Podcasts about Blind Blake

Jacksonville's most famous blues musician started making records in 1926.

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Geiger von Muller  | Intro  | Neocubist Blues  |   | Victoria's Big Easy  | You Don't Belong To Me  | What The Tide Took Back  | Mary Stokes Band  | Mean Mistreater  | Hometown Blues  |   | Blind Blake  | Rope Stretchin' Blues- Part 1 - Vol 2  | All The Recorded Sides  | Victoria's Big Easy  | Take Me Down (Freedom)  | What The Tide Took Back  | Big Joe Wiliams. Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry,  Brownie McGhee  |  Buked And Scorned (You Gonna Need Somebody To Go On Your Bond  | Folk Blues Revival  |   | Prakash Slim  | Blues Raga Part 2  | 8000 Miles To The Crossroads_  | Victoria's Big Easy  | Gonna Take That Train  | What The Tide Took Back  | Half Deaf Clatch  | Seeing Red  | A Road Less Travelled  | Blind Willie Johnson  | I'm Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge  | The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (1 of 2)  | Rev. Sekou with Luther and Cody Dickinson  | The Devil Finds Work  | In Times Like These  |   | Reverend Gary Davis  | You Got to Move  | Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964  | Andy Cohen & Moira Meltzer-Cohen  | Funnel Cakes  | Andy Cohen Small But Mighty MP3  | Adolphus Bell  | You Got To Hurt Before You Heal  | One Man Band  |   | Victoria's Big Easy  | True Love  | What The Tide Took Back

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Ernie Hawkins  | Hesitation Blues (feat. Joe Dallas)  | Monongahela Rye  |   | Ishmon Bracey  | Bust Up Blues  | Ishman Bracey & Charley Taylor -Complete Recorded Works 1928 -1929  | Red McKenzie  | Blues In F  | Red McKenzie 1924-1928 Volume 1 [Mound City Blue Blowers]   | Ben Waters  | Lonely Avenue  | Boogie 4 Stue (2026)  |   | Eric Clapton  | Layla (Acoustic Live)  | Unplugged  |   | Pink Anderson & Simmie Dooley  | Papa's 'Bout to Get Mad  | Searching For Secret Heroes  | Document Records  | Bessie Smith  | Bleeding Hearted Blues  | Old Time Classics Volume 1  | Blind Blake  | New Style Of Loving  | All The Recorded Sides  | Leon Redbone  | Nobody Knows but Me (Liv  | Strings and Jokes  |   | Blind Willie Johnson  | Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground  | Praise God I'm Satisfied  | Blind Willie McTell  | Lord, Send Me an Angel  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1931-1933)  | Sister Rosetta Tharpe  | Feed Me Jesus (Recorded Live At The Free Trade Hall, Manchester  | Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series  | Blind Lemon Jefferson  | Black Snake Moan  | Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order  | Doug MacLeod  | All I Had Was The Blues  | Raw Blues 2  |   | Raphael Callaghan  | Black Is The Colour  | Always In Arrears  | 

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Beaux Gris Gris And The Apocalypse  | Harder To Breathe  | Hot Nostalia Radio Live  | Alex Beraldo  | God Knows  | Moving On  |   | Greg Nagy  | Between The Darkness and The Light  | Just A Little More Time  | Duane Eddy  | Rebel Rouser  | Great Rock 'n Roll Instrumentals, Vol. 1 CD 1  | Johnnie The Gash Gray And Ken Jones  | Tequila  | The Best Of British Rock 'n' Roll (Disc 3)  | Muddy Waters  | Muddy Jumps One  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 4 1948  | Burnin' Sensations  | Hard Wired For Lovey Dovey  | Welcome to the Church of Rock and Roll  | Debra Power  | The Architect  | Unapologetically Me  |   | Blind Blake  | Cherry Hill Blues  | All The Recorded Sides  | The Rusty Wright Band  | Love Treat You Right  | Rusty Wright Band-Live From The End Of The World-1st Wave  | Joe Pullum  | Telephone Blues  | Communication Blues  | The Dominoes  | That's What You're Doing To Me  | When The Church Hits The Charts - 2004 - Vbr  | Leo Kottke  | Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring  | 6 And 12 String Guitar  | Blind Willie Johnson  | Can't Nobody Hide from God  | The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (2 of 2)  | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Sometimes  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity  | Anthony Geraci  | Tutti Frutti Booty  | Daydreams In Blue  |   | Kirby Sewell Band  | $1.11  | Girl With a New Tattoo

Rubrikoje „Dabar, prieš 100 metų“ – liūdna linksmo žmogaus istorija. Aklasis Blake‘as (Blind Blake) pirmuosius savo įrašus padarė 1926-aisiais. Netrukus jis išpopuliarėjo, tačiau, kaip paprastai būna bliuzo pasaulyje, jo gyvenimas baigėsi liūdnai... Po šimtmečio, šis ilgą laiką pamirštas muzikantas vadinamas vienu geriausių bliuzo gitaristų ir regtaimo gitaros karaliumi.Ved. Domantas Razauskas

