MetaFilter posts tagged with blues and music

bluestab's blog meets AfricanAfrican aka NegroArtist.com

y2karl — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:20:15 -0800

Chanteur puissant à la voix rocailleuse. And here is bluestab's blog And here, via Babelfish is bluestab's blog in an English of sorts. Then, while, looking for mp3s to match the tabs, I came across the universe of African American history and culture that is AfricanAfrican aka NegroArtist.com, a site so big it has two URLs. [Billy Mays] But, wait--that's not all! [/Billy Mays] Then, while looking for in the commons mp3s for any of the titles in bluestab's blog , I stumble upon a treasure trove of such in the 5000 series pages at Document Records. , the completist's completist pre-war jazz and blues label, And found even more even more in the Rare Recordings and Video page of AfricanAfrican, a small universe of texts, music and motion pictures of and on the African American experience. I am overwhelmed. Yoda says I: Truly a Labor of Love this is. And between the two--voila! We have a post!

The James Koetting Ghana Field Recordings

Kattullus — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:01:28 -0800

The James Koetting Ghana Field Recordings has 142 reels of Ghanaian music, almost all of which have more than one track, collected by ethnomusicologist James Koetting. There is a glossary of musical terms should you want to know a bit more about Ghanaian music and Koetting's notebooks should you want to know a whole lot more. All the music is wonderful but here are a few that stood out to me. Here are two tracks featuring postal workers whistling over a rhythm beat with scissors and stampers. Flute and drum ensemble. Brass band blues. And finally, twenty teenage girls singing over some nice rhythms. [requires RealPlayer]

Rory Block

Joe Beese — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:19:10 -0800

Aurora "Rory" Block has staked her claim to be one of America's top acoustic blues women, an interpreter of the great Delta blues singers, a slide guitarist par excellence, and also a talented songwriter on her own account. - AllMusic

Shakespeare in music

Matthias Rascher — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:25:12 -0800

Amazing to see how differently Shakespeare's work has been dealt with in music: there is Jerry Lee Lewis doing a blues on Othello. David Gilmour, former Pink Floyd lead singer, guitarist and songwriter, turned Sonnet 18 into a touchingly beautiful ballad. The Metal Shakespeare Company wrote a heavy metal song about Hamlet (III/1), "To bleed or not to bleed". And yes, there is Shakespeare rap, too: William Shatner (the very same!) raps about Caesar and British rapper Akala thinks he is a reincarnation of the bard. Last but not least, the Beatles tried their luck at Shakespeare, too (no music this time): they did a skit on the famous Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream (very rare footage!).

Ahmet Ertegun profiled by George W. S. Trow in 1978

Kattullus — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:42:39 -0800

Ahmet Ertegun was profiled by George W. S. Trow in The New Yorker in a classic piece back in 1978. Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to the US and he remained behind in D.C. studying medieval philosophy at Georgetown. Instead of devoting himself to his studies he founded Atlantic Records with his friend Herb Abramson. Trow charted how Ertegun moved from tramping through muddy, Louisiana fields in search of hot new sounds to the whirl of Studio 54. Below the cut are links to the songs mentioned in the article, as best as I could find, in the order in which they appear. Hugues Panassié, Le Jazz Hot (performed by Julie Andrews). I couldn't find any online versions of Dirty Mother for You but here's Roosevelt Sykes rippin' it up on Swedish TV in 1972. Couldn't find Ruth Brown singing A - You're Adorable, so here's the Sesame Street version. Ivory Joe Hunter, Since I Met You Baby. I couldn't find any footage or recordings of Bob Howard and His Rhythm, who recorded Button Up Your Overcoat and Memories of You for Atlantic Records, but here's Ruth Etting's 1929 version of the former and Sinatra's 1956 take on the latter. Here's a performance by Boyd Raeburn and His Orchestra who recorded The Lady is a Tramp and How High the Moon for Atlantic, here's Jaye P. Morgan doing the former and Les Paul and Mary Ford the latter. Sticks McGhee and His Buddies, Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee. Couldn't find Clovers' version of Skylark, so here's Bette Midler. I couldn't find a version of Don't You Know I Love You online. Joe Turner, Chains of Love. Ruth Brown, Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean. Joe Turner, Shake, Rattle and Roll. Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters, Money Honey. The Coasters, Searchin'/Young Blood. I couldn't find Chuck Willis' Hang Up My Rock n' Roll Shoes, but here's Bruce Springsteen covering the song and another song by Chuck Willis, What You Gonna Do When Your Baby Leaves You. Bobby Darin, Splish Splash. Ray Charles, What'd I Say? and I Got a Woman. The Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man, Satisfaction and Love in Vain. Stevie Wonder, Happy Birthday and Uptight/Satisfaction (with The Rolling Stones). Muddy Waters, Hoochie Coochie Man. Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. Professor Longhair, Tipitina (with The Meters). I can't figure out what that Trammps song is that's referenced, but here they're performing Shout. It's impossible to know what Johnny Dodds song Ahmet Ertegun is da da dooing along with, so here's some random Johnny Dodds. I couldn't find Brown Skin Man by Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders, but here's Charleston Mad (Priscilla Steward singing). Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, King Porter. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, You Can't Get That Stuff No More. Fred Astaire, Puttin' on the Ritz. I didn't find The Jealous Kind online. If I missed anything, please add a link.

