MetaFilter posts tagged with folk and americana

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!

Always been a rambler....

signalandnoise — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:53:48 -0800

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. Bob Dylan said of NLCR: "The New Lost City Ramblers was Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley. They never made the big time like the Kingston Trio, but they never did wear striped shirts. One of the things that the New Lost City Ramblers did was uncover great old songs -- songs that you could only find in those days, in piles of 78s in somebody's barn. They breathed new life into those songs, and their records stand the test of time, just like the originals." Here's Bob Dylan and Mike Seeger performing a duet of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown." And just because it gives me a chance to bring up another favorite old-time musician of mine, here's Mike Seeger performing and chatting with Roscoe Holcomb. - Radio Interview with Mike Seeger - Seeger discussing and performing the song "Walking Boss." - New Lost City Ramblers Discography

Modulating for the Lord!

flapjax at midnite — Sat, 02 May 2009 02:07:17 -0800

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,

You like vinyl? I've got your vinyl right here.

msalt — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:55:31 -0800

Desperate Man Blues Edward Gillen's documentary about Joe Bussard, renowned collector of 25,000+ blues, folk and gospel 78rpm records from the 20s and 30s. It's about the hunt and the hunter, as much as what he found. One week only on Pitchfork TV As plugged by UbuRoivas previously.

Robert Petway - Catfish Blues

y2karl — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:03:57 -0800

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.

It is remarkable, given the later ubiquity of 'Catfish Blues', how little solid information there is about Robert. He was born about 1908, probably on the J.F. Sligh Farm near Yazoo City, like his running buddy, Tommy McClennan. His publicity photograph shows a small man with a toothbrush moustache, a lantern jaw, and big, guitar player's hands. Most unusually, he apparently saw no reason to don the sharp suit and hand painted tie so often favoured by musicians (Tommy McClennan included) when facing the camera; photographed in his working man's blue duckins, Petway's only concession to style was a rakishly angled trilby. McClennan and Petway would play at house parties, and in the juke joint at Three Forks crossroads, nowadays famous as the place where Robert Johnson was poisoned.

...thus reads the text on the Document Records page for Mississippi Blues Vol. 3 Complete Recordings of Robert Petway, Mississippi Matilda, Sonny Boy Nelson comes these Coralized mp3s of Petway's Catfish Blues as well as his and McClennan's Boogie Woogie Woman. If these don't work, the links for them on the page will. What they give you are a cpuple of slices of 1940s Delta Blues in their original context as downhome juke joint dance music performed by two diminutive men--McClennan evidently stood 4'10" and weighed in at 133, according to David Honeyboy Edwards--with big voices and punchy percussive National guitars. As guitar players, they are limited in one sense, expansive in another. As singers, well, they are shouters and they tear it up.Regarding Catfish is Robert Petway - Acoustic Guitar Forum. And, also, at Weenie Campbell's Keys To the Highway forum, Robert Petway--Keys/Positions for his Songs is a comment in the thread concerning Tommy McClennan--Keys/Positions for his Songs. As for Tommy McClennan, go to the Blues & Gospel from the 1920s & 1930s section after you join up--for free--at the The Roots Music Listening Room, which was brought to our attention by one crunchland, and you will find Baby, Don't You Want To Go, Cross Cut Saw Blues, Down To Skin And Bones, Drop Down Mama, Elsie Blues, and I'm A Guitar King--ha!--among a dozen or so others of McClennan's 40 odd song output. And, for the record, compare and contrast their portraits on their respective Stefan Wirz' Robert Petway and Tommy McClennan pages. And here iare two more pages: Tommy McClennan and Tommy McClennan, Whiskey Head Woman: The Complete Recordings 1939-1940

Vintage Musical Americana featuring The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection

y2karl — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:49:39 -0800

Here is Naomia Wise from The Max Hunter Folksong Collection. Folk songs, more or less, sung by real folks, collected in Arkansas by Max Hunter between 1956 and 1976. On a related tip, here is Historic Music--recorded popular music from the 1920s, with a large selection devoted to music from the First World War. And here, from Manufacturing Memory: American Popular Music in the 1930's, are the Popular Music Jukebox 1930-1934 and the Popular Music Jukebox 1935-1939 to complete this day's vintage musical Americana experience.
The Max Hunter songs are in RealAudio. Realplayer haters can use Real Alternative aka Media Player Classic.

Honking Duck - Listen to Old Time Music from 78s

y2karl — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:35:31 -0800

Hill Billie Blues by Uncle Dave Macon and his Fruit Jar Drinkers is under 1924 at Honking Duck. You could search that by title as well. Or you can look up by Artist as in Al Hopkins & His Buckle Busters.
Need I mention all are in RealAudio ? Hate Realplayer ? Well, as noted before, fight the power and use Real Alternative aka Media Player Classic instead. It's not exactly my favorite style of interface but they certainly do afford a large selection.

Down with the old folks at... MySpace.

flapjax at midnite — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:04:35 -0800

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 Bogg s, 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. And though they present all kinds of old music (not only Trad/Old Time and such), I'd like to include a link here to the Venerable Music MySpace: they are a wonderful resource for historic music of many kinds. And they have some wonderful old photos on their page.