De pardillo no tiene un pelo. A sus 80 años, y solo siete meses después de su anterior entrega, Van Morrison lanza “Somebody tried to sell me a bridge”, su 48º disco de estudio en solitario. Apostando por las versiones, apuntando hacia el viejo blues e invitando a gigantes como Buddy Guy o Taj Mahal, el norirlandés hace, canta y compra exactamente lo que le apetece.Playlist;VAN MORRISON “Kidney stew blues”VAN MORRISON “Snatch it back and hold it”VAN MORRISON feat BUDDY GUY “I’m ready”VAN MORRISON feat TAJ MAHAL “Can’t help myself”VAN MORRISON “Somebody tried to sell me a bridge”VAN MORRISON “Delia’s gone”Versión y Original; BLIND BLAKE and THE ROYAL VICTORIA HOTEL CALYPSOS “Delia gone” (1952)TITO RAMÍREZ “Qué será, qué será”LA PERRA BLANCO “Supersonic lover”THE JAMES HUNTER SIX “Gun shy”JESSE ROPER “Georgia train”THE NUDE PARTY “Sweetheart of the radio”THE BYRDS “You ain’t goin’ nowhere”Escuchar audio

This week, we discuss the medicinal and edible uses of the Schisandra family.  These plants are extremely important to Asian herbal medicine and have edible berries that are considered to be one of the most delicious foods known to man.  One variety is native to my region but has no documented medicinal or edible use..... I will have to experiment with it this year and hope I survive!Also, I am back on Youtube Please subscribe to my channel: @judsoncarroll5902   Judson Carroll - YouTubeTune of the week:Black and Tan Blues on guitarI show you how to play Blind Boy Fuller's "Black and Tan". Fuller was a legendary North Carolina guitar player and singer. A protegee of Blind Blake, he ruled the Durham piedmont blues scene until his untimely death at age 36. His playing was dynamic, complex and energetic.https://youtu.be/1ctcBGtrdo8Email: judson@judsoncarroll.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/southern-appalachian-herbs--4697544/supportRead about The Spring Foraging Cookbook: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-spring-foraging-cookbook.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRP63R54Medicinal Weeds and Grasses of the American Southeast, an Herbalist's Guidehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2023/05/medicinal-weeds-and-grasses-of-american.htmlAvailable in paperback on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C47LHTTHandConfirmation, an Autobiography of Faithhttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2023/05/confirmation-autobiography-of-faith.htmlAvailable in paperback on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C47Q1JNKVisit my Substack and sign up for my free newsletter:https://judsoncarroll.substack.com/Read about my new other books:Medicinal Ferns and Fern Allies, an Herbalist's Guide https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/11/medicinal-ferns-and-fern-allies.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMSZSJPSThe Omnivore's Guide to Home Cooking for Preppers, Homesteaders, Permaculture People and Everyone Else: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-omnivores-guide-to-home-cooking-for.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGKX37Q2Medicinal Shrubs and Woody Vines of The American Southeast an Herbalist's Guidehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/06/medicinal-shrubs-and-woody-vines-of.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2T4Y5L6andGrowing Your Survival Herb Garden for Preppers, Homesteaders and Everyone Elsehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-your-survival-herb-garden-for.htmlhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X4LYV9RThe Encyclopedia of Medicinal Bitter Herbs: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-encyclopedia-of-bitter-medicina.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5MYJ35RandChristian Medicine, History and Practice: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/01/christian-herbal-medicine-history-and.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B09P7RNCTBHerbal Medicine for Preppers, Homesteaders and Permaculture People: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2021/10/herbal-medicine-for-preppers.htmlAlso available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B09HMWXL25Podcast:  https://www.spreaker.com/show/southern-appalachian-herbsBlog: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/Free Video Lessons: Herbal Medicine 101 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7QS6b0lQqEclaO9AB-kOkkvlHr4tqAbs

Guy Davis to perform at Towne Crier in Beacon Guy Davis knows how to have fun. One of his favorite jokes as he tunes his guitar is, "Sorry, I'm having trouble with my G string." But once he sinks into a song, the room is transported. "Playing is a personal thing that hits my soul," he says. "The music takes me on a trip to the country, where there's rivers, grass, rocks, trees; come with me, and I'm a happier camper." Davis also travels back in time to a specific place, evoking the 1920s and 1930s Mississippi Delta blues and ragtime era, when guitarists mimicked the piano by playing multiple parts at a time using a thumb pick to drive the rhythm and either bare fingers or metal banjo picks to pluck the chords and melodic lines. "People watched Blind Blake play and asked him, 'Where's the other guy hiding?'" Davis says. The son of prominent actors and activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee — who befriended Pete Seeger during the Civil Rights era — Davis will bring a Towne Crier audience into the wilderness and back to the past on Feb. 15. Davis has done plenty of acting, including in the 1984 hip-hop film Beat Street, and in 2023 produced incidental music for the Broadway revival of his father's play Purlie Victorious, which received six Tony Award nominations. After hearing a didgeridoo in Australia, "I fell in love immediately," he says, and learned the circular breathing technique required to maintain the wind instrument's drone; the sound is like Tuvan throat singing. "It helps with my harmonica playing," says Davis, who squeezes out exquisite notes on the harp. Routinely covered by guitar media outlets, he also has two Grammy Award nominations. Although Davis gravitated toward acoustic blues and began recording regularly in 1993, he still tours while juggling acting gigs and other projects. Playing harmonica, putting a metallic slide on the ring finger of his left hand and using a 12-string guitar expand his sonic palette. The repertoire mixes originals and covers of the old-timers. His own work, delivered in a raspy voice, fits the period's vibe. Davis crossed paths with Pete Seeger as a kid at Camp Killooleep in Vermont, a magnet for the folk music community, and learned banjo from one of Seeger's brothers, John. "We lived in Mount Vernon and, one day, Pete was hanging out in our living room," he says. "When we moved to New Rochelle, there he was again." Davis often tagged along when his parents visited Beacon, picking out Leadbelly tunes and listening to recorded relics, some of which seeped into his playing style. "It was low-key; we weren't trying to accomplish anything," he says. "He influenced all the songs on my 1978 Folkways album Dreams About Life" and sang backup on one track. Davis sailed on the Clearwater, Woody Guthrie and Sojourner Truth many times. In the 1970s, he participated in fundraisers to finish the boats and often opened for the folk bard. "Once, in Poughkeepsie, we got there early and we were hanging out at a fountain," he says. "Soon enough, there's Pete with his pants rolled up, splashing around in the water, pushing the garbage to the side and getting all the kids in the area to take it away." After a 2019 concert in Albany, one newspaper reported that the bluesman had reflected Seeger's "greatest gift," which was not his singing or songwriting but "his ability to turn an audience of strangers into close friends by getting them to sing along. Davis had just accomplished the same thing." The Towne Crier is located at 379 Main St. in Beacon. Tickets for the Feb. 15 show, which begins at 7 p.m., are $25 online or $30 at the door. See dub.sh/TC-guy-davis. To download or order music, see guydavis.com.

