Before
hip-hop beefs, there were response records, also known as
answer songs, usually replies to well-known songs. There are a few key eras: blues and R&B recorded music in the 1930s through 1950s, including a number of responses to "
Work With Me, Annie" (1954), recorded by
Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, with answers including "
Annie had a Baby," and "
The Wallflower" by Etta James; and Big Mama Thornton's "
Hound Dog" (1953), with a quick response by
Louis Innis and Charlie Gore, made a mere week after the original was released, and
Rufus Thomas' "
Bear Cat" (1953),
Sun Records' first hit. Country, rock & roll, doo-wop and pop music picked up where the blues left off, with most activity in the 1950s to 60s. Two examples from this era are
"Are You Lonesome To-night" and "Who Put The Bomp," and responses to both. The most well known from the next decade was Lynyrd Skynyrd's "
Sweet Home Alabama" (1974), a response to Neil Young's "
Southern Man" (1970) and "
Alabama" (1972). Until the 2000s, no answer songs had charted as high as the original hits. That changed with
Frankee's "
F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)" (2004), a response to
Eamon's "
Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)" (2003), which was the first answer song to reach number 1 in the UK. Six years later and across the pond, Katy Perry's "
California Gurls" was a response to "
Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z. It was the first answer song to reach No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100. More Responses inside.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 31, 2012 -
53 comments
New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2011 -
67 comments
A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated
O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for
a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich
cinematography (a pioneer of
digital color grading), its
whimsical humor,
fluid vernacular, and
many subtle references to Homer's
Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out:
the music.
Assembled by
T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from
cheery ballads and
angelic hymns to
wistful blues and
chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a
heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage,
a paean and uchronia of the Old South.
Though the multiplatinum album was recently
reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian
D. A. Pennebaker's
Down from the Mountain, an
extraordinary yet
intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them
Gillian Welch,
Emmylou Harris,
Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend
Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by
John Hartford, an accomplished
fiddler,
riverboat captain, and
raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on
Hulu and
YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of
the set list's fascinating history.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 22, 2011 -
107 comments
There's a new crop of Australian bands that take inspiration from old blues, but twist the music in a strange fashion. The trend may have started with
CW Stoneking (Jungle Blues,
Love Me Or Die), who channeled the old bluesmen despite being a
young man. Its continued on to Sydney's
Snowdroppers, who started out as a
house band for burlesque shows and kept that dirty sensibility up with songs like
Rosemary ,
Do The Stomp, and their signature tune
Good Drugs, Bad Women (lyrics NSW). Frequent Snowdroppers touring partners
Gay Paris add a Southern horror twist (
House Fire In the Origami District, My First Wife? She Was A Foxqueen! ) and an antic stage energy. Some of the bands relay on gimmicks, like Adelaide's
The Beards, who sing about how
you should consider having sex with a bearded man and point out that
if your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two moms. The Beards recently performed at the
World Beard and Mustache Championships. Horror-country-rockers
Graveyard Train have picked up the torch dropped when Sydney psychobilly masters
Zombie Ghost Train (
Graveyard Queen) disbanded. Graveyard Train tunes like
Mummy,
Ballad for Beelzebub ,
Tall Shadow and
Dead Folk Dance combine cheerful Misfits horror theming with stompy country. Most of the singers from this loose scene are joining forces in Sydney this week to
pay tribute to Tom Waits.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Oct 4, 2011 -
32 comments
Hank Williams III has had a rocky relationship with his label, Curb Records, from the beginning, when his first album with them was
an album with his grandfather and father, "
thanks to the wonders of 21st century digital overdubbing." A decade and a half later,
Hank 3 was free from Curb Records, though the label snuck out one last album, even though the contract was over. It was actually
an old album from a decidedly non-country style, but that didn't stop Curb from
offering it as a Hank III album at a fire-sale discount, ensuring
Billboard Country charting. That was in June of this year. Jump ahead to September:
Hank 3 released three albums over four CDs, spanning his broad musical styles and beyond.
CD1:
country (of sorts);
CD2:
haunted ambient soundtrack and
Cajun-tinted country, with guests (
like Tom Waits);
CD3:
cattle-core;
CD4:
doom rock.
posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 20, 2011 -
91 comments
"Call me nuts, but I find extraordinarily endearing the improbable blend of country music traditionalism and tastefully restrained space-age guitar pyrotechnics that can be heard in these tunes." Yes, friends, the fine folks at WFMU are back with the long-awaited 2nd installment of the tasty and wonderful
Country Fuzz Spectacular!
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Aug 24, 2011 -
8 comments
Say, you wanna hear a sad song? Eddie Hinton was a guitar player, vocalist, and songwriter from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Co-writer of one of the tenderest, sexiest hits of the late 60s, Dusty Springfield's
Breakfast in Bed, Hinton was a key member of the world-famous
Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section from 1967 to 1971 (turning down an invitation from Duane Allman to be a member of the Allman Brothers Band) who worked as a studio musician on albums by Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, the Staples Singers, and Toots Hibbert, but his early success was
sidetracked by mental problems, booze, and drugs.