Folktunes.org - The Folktunes Archive for teaching and learning.

y2karl — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:49:12 -0800

Viola Lee Blues by Cannon's Jug Stompers
The House Carpenter - Clarence Ashley
Old Dan Tucker - Judge Sturdy's Orchestra
Minglewood Blues - Cannon's Jug Stompers
Coo Coo Bird - Clarence Ashley
Sally Gooden - Eck Robertson on fiddle
The Worried Blues - Samantha Bumgarner
Dark Holler - Clarence Ashley
Cocaine Habit Blues - The Memphis Jug Band
All are from Folktunes.org, a list of annotated links to mp3s at the Internet Archive with lyrics and history on each page. It's like a functional annotated academic SomeOfTheCoolest78sAttheInternetArchiveFilter .

John Fahey - Fare Forward Voyagers

y2karl — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:36:04 -0800

John Fahey - Fare Forward Voyagers
John Fahey - Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIV
Clips 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.

You want the Old Skool? You can't handle the Old Skool! You don't even have a clue what the Old Skool is! chops down door Here's ...Johnny!!!

y2karl — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:13:53 -0800

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.

Beautiful Losers

y2karl — Fri, 04 May 2007 02:09:05 -0800

Karen Dalton - It Hurts Me, Too
Tim Buckley - Sally Go 'Round The Roses
Tim Hardin - If I Were A Carpenter
See also
The Other Side Of Greenwich Village 60's Folk Scene - Part 1
and Part 2
more within

American music

nola — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:22:55 -0800

All old things become new again. Traditional American music, such as Del McCoury and Doc Watson being explored and reinvented by new artists. Gillian Welch and Old Crow Medicine Show , Chatham County Line- Route 23 , and The Be Good Tanyas - The Littlest Birds. Just to name a few. [all youtube]

John Fahey at Rockpalast - Hamburg Uni, Hamburg, West Germany - 1978-03-17and otherwise on YouTube

y2karl — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 08:10:05 -0800

John Fahey in concert: Beverly (aka Indian Pacific Railroad Blues) Poor Boy (Which is a variation on Booker White's Poor Boy Long Way from Home)

folkstreams.net - A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures

y2karl — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 06:19:56 -0800

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.

Lomax Archive

liam — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 09:39:13 -0800

The Alan Lomax Database is a free multimedia catalog of the audio and video recordings and photographs made by Alan Lomax from 1946 to 1994.

The Minstrel Show 2.0: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter

y2karl — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:55:09 -0800

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…

Casey Jones, Stagolee, Frankie and Johnny - Murder and Death Ballad Back Stories

y2karl — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 14:56:34 -0800

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?

Labors of Love: American Vernacular Music & Lucky Mojo, Too

y2karl — Wed, 12 Feb 2003 01:56:15 -0800

Labors Of Love
Here are some handmade pages, personal and corporate, on American Vernacular Music and more:

First, here's Long Time Coming, with three separate shrines to Dock Boggs, Pretty Boy Floyd and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, worthy subjects all. I have no idea what the Eyeneer Records revenue model is or was but their American Music Archive, (Latest Update - August 20, 1999), albeit spotty, is still a must stop and see with pages on Charley Patton, Sleepy John Estes and Lucille Bogan, for example, and that's just the blues section. It's a very promising sounding site--and it's too bad they never finished it, but, on the other hand, thank god,they have not yet pulled the plug. Lea Gilmore's It's A Girl Thang's Historical Profiles has it goin' on with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Maybelle and Georgia White for examples. Catherine Yronwode, of course, is a name well known here, as is her wondrous Lucky Mojo, cornucopica that it is. There, among much riches, is the extensive and authoritative Blues Lyrics and Hoodoo --but that's Not All ! »→ »→ »→

y2karl — Thu, 03 Oct 2002 21:19:20 -0800

Folk Music. Stefan Wirz and Hideki Watanabe pay homage to their favorites. Check out Hideki's Muscle Shoals page for another slice of his Americana pie. Or click on a name--Eric Von Schmidt, say--on Stefan's completist, slow loading page and wallow in pictures and stories... Then there's the Richard & Mimi Fariña website. Jan Hoiberg's Band site is another. I love labors of love.

And don't forget the Bauls of Bengal or the secrets of John Wesley Harding revealed!

And note, newsfilterians, you can now order Mickey Jone's home movies from the '66 tour, too. I'm going to see the Bobster tomorrow, so I've been thinking of these things.

y2karl — Wed, 13 Mar 2002 13:57:05 -0800

The Minstrel Show The Minstrel Show presents us with a strange, fascinating and awful phenomenon. Minstrel shows emerged from preindustrial European traditions of masking and carnival. But in the US they began in the 1830s, with working class white men dressing up as plantation slaves. These men imitated black musical and dance forms, combining savage parody of black Americans with genuine fondness for African American cultural forms. By the Civil War the minstrel show had become world famous and respectable. Late in his life Mark Twain fondly remembered the "old time nigger show" with its colorful comic darkies and its rousing songs and dances. By the 1840s, the minstrel show had become one of the central events in the culture of the Democratic party.. The image of white men in blackface, miming black song, dance and speech is considered the last word in racist bigotry for some. And yet, standing at the crossroads of race, class and high and low culture, blackface minstrelsy is one fascinating topic in academic circles. It’s history is intertwined with the rise of abolitionism, the works of Mark Twain and the histories of vaudeville, American vernacular music, radio, television, movies, in fact all of what is called popular culture. Details within.

anathema — Thu, 07 Mar 2002 14:25:26 -0800

Amazing collection of information on Folklife in Florida between 1937-1942. Audio files are stunning. They were originally recorded (with a portable acetate cutter!) by Zora Neal Hurston and Stetson Kennedy, working for the WPA. Does anyone else have other favorite Library of Congress sites? first heard about on npr last week.