When Thomas A. Dorsey (a.k.a. “Georgia Tom”) walked out of a New York City recording studio in the winter of 1932, he ended a highly successful music partnership with Tampa Red (a.k.a. Hudson Whittaker).Over four years, Red and Tom garnered a happy following for their infectious, highly danceable brand of blues tunes.In 1928, the two young men had teamed up and recorded for the Paramount label the hit “Tight Like That.” The success of that number — based on Blind Blake's “Too Tight” and on Papa Charlie Jackson's “Shake That Thing” — inspired imitators and launched the blues genre known as “hokum,” as reported here earlier, Whittaker and Dorsey recorded more than 60 sides together, often under the name “The Famous Hokum Boy.” Some of these rollicking tunes have been covered by The Flood over the years, songs like “Somebody's Been Using That Thing,” “Yas Yas Duck” and “You Can't Get That Stuff No More.”And add to that list the last tune that Tom and Red ever recorded together. The composition they called “No Matter How She Done” was waxed on Feb. 3, 1932, and released that spring on Brunswick's Vocalion label.Nothing in Red's sassy lyrics hinted at an end to this lucrative collaboration: The copper brought her in, she didn't need no bail She shook it for the judge, they put the cop in jail! As we noted in an earlier Flood Watch report, when Dorsey left the blues field in 1932 to take up a career as gospel songwriter and choir director, Whittaker continued as a solo blues artist well into the 1940s.Floodifying ItFlash forward seven decades. When The Flood started doing this song in the early 2000s, we committed what some folk purists consider a sacrilege: We altered both its title and its hook, removing one entire syllable. Instead of Tampa Red's original “No matter how she done it” lyric, The Flood opted to sing “Any way she done it.”We're still doing it that way, in fact, as you hear in this track from a recent rehearsal. And, no, we have no excuse, not really, except an aesthetic one. We felt the revision simply allowed the line to flow more easily off the tongue. (Call your neighborhood linguist and ask about the joys of removing “alveolar taps.”)One thing for sure: now, as then, the new phrasing does facilitate group singing, as you can hear on the band's lively original rendering 20 years ago on our Plays Up a Storm album. Click the button below to hear it:That track, recorded on the evening of Nov. 16, 2002, featured Sam St. Clair, Joe Dobbs, Doug Chaffin, Chuck Romine, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen.The Bob Wills ConnectionWhile the tune (any way we sing it) has always had a happy hokum vibe, “No Matter How She Done” took a curious turn four years after Tampa Red and Georgia Tom's inaugural recording.In September 1936 in Chicago, the song got a cool country treatment by no less a luminary than Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.This was just three years after Wills organized the band in Waco, Texas, and set about defining the style of music that's come to be known as “Texas swing.”Released as a single in May 1937, “No Matter How She Done It (She's Just a Dirty Dame)” was recorded in Wills and the Playboys' second major recording sessions for the American Record Corporation.The session is particularly important for Wills collectors, because it features the lineup that would define the Texas Playboys sound for years to come, including vocalist Tommy Duncan, pianist Al Stricklin, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe and drummer Smoky Dacus.More Hokum, You Say?Meanwhile, if more hokum music is what you need to make your Flood Friday complete, remember that we've got a whole channel waiting for you on the free Radio Floodango music steaming service.Just drop in and click the “Hokum” button or, better yet, just use this link to jump to it directly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Participants: John Steppling, Jennifer Matsui, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: media personalities who mock the Gaza flotilla, the military escort of Spain and Italy for the flotilla stops short of confrontation with Israel, Hegseth meets his generals, making sense of Covid statistics, trying not to get stuck in the Charlie Kirk assassination rabbit hole. Music track: “Diddie Wa Diddie” by Blind Blake (public domain). See Aesthetic Resistance on Substack for the links related to this episode.

Participants: John Steppling, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Palestine, US backtracks on General Langley's hostile rhetoric about Burkina Faso, US plays dumb while Ukraine provokes Russia toward nuclear war, Lindsay Graham grandstanding on another trip to Ukraine, Sartre's theory of “bad faith,” Freud vs. evolutionary psychology on the unconscious and self-deception. Kenyans fight against an imposed carbon capture scheme, Hollywood's turn toward fascist narratives. Music track: “Diddie Wa Diddie” by Blind Blake (public domain).

There's an echo in the well of Americana and it reverberates from tradition and some of the early songsmiths and blues masters who delivered the blues proper through the depths of the past century of America's music. We'll be pulling some of the classic blues covers of songs composed by just a small collection of the great blues masters: Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Blind Blake and beyond in this week's episode. There is seldom enough time to make a dent in only two hours but we'll do our best with covers from some of the inheritors like BB King, Carl Perkins, Bob Dylan, Jorma Kaukonen and a couple dozen others. We're excavating some deeper roots this week and then tilling the airwaves with freshly turned songs of the earth; a landscape of blues cutting a deep swath across the musical landscape of the past 100 years. Celebrating blues and those who brought it home this week on KOWS Community Radio. 

