Oh yeah. There he is, Mr.
RL Burnside, in the year of nineteen and seventy eight, Independence, Mississippi, porch fulla kids, singin' about
when his first wife left him, million-dollar smile on his face. And there he is again, with his guitar and amp, out by the barb wire fence, a
poor boy a long way from home. These two little gems just added to the
Alan Lomax Archive YouTube channel, where you'll also find some wonderful newly-uploaded clips (filmed in 1983) from
fretless banjo plucker Tommy Jarrell, the toast of Toast, North Carolina.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Mar 15, 2012 -
9 comments
Within that small and very specific sub-genre of musical Americana identifiable as the
train imitation, there is one amazing performance, from 1926, that set the standard:
Pan-American Blues. The man who recorded it did a fine and fanciful job of evoking the sounds of a
fox chase as well, and his rhythmically compelling solo rendition of
John Henry stands as testament to the potential for musical greatness achievable by one man and a humble harmonica. He was an African-American who was a founding member of the Grand Ole Opry, a musical institution that we rarely (as in,
never) today associate with black people, and his touching and tragic story, documented
here, is one that will be of interest to those concerned with the racial, economic and socio-cultural history of American popular music. He stands at one of its more unexpected intersections: his name is
DeFord Bailey.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2010 -
15 comments
Born in Big Sandy, Texas in 1874,
Henry Thomas was one of the oldest black musician who ever recorded for the phonograph companies of the 1920′s and his music represents a rare opportunity to hear what American black folk music must have sounded like in the last decade of the 19th century.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 11, 2010 -
21 comments
Bobby Charles 1938-2010. Songwriter, musician's musician and cultural treasure, he died on last Thursday in Abbeville,Lousiana. In the 1950s, he wrote Fats Domino's
Walking to New Orleans, Bill Haley and the Comet's
See You Later, Alligator and recorded for Chess records. His
eponymous Bearsville album recorded in Woodstock in 1972 has been described as the best Band album released under another name.(Check out
Small Town Talk there.) He appeared as well in the Band's farewell concert filmed as The
Last Waltz. He made an enormous contribution to American popular music.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Jan 19, 2010 -
25 comments
"Men working on the river would move in time to the beat of the music. It was everywhere: on the street, in the church. In the tonks and barrelhouses where people went to be together. Like the beating of a big heart. It gave everyone a good feeling." The Cradle is Rocking is a delightful 12-minute film that, though somewhat damaged (Folkstreams has found what may be the only surviving print), is highly recommended viewing for anyone interested in American roots music: in this case, New Orleans jazz. The film's thoughtful and affable narrator is trumpeter
George "Kid Sheik" Cola, who can be heard along with Captain John Handy serving up some fine old-school Dixieland jazz
here and
here.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 9, 2009 -
13 comments
Mike Seeger, folk musician and folklorist, passed away on
August 7, 2009. Half-brother to Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger was self-taught at banjo, fiddle, guitar, autoharp, and dulcimer, among other instruments. Additionally, Seeger spent decades traveling the country to collect and document American folk musicians, many of whom would have been forgotten were it not for his efforts. In the late 50's, Seeger, Tom Paley, and John Cohen founded the old-time string band
The New Lost City Ramblers. The Ramblers countered the rising tide of bluegrass music with a return to old-time traditionals and were a significant influence on the mid-century folk revival. Seeger's death coincides with the upcoming release of an
Arhoolie Foundation documentary about the Ramblers (warning: the documentary link contains an embedded video). On Youtube:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5.
[more inside]
posted by signalandnoise
on Aug 11, 2009 -
20 comments
The
foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the
ankle bone connected to the leg bone, the
leg bone connected to the knee bone, the
knee bone connected to the thigh bone, the
thigh bone connected to the hip bone, the
hip bone connected to the back bone, the
back bone connected to the shoulder bone, the
shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, the
neck bone connected to the head bone, now
hear the word of the lord...
and be sure to check the hover-overs for link details on all this bony business,
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 2, 2009 -
24 comments
Eighty one years ago to the day, barber, banjoist and balladeer
B.F. Shelton travelled from his home in Kentucky to take part in a recording session in Bristol Tennessee. Now referred to as the "
Bristol Sessions", these recordings are widely viewed as some of the most important and influential in American music history. The four songs Shelton recorded that day, stark, simple and immensely powerful in their unadorned honesty, can all be heard
here. After Bristol, Shelton never recorded again.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jul 29, 2008 -
16 comments
Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old, a film by Alan Lomax, takes a loving look at the talents and wisdom of elderly musicians, singers, and story-tellers from southern American folk traditions. All the musicians featured in the film have soul and musical energy to spare: great, great performances and engaging reminiscences make this film a real treat. Please see the [more inside] for a collection of links to several of the outstanding performers featured in the film.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Mar 25, 2008 -
15 comments
And here we have a couple of YouTube productions, screensaverish animations of photos and lyrics to the original recordings:
Robert Petway - Catfish Blues and
Tommy McClennan - It's Hard To Be Lonesome. This is mostly about Petway and
Catfish Blues but you can't mention Petway without mentioning McClennan, as they ran together in their time and as both did versions of
Catfish, a song canonical in Delta Blues, recorded and performed by nearly everyone--
Muddy Waters - Rolling Stone, for example. Petway just happens to be the first person to record
Catfish, and quite possibly the person who wrote it and certainly. to my mind, at least, the person who nailed it... in the uptempo version at the very least.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Feb 28, 2008 -
8 comments
Each of the following
MySpace Music pages features bios and/or photos and/or videos and/or miscellaneous related materials and/or up to four songs by each of the following Old Time, Traditional, Appalachian folk (and related) artists:
Lowe Stokes,
Clarence Ashley,
Charlie Poole,
Gid Tanner and the
Skillet Lickers,
Roanoke Jug Band,
Roscoe Holcomb,
Hobart Smith,
The Weems String Band,
Burnet & Rutherford,
Bascom Lamar Lunsford,
John Masters,
Dock Boggs,
Tampa Joe & Macon Ed,
William Stepp,
Buddy Thomas,
Buell Kazee,
Isidore Soucy,
John Salyer,
Cousin Emmy,
Luther Strong,
Elizabeth Cotten,
Fred Cockerham,
G.B. Grayson,
Melvin Wine,
Lewis Brothers,
Uncle Dave Macon,
George Lee Hawkins and
Wilmer Watts. And here's some general Old Time (etc.) pages, featuring various artists:
Dust To Digital,
Traditional Music of Beech Mountain and
North Carolina Folklife Institute.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 24, 2007 -
17 comments
John Fahey - Fare Forward Voyagers
John Fahey - Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIVClips from a 2 hour performance at
the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, Oregon from 1976. Among the cognoscenti at
FaheyGuitarPlayers, the consensus is that these clips display Fahey in rare form on a very good night.