O Black and Unknown Bards - Among Other Things, Regarding The White Invention of The Blues

y2karl — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:08:58 -0800

...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.

From Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values. In it, Sullivan recounts how in 1997 or 1998, he--as a junior editor at the Oxford American, fact checking an article by Greil Marcus--and John Fahey, then yet another recluse in a welfare hotel in Salem, Oregon attempted to decipher the lyrics of Geeshie Wiley's Last Kind Word Blues, which most of you may know from the soundtrack of Terry Zwigoff's documentary film Crumb. There are three or so copies and he, R. Crumb, would have one. Well, among many other things, at least one hearing of Last Kind Words is required for your Cultural Literacy Certificate. As is at least one hearing of I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape. NuGrape - now available again at Fred Meyers and QFC here in Seattle. And here is a discussion of the lively reader response in Harper's to his interpetation of Wiley's lyric. Not wanting to spend money on assorted essays on the Smiths, Beastie Boys and Jay Z, I read Unknown Bards standing up at Borders Books. An ethically suspect practice, no doubt--as is posting the article entire in pdf form. Or in a series of comments at a thread at Jazzcorner's Speakeasy. Well, the scrupulous may pay for it at Harper's where it originally ran. Unknown Bards discusses the CD American Primitives, Vol. II and two must read books, In Search of the Blues: The White Invention of Black Music by Marybeth Hamilton and Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson, and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald. Oh, and for the guitar players out there, here, from Guitar Seminars Dot Com, is a thread with a rough tab of Last Kind Word Blues by one Mr. Mando. For what it's worth, Marybeth Hamilton's overall thesis about the white invention of the blues sounds about right to me--and I was fascinated by her story of James McKune, the Father of Us All, to whom, more than any other person, we owe the most for the consensual reality we inhabit, and cultural construct we share, when we hear the word 'blues.'

...decades ago it was a lodging house run by the Williamsburg branch of the YMCA, and it was here, in a single room on the uppermost floor one unknowable day in the mid-1950s, that the Delta blues was born. Born, that is, in the imagination of one of the YMCA’s long-term residents, a record collector named James McKune. A journalist turned postal worker, reclusive, homosexual and alcoholic, McKune conducted his life as a long downward spiral: moving into the Y around 1940, losing job after job as his drinking intensified, and eventually ending up on the streets, where he died at the hands of a violent stranger in 1971. Yet during his years at the Y he scavenged junk shops and used record stores to build up an extraordinary collection of blues 78s. In time that collection became the driving force behind the 1960s blues revival, when white Americans and Europeans discovered - one might say invented - a tradition that they called the Delta blues, constructed out of scraps of old recordings that African-Americans had long left behind.

Oh, and for what it's worth, the title Unknown Bards comes from the James Weldon Johnson poem O Black and Unknown Bards.