Parce que le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire : une émission spéciale Vieux, Ancêtres et Aïeux. Avec Bix Beiderbecke, Eva Taylor, Lil’ Hardin, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Noone, Fats Waller, Blind Blake, Duke Ellington, Clarence Williams, Sydney... Continue Reading →

It's the final episode of Patrick's Old-Time Music Week and he wraps things up with a discussion of three important blind singers of the country blues: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell.  Rockin' the Suburbs on Apple Podcasts/iTunes or other podcast platforms, including audioBoom, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, iHeart, Stitcher and TuneIn. Or listen at SuburbsPod.com. Please rate/review the show on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. Visit our website at SuburbsPod.com Email Jim & Patrick at rock@suburbspod.com Follow us on the Threads, Facebook or Instagram @suburbspod If you're glad or sad or high, call the Suburban Party Line — 612-440-1984. Theme music: "Ascension," originally by Quartjar, covered by Frank Muffin. Visit quartjar.bandcamp.com and frankmuffin.bandcamp.com.

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |  | J.D. Harris  | The Grey Eagle  | The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of (disc 1)  | Lonnie Johnson  | Lonesome Road  | Lonnie Johnson Tomorrow Night 1970  | Tampa Red  | Through Train Blues  | Tampa Red Vol. 1 (1928-1929)  |   | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Mean Old Frisco  | The Blues of Lightnin' Hopkins (1967)  | Big Bill Broonzy  | Sad Letter Blues  | Chicago 1937-1938 (CD8)  1937-1940 Part 2  | Leecan and Cooksey  | Dirty Guitar Blues  | A Richer Tradition - Country Blues & String Band Music, 1923-1928  | Corey Harris  | Jack O' Diamonds  | Fish Ain't Bitin'  |   |   | Half Deaf Clatch  | Storm Brewin  | The Blues Continuum  |   | Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee  | Worried Life Blues (Recorded Live At The Free Trade Hall, Manchester  | Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series  | Jake Leg Jug Band  | I Love Me  | Break A leg  |   |   | Dik Banovich  | Pay Day  | Run to You  |   |   | Blind Blake  | Fancy Tricks  | All The Recorded Sides  |   | Tom Doughty  | Come Back Baby  | You Can't Teach An Old Dog  |   | Bluesblabber  | The Ballad of Mr. Wright  | Like It Raw  |   |   | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | That Suits Me  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity  | Peg Leg Howell  | Coal Man Blues  | Country Southern Blues  | 

Today, I'm sharing a conversation I had with GRAMMY-NOMINATED American guitarist, composer, producer and bandleader Charlie Hunter. He first came on to the scene in the early 1990s, and simultaneously plays bass lines, chords, and melodies, on custom seven and eight-string guitars, as featured in trios and quintet projects, as well as Garage-A-Trois. Notably, Charlie is also a student of ragtime guitar, using the true two finger technique pioneered by Arthur Blind Blake and very different from what he's known for. We talked about Charlie's upbringing in a musical family, finding his own path, the groove and authenticity, all things Blind Blake, and as usual, we geeked out on some music history. Enjoy! Charlie's Links: Official Website Instagram ___ Support Educational Programming: Tax-Exempt Donations Join the Patreon Community One-time donations: Venmo or PayPal Follow American Songcatcher: Instagram  Credits:  Nicholas Edward Williams - Production, research, editing, recording and distribution --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/americansongcatcher/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/americansongcatcher/support

Black History Month is celebrated every February in the United States. The precursor, Negro History Week, was created in 1926 when the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History chose the second week of February. This coincided with the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, celebrated together in the Black community since the 19th century. President Gerald Ford recognized Black History Month in 1976. Our theme music for this week's program is “Thelonious” by Thelonious Monk. We'll continue with Eric Bibb, Tarika, Blind Blake, Kaia Kater, Rhiannon Giddens, and explore many other voices, too. Part One of our celebration of Black music … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysThelonious Monk / “Thelonious” / Underground / CBSEric Bibb / Refugee Man” / Migration Blues / Stony PlainTarika / “Aloka” / The Rough Guide to the Music of Madagascar / Rough GuideRhiannon Giddens / “Better Get it Right the First Time” / Freedom Highway / NonesuchBlind Blake / “Brown Skin Gal-Mary Ann” / Legends of Calypso / ArcIssa Bagayogo / “Saye Mogo Bana” / African Groove / PutumayoKaia Kater / “Nine Pin” / Nine Pin / KingswoodThelonious Monk / “Thelonious (take 3)” / Underground / CBSVarious / “Chohun and Gymamadudu” / Africa-Ancient Ceremonies: Dance Music & Songs of Ghana / Nonesuch-ExplorerPaul Simon-Bakithi Kumolo / “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes (Alternate)” / Graceland / Sony LegacyKotoja / “Swale” / The Super Sawale Collection / PutumayoMandinka and Fulani Music of Gambia / “Dangoma” / Ancient Heart / AxiomSweet Honey in the Rock / “This Place Inside Where I Can Rest” / #LoveinEvolution / AppleseedPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Nous allons ouvrir un gros dossier :  "Crossroad blues ». Cet épisode va nous permettre de parler du morceau mythique et fondateur « Crossroad» ou crossroad blues et l'histoire des début discographique du blues, De Cream le premier supergroupe de l'histoire du rock, et pour finir  du mythe de Robert Johnson et du ramassis de conneries qui l'accompagnent. Cet épisode sera donc en 3 parties…. PLAYLIST The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites ?" "One O' Them Things" The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues" Ciro's Club Coon Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues" Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues", Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues" Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues" Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues" Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues" Blind Blake, "Southern Rag" Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues" Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love" Son House, Mississippi County Farm Blues" Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues" Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" Charlie Patton, "Poor Me" The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World" Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues" The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" Robert Johnson, "Crossroads" Willie Brown, "M&O Blues" Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin' Charlie Patton, "34 Blues" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right" Alexis Korner et Davey Graham, "3/4 AD" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)" Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)" " At the Jazz Band Ball" The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission" Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There" The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)" The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty" Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm" Bande Annonce : Gonks Go Beat !