Apart from Fahey,
Bohemia Visual Music aka Mike Nastra, the contributor of these clips, provides an interesting assortment of way too hip YouTubery offerings including, among others, Spike Jones, Dimandas Galas, Gene Krupa, Tuxedo Moon, Sun Ra, Pere Ubu and the Holy Modal Rounders.
posted by y2karl
on Oct 16, 2007 -
9 comments
Here is Uncle John Scruggs singing and playing
Little Log Cabin Round the Lane in RealAudio
Dial Up and
DSL format. The dancing is great and I do like the walk-on kitten part, myself.
That's from the
Center For Southern African-American Music Video Link Page. Their
audio link page is a wonder, too with individual artists galore. But, for the real deal, check out the
Various Artist compilation album pages. Those may be 20 second of so mp3 clips but, still, those Yazoo, Document and Folkways albums are the bomb and there you get a taste of what they offer. And anywhere you can hear, for example, even a few bars of Blind Alfred Reed's
How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live ? or Estil C. Ball and Lacey Richardson's
Trials, Troubles, Tribulations rules in my world.
posted by y2karl
on Jun 29, 2007 -
9 comments
Folkstreams.net has two goals. One is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures. The other is to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The filmmakers were driven more by sheer engagement with the people and their traditions than by commercial hopes. Their films have unusual subjects, odd lengths, and talkers who do not speak "broadcast English." Although they won prizes at film festivals, were used in college classes, and occasionally were shown on PBS, they found few outlets in venues like theaters, video shops or commercial television. But they have permanent value...
folkstreams.net Currently streaming are the films
The Land Where the Blues Began ,
Cajun Country ,
Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now ,
Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance: Buck, Flatfoot and Tap ,
Ray Lum: Mule Trader and
Pizza Pizza Daddy-O , among
many others.
posted by y2karl
on Oct 6, 2006 -
14 comments
Made most popular to many Americans as the closing song for the Grand Ole Opry programs, Will The Circle Be Unbroken was written in 1907 by Ada Habershon, an intensely religious young woman and acquaintance of
Dwight Moody and
Ira David Sankey. The music was "composed" by
Charles Gabriel, a popular songwriter and composer of the era who is often solely credited with the song, but while he may have put the notes down on paper, the tune itself already existed as the African-American spiritual Glory Glory / Since I Laid My Burden Down. [lots more inside]
posted by luriete
on May 26, 2006 -
18 comments
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine. Dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooded legs, two wire legs, two spring legs–all sorts of legs and no legs–what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!Dancing Across The Color Line. In 1842, Charles Dickens came to New York City, where initally, he was wined, dined and theatrically entertained by the upper crust. Afterwards, he then went slumming and soon saw
William Henry Lane, aka
Master Juba, a man of whose dancing a number of historians say is where
tap dance began, step lively in a cellar in the neighborhood called Five Points--the very same neighborhood creatively misrepresented recently by one Martin Scorcese in
Gangs of New York. The dance he did was known as Pattin' Juba and the first time it's rhythm--which we think of as the
Bo Diddley beat--was used on a sound recording was in 1952, when Red Saunders and his Orchestra, with Dolores Hawkins and and the Hambone Kids recorded
Hambone.
Continued within
posted by y2karl
on Apr 4, 2005 -
3 comments
Jump Jim Crow, through the hoops of one Robert Christgau's erudition as he surveys the literature extant in
In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter, through multiple readings of
Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop,
Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World and and
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Consider, too,
The Minstrel Cycle from
Reading The Commitments and other various and sundry attempts to peek
inside the minstrel mask—all multiple readings reading blackface minstrels from the
pejorative to the
explorative, subversive to oppressive, past to future, unfolding tesseractly, if not exactly, with singing, dancing
and extraordinary elocutions. Buy your tickets and step within for
The Meller Drammer of Minstrelsy in
The Minstrel Show 2.0…
posted by y2karl
on Mar 31, 2005 -
17 comments
My Back Pages--Interesting in his own right
Eyolf Østrem still maintains the fan's fan tab, chords and music site, the standard by which all others are judged. I just revisited it the other night, while trying to recall how that little run in Dylan's version of
Delia went, and dang, if it didn't have the
back story of that ballad. I love this kind of stuff. The source of that account, John Garst, is the folklorist king of such research--he puts
John Henry at a railroad tunnel near Leeds, Alabama, just east of Birmingham on September 20, 1887, for example. Murder and heroic death ballad back stories are of extreme interest to me, so I decided to post a few more here:
Frankie and Albert,
Frankie and Johnny,
Casey Jones and
Stagger Lee. Did I say I love this kind of stuff?
posted by y2karl
on Sep 23, 2004 -
10 comments