Gabriel Brown and His Guitar

1f2frfbf — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:00:58 -0800

Two 78 sides by Gabriel Brown (yt) Gabriel Brown is one of those great unknowns of the blues whose story seems way too odd to be ignored, but he garnered only a scant paragraph in Edward M. Komara's otherwise excellent Encyclopedia of the Blues:

A strangely anonymous artist with no real discernible roots and a sophisticated background that that belies his concentration on slick country blues. Brown won first prize in the St. Louis National Folk festival of 1934 and was recorded for the Library of Congress. He became an actor, working with Orson Wells, among others and was taken up by record company owner Joe Davis. who recorded him extensively from 1943 to 1953 before he reportedly died in a boating accident. He achieved the notice of such famed field recorders as Alan Lomax and Zora Neal Hurston¹, no tin ears themselves. His professional association with the formidable character of Joe Davis² alone should have made him more visible to the legions of blues collectors out there, but sadly, he still languishes in the shadows as an unknown sideman. Collections of his music, a scant two records on the UK labels Flyright and JSP, do little to give him the respect he deserves. His loping guitar work brings to mind the work of Pink Anderson, and Lightning Hopkins, and his original songs have lyrics that compete with the best of the Delta Musicians. 1: Some of her recordings are available here (previously), and it should be noted he worked with her and Orson Welles in the controversial Federal Theater Project in Harlem. (object OP10, on this page is a photo of him in costume, sadly not online, and here is a poster of the production.) 2: An example story of the exploits of Joe Davis here

Don't Throw The Blues On Me So Strong

chuckdarwin — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:09:28 -0800

The extraordinary T-Bone Walker was born this day in 1910. Previously

Sleepy John Estes with Yank Rachell - Mailman Blues & African African

y2karl — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:06:06 -0800

Sleepy John Estes with Yank Rachel - Mailman Blues
More about Sleepy John Estes
From Stephan Wirz - American Music: Illustrated Sleepy John Estes discography
See also The Tennesseean Encyclopedia - Sleepy John Estes And here are 23 mp3s of Sleepy John Estes 1929-1940 from African African, an online encyclopedia of all things African-American, that for its Rare Recordings and Video page alone--featuring videos and mp3s of civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Angela Davis; vintage films about Negro life from the 1930s through the 1960s and leading to copyright free streaming mp3 pages of select vintage jazz and blues singers like John Adam Estes, which is but a tiny slice of all the African African site offers--is best of the web worthy in its own self. See also Meeting Yank Rachel by Ron Hacker In a similar vein, my friend Jack Cook took a trip down south when he was 19 and met everyone still alive who recorded a pre-war country blues 78. Jack's encounters with Furry Lewis and Sleepy John Estes on that trip are American Splendor style worthy of illustration by someone like R. Crumb. When Jack meet Sleepy John, John was living in a shack, thought the boards of the walls of which could been seen daylight, with his wife and children, furnished with a bed, a color TV and a pile of clothes. No one in Brownsville at the time seemed to know who he was. He later was moved to a low income apartment with solid walls and indoor plumbing, which is now preserved as a historical monument. Jack also stayed with Yank Rachel in Chicago on that trip and remembers Yank as one of the kindest and most generous people he ever met. He remembers bedding down on a sofa in the TV room and noodling on his National over Rollin' and Tumblin' on slide in open G. Yank stopped in to check on Jack and his friend and allowed as to how he hadn't heard that one for awhile--Yank, who'd played with Hambone Willie Newbern, the song's originator, in his very younger days--and took the guitar with a 'please' and then meditatively ran through about five choruses, each a unique variation as different from the last as the one before, and all this done without a hint of showing off. Jack recalls it as a marvelous moment. Jack also recalls Sleepy John as being exactly that--sleepy. He was narcoleptic, not there, dozing most of the time he wasn't playing. It would take him aawhile to respond to a question. But when he pick up a guitar and began to sing--one never heard the blues sung so deeply. That was when he came alive and more than that, a force of nature. Son House was like this when he sang as well. It was like he became possessed.