Jack Rose was an old soul guitarist who took John Fahey and other fingerpickers as role models.  Born in Virginia in 1971, Rose moved to Philadelphia in 1998, where he became part of the alternative music scene.  As he taught himself the primitive styles of Blind Blake, Charlie Patton, and others, he took on the name “Dr. Ragtime”.  His album “Raag Manifesto” was named one of the top 50 records of the year by British music magazine “The Wire”.  Davendra Banhart included one of his songs in the compilation “Golden Apples of the Sun”.  His fourth recording, “Kensington Blues”, was his breakthrough and he toured extensively.  Rose's career was tragically cut short in 2009 when he died before his 39th birthday and just before the release of his 5th album “Luck in the Valley”.  He is interred in the Nature's Sanctuary section of Laurel Hill West, one of our green burial spaces.  But his music lives on.

Eighty-nine years ago today, one of America's greatest — though least-known — blues artists died after months of illness. Gaunt and frail, Arthur Blake — known to blues aficionados by his stage name, “Blind Blake” — must have looked much older at the end than his 38 years.It had been a wild and sometimes wonderful decade for him. Starting in mid-1920s, he was celebrated as Paramount Records' sensational guitarist, whose distinctive playing often was compared to the sound and style of a ragtime piano.InfluencesHis intricate finger-picking was to inspire generations of guitarists, from Rev. Gary Davis to Ralph McTell, from Leon Redbone to Ry Cooder and John Fahey.Famously, blues great Big Bill Broonzy, who heard Blake in person in the early 1920s, said Arthur made his guitar “sound like every instrument in the band — saxophone, trombone, clarinets, bass fiddles, pianos, everything. I never had seen then and I haven't to this day yet seen no one that could take his natural fingers and pick as much guitar as Blind Blake."The CrashBlake recorded about 80 tracks between 1926 and 1932. His future looked bright. With his records selling well, he felt he could settle down, so he married Beatrice McGee around 1931. But then the next year it all went bad. Paramount went bankrupt in 1932 under the weight of the Great Depression. In the remaining two years of his life, Arthur Blake was plagued by poverty and by illness. A coroner's autopsy confirmed that his Dec. 1, 1934, death came because of complications from tuberculosis.The SongToday Blind Blake's legacy lives on in his recordings and through their impact on nearly a century of blues, folk and jazz musicians who travel in his shadow. In 1992, for instance, Bob Dylan honored Blake in the title of his Good as I Been to You album, on which he performed a cover of "You Gonna Quit Me Blues.”Our Take on the TuneAnd that's where The Flood comes in. We started doing the song in the mid-'90s, right after hearing Dylan's version on that album.We were looking for an easy, happy tune that we could warm up with, one that would let everybody in the room just stretch out a little. Nowadays it is just as likely to turn up as a last song of the night — as it does here — putting a bow on a great evening of music. Enjoy.Meanwhile, in Other News…By the way, we're now one month away from our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash on New Year's Eve, and the good folks at Alchemy Theatre who are hosting it have created a Facebook Event page for the do, with all kinds of additional goodies. Click the graphic below to reach it on Facebook:In addition, our dear friend Shane Ward at Eve.NET has helped us get a dedicated website for the event up and running. Visit us there at Floodat50.com! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

"I don't consider myself a jazz musician," says guitarist Charlie Hunter on this episode of Wong Notes—essentially refuting how he's known in the music world. "I am maybe jazz adjacent." Most listeners probably wouldn't agree, but if nothing else, Hunter is experimental. He's known for playing a guitar that's strung with both bass and electric guitar strings, that has two pickups—one for bass and one for guitar—and two input jacks, which go to separate amps for the respective sounds.As the conversation unfolds, Charlie shares with Cory about the importance of interdependence, especially in jamming. "All I want to do is be a part of an extension of [the drummer's] beat," he explains. "Everything has to take a backseat to that." He compares the level of resources he had with young musicians today—back then, for better or for worse, all he had was a metronome and the discipline exemplified by the older musicians he played with. Something else that shapes modern musical culture, he says, is globalization: Having access to every genre and the music of every guitar player can make it harder for people learning to pick a specialty.Charlie goes on to share about how he got his stripes largely from his time performing as a street musician in Europe. "I would not trade those three, four years of being a street musician for anything," he says, describing the experience as a kind of boot camp. His first lessons were in playing 12 hours a day on an unfamiliar instrument at the time—acoustic bass—on the streets of Zurich.Towards the end of the interview, Charlie and Cory reflect together on the values of bonding with your musical community in person, something that's more of a challenge with the rise of internet culture. However, Charlie has lately been using Instagram as a vehicle to share the music of Blind Blake, someone who he thinks is "literally better than any of us [on guitar]."Listen to the full episode here: https://bit.ly/WongNotesGet 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywongVisit Charlie Hunter: http://charliehunter.comHit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.comVisit Cory: https://www.corywongmusic.comVisit Premier Guitar:

When The Flood first started doing this song some 40 years ago, Charlie's sweet mother asked where such an odd little tune came from. We didn't want to tell her the truth.“Mom, it was a popular party song in the late 1920s.” Well, that wasn't a complete lie. It's just that the “parties” where this song was born started very late at night and were in a part of town where nice girls generally didn't go. Stump's SongThe song we've always called “Yas Yas Duck” is an old hokum jazz tune that has been recorded under a lot of different names for nearly a century now.The first recording was made in St. Louis by the great piano pounder James “Stump” Johnson who released it in January 1929 as “The Duck Yas-Yas-Yas.” He recorded his song at least three times during his career, which ended with his death at 67 in 1969.Also in 1929, new versions started cropping up. Flood heroes Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded a version on May 13, 1929. That's where we learned it.But a particularly popular rendition also was done by Oliver Cobb and his Rhythm Kings on Aug. 16, 1929, about a year before his untimely death. In most versions, the song is perhaps best known for its opening lyrics: Mama bought a rooster, Thought it was a duck. Brought it to the table with its legs straight up …And, Uh, About That “Party”…Wikipedia just tells it like it is (or was). “The song,” it reports, “is a ‘whorehouse tune,' a popular St. Louis party song." (See there, mom? It says it right there! “Party song …”) The title, Wikipedia goes on, is explained by the verse that goes, Shake your shoulders, shake 'em fast, if you can't shake your shoulders, shake your yas-yas-yas.The Duck in the ‘60sFolkies learned the song in 1961 when the legendary Dave Van Ronk released it as "Yas Yas Yas" on his Van Ronk Sings album (though Dave's source was a variant recorded in the Bahamas by Blind Blake & his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypso Band, released as "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in 1951).Meanwhile, in 1967 cartoonist R. Crumb used the song in his comic strip album Zap Comix, No. 0, quoting it in the first panel of a story called "Ducks Yas Yas." Crumb also later recorded the tune with his band, The Good Tone Banjo Boys, on a transparent red vinyl 78 rpm stereo record in 1972.Our Take on the TuneFor us, “Yas Yas Duck” became a kind of connective tissue between today and our jug band roots of the 1970s and '80s. That's why we put it on our first commercial album back in 2001, and why it still gets trotted out regularly at rehearsals, just so newer folks coming to the band room can learn it. Recently, it was Jack Nuckols' turn. As you can hear here, Jack's drumming has brought us a whole new class of cool. Whether it's his tasty solos, or rocking along with Randy's bass under Charlie's vocals, or making his wise and witty contributions to the ensemble supporting Danny and Sam's solos, Jack's rhythms have us all wanting to get up and dance. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Chris YakopcicChris Yakopcic is a fingerstyle acoustic blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter inspired by pre-war delta and Piedmont players. His guitar playing builds on the rhythmic and often high energy thumb-bass picking patterns innovated by Robert Johnson, Bill Broonzy, and Blind Blake to name a few.

Con Ben E. King ft LaVern Baker, the Edsels, Ricky Nelson, The Carter Family, Jimmy Webb, Johnny Rivers, Isaac Hayes, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Bobby Bare, The Temptations, Blind Blake, Ry Cooder, the Smithereens, Fountains of Wine, Any Trouble, The B-52´s y Camera Obscura

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Spencer Mackenzie  | Battle From Within  | Preach To My Soul  |  | Eric Johanson  | Beyond The Sky  | The Deep And The Dirty | Duke Robillard  | It's Alright  | Low Down & Tore Up | Unwed Mothers  | White Knight [Blues Rock Review Album Sampler- Volume 3]  | Blues Rock Review Album Sampler- Volume 3 | Noa & The Hell Drinkers  | The Last Goodbye  | HELL'S THE NEW HEAVEN | Chuck Berry | I'm A Rocker  | Back Home (Chess: US title) [I'm A Rocker (UK title)] | Blind Blake  | Sweet Papa Low Down  | All The Recorded Sides | Fats Domino  | Please Don't Leave Me  |  | Nidaros Blueskompani  | Big K Boogie (Tribute to Big K)  | Live at Nidaro's Studio | Latemouth Blake (Dave Allen)  | Meat Shaking Woman (Fuller)  | Latemouth Blake: Vintage Blues | Marie Knight  | Didn't It Rain  | The Gospel Truth Live | Jerry Lee Lewis  | I'm A Lonesome Fugitive  | A Whole Lotta... Jerry Lee Lewis (CD2) | Dion  | If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll feat. Eric Clapton  | Stomping Ground  |  | Malcolm Holcombe  | I've Been There  | Bits & Pieces |  | Alabama Mike  | Goodbye Tamika  | Stuff I've Been Through

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Bill Filipiak  | She Still Wants to Kiss Me  | Aka Billium  |  | Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse  | I'm On FIre (Live In Poynton, UK April 29, 2023)  | Beaux Gris Gris and the Apocalypse: Live in the UK | Bicton Street Blues  | Got a Devil  | Whole New Kind Of Blues  | Self Produced | Kris Kramer & Beatbox 'n' Blues  | Ain't Nobody At Home  | Way Back Home  |  | Jimmy Regal & The Royals  | The First And Last Stop  | The First And Last Stop | Ritchie Dave Porter  | Hell yeah man, I got the blues  |  | 7 Hills Stomp  | John The Revelator  | If I Had My Way: A Cigar Box Tribute To Blind Willie Johnson | Mark Searcy  | Stones in my Passway  | Ground Zero  |  | Claire Hamlin  | Horns Of Plastic  | Elbows Going Crazy  |  | Blind Blake  | Skeedle Loo Doo Blues  | All The Recorded Sides | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Moses Don't Get Lost  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Chuck Berry  | Memphis Tennessee  | Chuck Berry  |  | Walkin' Cane Mark  | Rock And Roll Records  | Tryin' To Make You Understand | D.K. Harrell  | Honey Ain't So Sweet  | The Right Man  |  | Nigel Mack  | Highway 69  | Back In Style  | 