[more inside]
posted by BitterOldPunk
on May 31, 2011 -
22 comments
Wes Freed (some images NSFW) is a painter who combines Southern gothic subject matter with an outsider art style. He's best known for his work with the great Southern rock band
Drive-By Truckers and has designed most of their album covers, posters, and merchandise.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Mar 14, 2011 -
27 comments
In 1969 banjo virtuoso and bluegrass innovator Earl Scruggs parted ways with his
longtime musical partner
Lester Flatt and the band they led to
great popularity and acclaim,
The Foggy Mountain Boys. Scruggs wanted to push his musical gifts as far as they could go. In 1970 he was the subject of a PBS documentary where he played with artists such as Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, The Morris Brothers, The Byrds, Charlie Daniels, Bill Monroe, Joan Baez, various friends and family members, and even records a track accompanying a Moog. You can watch the whole thing online:
Earl Scruggs, His Family and Friends.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 28, 2011 -
17 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
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
Peter Grudzien lives in New York and makes psychedelic country music or at least used to, since only two albums of his material ever came out,
The Unicorn in 1974, and
The Garden of Love, which is mostly a collection of demos. His songs are varied, ranging from noise music to straight up country, and their subject matters are equally wide-ranging, from strange fare, such as
lyrics about his clone being at Stonewall, to
straight-up love songs. His best known original is probably
The Unicorn, a beautiful song whose
lyrics recast the early 70s New York gay demimonde in terms of a barren zombie-filled wasteland which will be reborn when the titular unicorn is found by the queen. Other songs on YouTube are
White Trash Hillbilly Trick,
New York Town and an instrumental cover of the Georgia Gibbs hit
Kiss Me Another. Finally,
here's a lovely cover of The Unicorn by Calgary folkie Kris Ellestad.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 21, 2010 -
16 comments
Bluegrass, it's said was invented by
Bill Monroe,
(yt) but where
would bluegrass have been without the banjo style of
Earl
Scruggs?
(yt) Together they
created a sound that has become known
as Bluegrass. In 1945 George Elam Scruggs joined up with
Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, two years later Scruggs left to form
a group with
Lester Flatt(yt), but not before gifting Monroe with
the amalgam that was and is Bluegrass. Other players like
Chubby Wise born 1915, Lake City, Florida(yt), and bassist Howard
Watts became known as the "Original Bluegrass Band".
[more inside]
posted by nola
on Feb 28, 2010 -
19 comments
"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)
posted by 1f2frfbf
on Mar 12, 2009 -
17 comments
Sometimes, when you've had your fill of people basking in the golden light of their self-righteous indignation, you just wanna hear a song about somebody telling those holier-than-thou-ers where to get off. Something like, say,
Harper Valley PTA.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 24, 2008 -
39 comments
Just the other day I was thinking about World War 2-era propaganda songs, so of course I gave a listen to
Smoke On the Water. Say what? You didn't know it was about kickin' Hitler's ass? Or Hirohito's? Guess you weren't listening well enough when ol'
Red Foley sang:
"...there'll be nothing left but vultures to inhabit all that land, when our modern ships and bombers make a graveyard of Japan..." I tell you, they just don't write songs like that anymore, friends. Anyway, by 1951 Red was looking forward to
Peace in the Valley.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 9, 2008 -
20 comments
It's 3 a.m., on some date in 1975, the white line is wavering in front of your amphetamine bleached eyes, your rig is barreling through the high plains north of nowhere and you won't see your woman for three more days, what 8-track do you need to get you through the night? Why,
Country Porn, of course.
Linked page is mostly safe for work, but NSFW audio files, and some text [more inside]
posted by 1f2frfbf
on Mar 12, 2008 -
27 comments
The
Delmore Brothers, hailing from north Alabama and active from 1926 to 1952, were an early country and western duo that married effortlessly relaxed (but very polished)
harmonies with soulful
country-boogie blues. Bob Dylan said of them: "The Delmore Brothers, God, I really loved them! I think they've influenced every harmony I've ever tried to sing." They're sure worth some
listens, y'all.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Nov 7, 2007 -
13 comments
For lovers of old-time, mountain banjo styles and songs,
Roscoe Holcomb and
Dock Boggs are revered figures. To many, however, plucker and singer
David Akeman remains uncelebrated or unknown, even by his stage name of
Stringbean. Is it because he
was for a time actually
famous as a
country music showbiz staple, and therefore lacks
folk cred? Or maybe the purists just can't get with those
low-hanging pants the man was known for, his original
hillbilly homeboy styling? Or was it cause on any given tune his
left hand would likely be
off the neck of the banjo more than on it? Whatever the reason, it's time folks took a new look at Stringbean. After all, the lines between
folk and commercial styles have
always been blurry in American music. Let's hear it for
Stringbeeeeeeeaaan! [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 17, 2007 -
15 comments
The DeZurik Sisters committed only six songs to record during their recording career, but were the first women stars of the
Grand Ole Opry and the
National Barn Dance. Now WFMU has
32 tracks of theirs from their early appearance as The Cackle Sisters on the Purina Checkerboard Squares Radio Show. Download away and hear the yodeling that swept the nation in the early 40s.
posted by 1f2frfbf
on Aug 2, 2007 -
7 comments
“We consider the 'primitive' music of blues singers such as Leadbelly to be more authentic than that of the Monkees.
But all pop musicians are fakes . . . Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor . . . have turned out their personal record collections to produce a persuasive defence of inauthenticity as the defining characteristic of great popular music[.]” (
via)
posted by jason's_planet
on Apr 20, 2007 -
144 comments
Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music Photgrapher
Henry Horenstein's
Honky-Tonk: Portraits of Country Music, 1972-1981 captures a sound in transition. This evocative collection of informal, black-and-white portraits of country musicians and fans in bars, backstage, and on the road illustrate a decade when smoky roadhouses and
venerated venues began to give way to the more mainstream
Countrypolitan or "Nashville" sound. Seminal artists like
Mother Maybelle Carter and
Bill Monroe mingled backstage with shinier newcomers like
Dolly Parton and
Anne Murray. But even as the commercial sound was dominating, youngsters mixing with old-timers sparked
the first wave of old-time/bluegrass revival, and some of the artists who got started then still
carry the
torch for a non-Nashville sound today. In this online exhibit you can watch it all unfold.
posted by Miko
on Feb 2, 2007 -
30 comments