Tampa Red

flapjax at midnite — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:05:40 -0800

Hey kids, let's go way back, and spend a little quality time with Tampa Red, shall we? Cause, you know, you can't get that stuff no more, and if you missed him, you missed a good man.

The Anthology, notated.

1f2frfbf — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:15:25 -0800

"With this blog, I want to use the Folkways Anthology as a roadmap to explore American folk music and maybe other countries traditions along the way. I’ll use texts, images, music and videos gathered from my personal collection and from the net to make this work-in-progress enjoyable and educational the best I can." (via)

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.

The Hoodoo Man

Joe Beese — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:55:59 -0800

"He was one bad dude, strutting across the stage like a harp-toting gangster, mesmerizing the crowd with his tough-guy antics and rib-sticking Chicago blues attack." - All Music Guide. He was also a sharp-dressing mofo who, at the end of his storied life, was buried in "his creaseless sky-blue silk suit and matching homburg, a shiny trove of harmonicas laid out beside him, a pint of gin nestled nearby to ease his journey home". In the opinion of many, he was the greatest blues harmonica player of all time. Junior Wells' universally acknowledged masterpiece is his 1965 debut, Hoodoo Man Blues. More excellent early work is found on Blues Hit Big Town. Favorites among his later work include Drinkin' TNT 'n' Smokin' Dynamite - a live performance with Buddy Guy at the 1974 Montreux Blues Festival - and Come On In This House. A January 1978 performance at The Bottom Line in New York City can be found here. (site is twitchy - be patient) And for specialists: his hippie cash-in "The Hippies Are Trying" is here.

Figuring out harmonies mathematically is like reading the mind of God.

1f2frfbf — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:36:29 -0800

The occasionally updated The Celestial Monochord claims to be the "Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues" Highlights include: The connection between Gillian Welch and a rare South Carolina flower that was "discovered by a man who didn't name it, named for a man who didn't see it, by someone who didn't know where it was," . Did Tom Waits reinterpret Stephen Foster in Cold Cold Ground? A possible source for the title of Bob Dylan's breakout album. The connection between the New Lost City Ramblers and Voyager 1.

Delta Blues' OG's

swift — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:37:39 -0800

Pinetop Perkins survived being hit by a train. Bukka White was a professional boxer, a Negro League pitcher, and hobo. Sunnyland Slim was a hustler. Johnny Shines toured with Robert Johnson, and Honeyboy Edwards saw Johnson poison himself. Skip James was a laborer and bootlegger. Son House started out as a preacher but went to prison for killing a man. R.L. Burnside also killed someone, but said "I didn't mean to kill nobody, I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head." Big Boy Crudup's songs were stolen by Elvis Presley. Mississippi Fred McDowell did not play no rock 'n roll. To get more recording contracts, John Lee Hooker also called himself John Lee Cooker, John Lee Booker, Texas Slim, Birmingham Sam & His Magic Guitar, Delta John and Sir John Lee Hooker. Big Joe Williams was King of the 9 String Guitar. Snooky Pryor began his musical career as an Army bugler. Mississippi John Hurt learned to play guitar in secret. Paul Pena wrote Jet Airliner, knew Tuvan, and could throat sing. After a severe case of polio, Cedell Davis learned to play guitar left-handed using a kitchen knife. Earl Hooker was so good he never had a day job. Hound Dog Taylor, who was born with six fingers on each hand but cut off one of the extras with a razor blade, said his epitath should be "He couldn't play shit, but he sure made it sound good!" Previously 1 2 3 4 5 6

Just three old blues tunes, that's all.

flapjax at midnite — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:00:38 -0800

Ramblin' Thomas: No Job Blues (1928), J.D. Short: Lonesome Swamp Rattlesnake (1930), Bo Carter: My Baby (1940). Ramblin' Thomas. J.D. Short. Bo Carter. And one more for the road: a little of that trademark suggestiveness from Bo Carter: All Around Man.