Our version of this traditional tune originated with Roger Samples and the quiet picking sessions he and Charlie Bowen had back in the mid-1970s. They had been listening to David Bromberg's then-new debut album, on which they both liked Bromberg's arrangement of something that Philadelphia folkie called “Dehlia.” But of course, as usual, Samples had his own ideas for the song. Crafting a new melody that he borrowed from assorted sources — versions had been recorded over the years by everyone from Blind Willie McTell and Blind Blake to Pete Seeger and Josh White, from Harry Belafonte and Burl Ives to Johnny Cash and Bobby Bare — Roger then turned the lead vocal over to Charlie so he could sing the harmony himself on the choruses.Their resulting rendition of “Delia's Gone” made the rounds at the Bowen Bashes and put in regular appearances at occasional Flood gigs. But eventually, the song was retired. And it remained so for the next several decades, until one night earlier this summer. That's when the tune popped into Charlie's head during a weekly rehearsal. Right from the start, Danny, Randy and Sam were giving new life to the old number. It looks like it's back to stay.Murder HistoryThe story behind “Delia's Gone” begins on Christmas Eve 1900, when Moses "Cooney" Houston shot and killed Delia Green in the Yamacraw neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia. And if that isn't tragic enough, both were just 14 years old.Legend has it the two had been fussing all evening during a Christmas Eve party at the home of Willie and Emma West, where Delia worked as a scrub girl. Delia and Cooney had been going together for several months. Folks say that night the quarreling started when a very drunk Cooney began teasing Delia about their having sexual relations. Perhaps, some say, he was just trying to embarrass her in front of the Wests.At some point, according to trial transcripts, Delia got angry at being characterized as Cooney's wife, and she cursed him, calling him a “son of a b***h.” Sensing a situation that was getting out of hand, the Wests ordered Cooney to leave. That's when Cooney pulled a pistol.After shooting Delia, he fled, but Willie West chased after and caught him. He turned Cooney over to a police patrolman who later testified that the young assailant confessed.Houston served 12 years in prison, paroled in 1913. Accounts of his later life are sketchy, but he is said to have died in New York City in 1927 after other brushes with the law.Delia Green is buried in an unmarked grave in Savannah.The SongIf it hadn't been for a song, Cooney and Delia's sad story surely would have been quickly forgotten.However, as early as 1906, folklorist Howard Odum collected a fragment of the ballad in Newton, Ga., and published it in The Journal of American Folklore. This version — a three-verse fragment called “One More Rounder Gone” — implied that Delia was a prostitute. That insinuation was to move in and out of other renditions in the years to come.After that, the ballad traveled from Georgia to the Bahamas, then back to the States during the folk boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, sung by generations of balladeers and recorded by musical icons like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.In 1928, Newman Ivey White's American Negro Folk Songs included a five-verse variant called “Delie,” collected four years earlier from Frank Goodell of Spartanburg, SC, who reported that he learned it sometime around 1904. The first recording of the song was by Georgian Reese DuPree in the winter of 1924. (If you've heard of DuPree, it's probably because he's widely recognized as the first African-American male to record a blues. Incidentally, he's also generally credited with writing the song, “Shortnin' Bread,” which he was singing in public as early as 1905.)But back to Delia and Cooney. Early versions of the song like "One More Rounder Gone" and "Delia" were originally accompanied by the traditional "Frankie and Albert" tune.But when the song made its way to the Bahamas, new lyrics were added, and the tune took on a decidedly Caribbean flavor. As early as 1935, Alan Lomax recorded a local version in the Bahamas by the renowned Nassau String Band. Curiously, most subsequent versions of the song would use that form rather than one based on the song's older, original American cousin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In de vorige afleveringen van deze podcast vertelde ik jullie hoe de blues tijdens de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw migreerde van het platteland in het zuiden naar de steden in het noorden van de VS. En daar in de stad werd de bluesmuziek waanzinnig enthousiast onthaald. De eenzame field hollers verdwenen in het stedelijke rumoer en de muziek werd er sterker, fortissmi, krachtiger en intenser. Zwarte artiesten kregen meer en meer een podium en zelfs een kans om opnames te maken. Aanvankelijk waren het vooral vrouwen die de blues vertolkten - met een krachtige stem, met een expressieve seksualiteit en begeleid door luide bigbands. Het was WC Handy die de blues het stedelijk maatpakje had aangetrokken, en na hem leek de blues van het platteland wel helemaal vergeten. Uit het oog dus, uit het commerciële oog. Maar de blues was zeker niet uit het hart, want aan het eind van de jaren twintig verschoof de aandacht opnieuw naar het platteland, naar de plattelandsblues, de country blues. En daar wil ik het in deze aflevering graag over hebben.Nieuwsgierig naar meer? Volg me op Facebook, Instagram of Twitter. Of bezoek ⁠www.souloftheblues.be⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bart-massaer/message

