les Blanks
This is the complete show from the Catalyst in Santa Cruz in March 1987. Via The Iwebender Channel

Love that Maria Elena.... Let's Have A Ball Jesus On The Mainline How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb Down In Mississippi Maria Elena Just A Little Bit The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor) Crazy About An Automobile Chain Gang Down In Hollywood Good Night Irene Ry Cooder - guitar, vocals; Jim Keltner - drums; Van Dyke Parks - keyboards; Jorge Calderon - bass; Flaco Jimenez - accordion; Miguel Cruiz - percussion; Steve Douglas - sax; George Bohannon - trombone; Singers: Bobby King, tenor; Terry Evans, baritone; Arnold McCuller, tenor; Willie Green Jr, bass

Tina Turner, Holland 1971

Egg Shen — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 11:47:53 -0800

"She's known as the hardest working young lady in show business today. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Tina Turner." She can do The Beatles. She can do The Stones. And, oh my, can she sing the blues. Oh, yeah... she does a Creedence number too.

Bluesman Tommy Johnson gets some respect

flapjax at midnite — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:11:41 -0800

Legendary Mississippi Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson is finally getting a headstone on his grave, more than a half century after his death. Recommended celebratory listening, then, is this 9-song YouTube playlist, which starts out with "Cool Drink of Water Blues" (a shining example of Johnson's quavering falsetto - "looooooord, lordy looooord") and continuing with pre-war blues classics like his "Big Road Blues", "Big Fat Mama Blues", "Canned Heat Blues" and more.

Who loves ya? Scott Bradlee, apparently.

KChasm — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 05:14:28 -0800

Scott Bradlee is probably best known around the internet for his ragtime reinterpretation of classic 80's hits (previously), but that's certainly not the only thing he's done. There are the relatively straighter covers, for example. And then there's the other stuff. Here's "Regulate" on toy instruments and cello. Here's Bruno Mars' "Grenade" and also "Suicide Is Painless". Here's three different kinds of New York. Here's that one super-obscure Gotye song and some kitchenware. Here's that less obscure Cee Lo Green song. Here's Nickelback, only decent and Motown. Here's "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with a history lesson attached. Here's the rest of his YouTube channel. Here's his new solo piano mashup album, which you can buy for eight bucks USD.