John Lee Hooker and the fine art of translation

flapjax at midnite — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:11:11 -0800

You know, I want you to pick up on this. You know, these lyrics are something else. Just dig this. Yeah, whoever put those subtitles on that clip was... um, shall we say, not listening? Let's take a look at that one more time: "Now, I want you to pick up on this" = "Now I want you to pick upon this." "You know, these lyrics are something else." = "Your delirious is something else." "Just dig this." = "This did this."... Knuckleheads. Fortunately, some were listening a little more closely: the same introduction gets rather more accurate subtitles (albeit translated into French) in this clip. Well, whatever. Mainly it's just a great performance from a great bluesman. Here's more from the John Lee Hooker of the 1960s: The awesome, quiet power of Hobo Blues, plus Maudie and Tupelo. And a real treat: Hooker backed by the Muddy Waters band (!) at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1960. Just for reference (and a kick ass performance) here's the band with their usual leader at the same 1960 event in Newport, RI: Muddy Waters at Newport Festival 1960, Hoochie Koochie Man and Rollin' Stone.

Soon we'll be livin' it up!

jbickers — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:41:54 -0800

Lady Dottie's a "sixty-something blues queen with body pillows for boobs and more swagger than Space Ghost." Her band, The Diamonds, is a bunch of young hard-rockers. (Think Kings of Leon or the MC5 backing up Etta James.) Their new record kicks all kinds of ass - as do their live shows.

Martha Copeland, 20s-era blues singer

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:06:20 -0800

Though Bessie Smith is regarded as the queen of the early blues singers, Martha Copeland was singing the blues and its variants (and doing a fine job of it) back in the 20s as well. Head over to Internet Archive to hear Martha sing her versions of two of the tunes that made Bessie so famous: I Ain't Got Nobody and St. Louis Blues, the latter with backing vocal chorus from the Hall Johnson Choir. Check out her Dying Crap Shooter's Blues and Sorrow Valley Blues. And there's plenty of Martha Copeland goodness for your ears (RealPlayer) here and here. I've only been able to find one photograph of Martha Copeland: it graces the jacket of this Document Records release. The Internet Archive links to "I Ain't Got Nobody" and "St. Louis Blues" in this post are originally from a radio show, year 1928, which you can hear at the 20 minute point of this WFMU "Thomas Edison's Attic" broadcast of The Eveready Hour. From the excellent Honey Where You Been So Long (prewarblues.org): "Martha Copeland was a highly successful artist, whose talents were mismanged and wasted by Columbia. Copeland’s wonderful voice was often used to record substandard sides and copies of current hits by Bessie Smith and others rather than promoting her own work. Copeland became famous - but never of the level that her talent would have allowed. Copeland’s body of work is also lessened by the choices others made for her, but on her stand out tracks you can see how much talent and skill she possessed." Meanwhile, here's more great Bessie Smith for your listening pleasure: Gimme a Pigfoot, Yellowdog Blues, Mountaintop Blues, Downhearted Blues and A Good Man is Hard To Find.

Searching For Robert Johnson: Guitar expert spots new photograph on eBay auction

y2karl — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:26:03 -0800

...As he pored over the mass of texts and thumbnail photos that the eBay search engine had pulled up on that day in 2005, one strangely worded listing caught Schein’s eye. It read, “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???” He clicked on the link, then took in the sepia-toned image that opened on his monitor. Two young black men stared back at Schein from what seemed to be another time. They stood against a plain backdrop wearing snazzy suits, hats, and self-conscious smiles. The man on the left held a guitar stiffly against his lean frame. Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare... the more convinced he became that it depicted one of the most mysterious and mythologized blues artists produced by the Delta: the guitarist, singer, and songwriter whom Eric Clapton once anointed “the most important blues musician who ever lived.” That’s not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it’s Robert Johnson.

Searching for Robert Johnson reveals not only what may be the third picture of Robert Johnson but a Byzantine struggle over his legacy as well.

It’s good to be loved

nola — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:37:29 -0800

In the French Quarters of New Orleans you are very likely to come across various street entertainers. Grampa Elliott is one such performer.

Elliott Small has had a smattering of recordings over the years like the 1976 Malaco record discussed here

Since that time no record lables have produced any of his work that I can find. He spent his time performing on street corners in the Quarter until Katrina, some people feared the worse, but he turned up on Royal street in 2005 no worse for wear. Here is a story by Rick Bragg of the NYT Grandpa Elliot & Stoney B. Born in New Orleans, Grandpa Elliot began his career over 50 years ago, tap dancing on Bourbon Street, and now plays harp and sings harmony on Royal and Toulouse. He joins Chicago “Blues Man” Michael Stone (a.k.a. Stoney B.) and is oftentimes accompanied by Oscar Castro on guitar. Together and singularly, they form formidable singers and musicians, playing everything, as Grandpa puts it, “From A to Z.” It was Stoney who gave Grandpa his nickname (“He’ll give you a nickname too”) and adopted the role of “a nervous, oblivious, snatched off the Nervous Ward and set right down here” bumbler who, with Stoney’s virtuosity on standard blues renditions, is transformed into a perfect savant. Elliot has “done some recordin’ in (his) younger years” with “I’m A Devil and Girls Are Made For Lovin”. He loves the French Quarter and is saddened by the changes that he’s seen. But he maintains his mantra: “To keep me out you’d have to chain me to the outside.”

Mississippi Fred McDowell

flapjax at midnite — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:00:42 -0800

When the Rolling tones recorded an old blues tune called You Gotta Move on Sticky Fingers back in 1971, it was another instance of a tune by an old black man, known only to blues aficionados, suddenly becoming part of the consciousness of a gazillion people who probably never would've heard it otherwise. But let's pay a little visit to the man who originally wrote and recorded the song, Mississippi Fred McDowell, shall we? Here's a jumping version of Shake 'em On Down, his haunting Going Down to the River, the gospel blues of When I Lay My Burden Down, Highway 61, My Babe (you'll note the similarity to "This Train"), Louise, and his version of the American folk/blues standard John Henry. And don't miss the beautiful 1969 documentary featuring McDowell at Internet Archive, Blues Maker, which features some superlative acoustic performances, and footage of the people and environment of the Mississippi delta country.

Delicate Things

beelzbubba — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:05:19 -0800

Who you are is what you listen to: Prof. Adrian North of Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University recently published results of what the Beeb calls "the largest study of its kind" linking music listening habits to personality characteristics. His breakthrough conclusions? Heavy metal listeners, contrary to public perception, are not a "suicidally depressed" or a "danger to themselves and society in general. But they are quite delicate things." Ok, the personality descriptions read like a newspaper daily horoscope personality profile, but while I'm a jazz fan (outgoing, creative, high self-esteem), you Indie fans are "Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle" and in other news, "drivers who listen to blues music in their cars are the most likely to be caught speeding." And from the MeFi archives, Wanna come up to my place & see my record collection? Apparently, Professor North thinks this will help the Music Industry figure out how to market to us based on our personalities to stem declining CD sales. Good luck with that.

Lookin' for a home...

flapjax at midnite — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:49:52 -0800

In the little town of Enterprise, Alabama, there stands a bizarre statue that would make any card-carrying surrealist proud: an archetypical Greek goddess raises her arms toward heaven and holds high above her head... an enormous insect. Of course, it's the boll weevil. That cotton-eatin' critter inspired not only the world's only monument to an agricultural pest, but some great tunes as well, from a wide range of artists. [note: see hoverovers for link descriptions] The Doc Pomus-penned tune (sung by Elvis) Little Sister refers to the boll weevil in one of its lines. MeFier Astro Zombie's tune A Man is Coming, right here at MetaFilter Music, opens with a line addressed to a boll weevil.

There's Always One More Time

nola — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:36:17 -0800

September 14, 1998 "the Tan Canary" passes away. He started out as a gospel singer but went on to perform blues, soul, county, and jazz. In 1968 he covered the country standard "Release Me" and it became a hit. His audience grew, but stardom outside of his home in New Orleans was not to be his. Tom Surowicz pointed out in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Adams could sing sophisticated jazz. He could sing sentimental pop, or stirring gospel. He had precious few peers when tackling Southern deep-soul classics. And on the right night, with the right band, he all but owned the blues." I Won't Cry was his first hit 1959, and from the same site Part Of Me His song Hell Yes I Cheated is featured on an interesting compilation called More Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country Myspace