Tornem a viatjar al Carib a la recerca del calypso, un g

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

 | Artist  | Title  | Release Date  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Angela Strehli  | Person To Person  | 2022  | Angela Strehli  |  | Trevor Babajack  | Rambling Man  | Not Far To Go  |  | Blind Blake  | Rope Stretchin' Blues- Part 1 - Vol 2  | 2003  | All The Recorded Sides | Kathy & The Kilowatts  | One Lie Leads To Another  | 2017  | Let's Do This Thing!  |  | The 2:19  | Seven Wonders  | We Will Get Through This | The Mckee Brothers  | Miracle  |   | A Time Like This  |  | Track Dogs  | Dead to Rights  | Track Dogs  |  | Big Daddy Wilson and Missisippi Grave Diggers  | Summertime  | 2003  | Get On Your Knees And Pray   | Cripple Clarence Lofton  | Had a Dream  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1935-1939) | Eric Gales  | I Gotta Go  | 2021  | Crown  |   |  | Joanna Connor  | Heaven  | 2016  | Six String Stories - 2016 | James Oliver  | Run Chicken Run  | Less Is More  |  | Bo Diddley  | The Story Of Bo Diddley  | Jungle Music (The Blues Collection) | Big Harp George  | Sunrise Stroll  | Cut My Spirit Loose  | 

In de vorige afleveringen van deze podcast vertelde ik jullie hoe de blues tijdens de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw migreerde van het platteland in het zuiden naar de steden in het noorden van de VS. En daar in de stad werd de bluesmuziek waanzinnig enthousiast onthaald. De eenzame field hollers verdwenen in het stedelijke rumoer en de muziek werd er sterker, fortissmi, krachtiger en intenser. Zwarte artiesten kregen meer en meer een podium en zelfs een kans om opnames te maken. Aanvankelijk waren het vooral vrouwen die de blues vertolkten - met een krachtige stem, met een expressieve seksualiteit en begeleid door luide bigbands. Het was WC Handy die de blues het stedelijk maatpakje had aangetrokken, en na hem leek de blues van het platteland wel helemaal vergeten. Uit het oog dus, uit het commerciële oog. Maar de blues was zeker niet uit het hart, want aan het eind van de jaren twintig verschoof de aandacht opnieuw naar het platteland, naar de plattelandsblues, de country blues. En daar wil ik het in deze aflevering graag over hebben. Nieuwsgierig naar meer? Volg me op Facebook, Instagram of Twitter. Of bezoek ⁠⁠www.souloftheblues.be⁠⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bart-massaer/message

It was April 1927 when a pair of blues singers from Mississippi named Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed walked into a Chicago studio to record the first of a half dozen tunes they'd leave there over the next few weeks.Joining them for the session was guitarist Sunny Wilson, whose song "Hey! Lawdy Mama/France Blues" was among their first. The trio was billed on the label as “The Down Home Boys” when the disc was released the following month by Black Patti Records, a new short-lived company created by a fascinating historical character named J. Mayo “Ink” Williams.Ink WilliamsA Brown University graduate, Ink Williams is the only man we know of who was inducted into both the National Football Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame. Besides being one of the first African American pro-football players (as part of a Chicago team in the first season of the NFL), Williams also is remembered as an important recording industry pioneer.Starting his career producing for the fledgling Paramount Records, Williams earned his nickname because of his persuasive way of inking contracts with a wide range of original talent. Over the years, he was to work with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ma Rainey, with Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, with Blind Blake and Ida Cox (not to mention Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roosevelt Sykes, Sleepy John Estes and so many more). In 1924, Williams also earned an early entry in blues annals by producing the legendary Papa Charlie Jackson's “Lawdy, Lawdy Blues,” the first successful blues record made by an African American man.In 1927, Williams left Paramount to go out on his own by starting Black Patti Records, named after the opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, who was called “Black Patti” because some thought she resembled the Italian opera singer Adelina Patti. While Williams' label lasted only seven months, it produced 55 records in a variety of styles, including blues, jazz and spirituals, as well as hell-fire sermons by “straining preachers” and comedy routines and popular ditties from vaudeville stars. When the enterprise was not immediately profitable, Williams moved on to greener pastures by the end of 1927, but not before discovering a few stand-out blues acts that had moved to Chicago from the South as part of “The Great Migration.”Among his finds in those early days was The Down Home Boys, whose two-guitar accompaniment was a blend of parlor guitar and ragtime. The trio sang blues, but much of its repertoire was from the turn of the century — before blues had become a dominant musical genre — and included ballads and medicine show material.Back to the SongSunny Wilson's “Hey! Mama” tune didn't have the same cachet of some of the group's other numbers — notably the guys' “Original Stack O'Lee Blues,” which probably was a response to Ma Rainey's version of the number, which had the young Louis Armstrong on cornet — but it did have a long shelf life. For instance, right after its Black Patti debut, it was brought out as "France Blues" on Gennett (credited to "Sunny Boy & His Pals") and again on Champion by "The Original Louisiana Entertainers.”Then 40 years later, the song was reborn in the folk revival of the 1960s. The Flood learned the song from the January 1964 album recorded by Stefan Grossman and Peter Siegel's Even Dozen Jug Band. This seminal ‘60s group also featured John Sebastian, Steve Katz, David Grisman and Maria Muldaur, all friends who got to know each other during legendary jam sessions in New York's Washington Square Park.Later that same year, the song made another notable folk revival appearance, this time performed by Mark Spoelstra (with Fritz Richmond on washtub bass and Doug Pomeroy on washboard and kazoo) on a landmark Elektra album called The Blues Project. Our Take on the TuneIf you hang out much with The Flood, it seems like everything we do is carefully planned …. uh, right… but actually, accident and happenstance are a couple of our good friends. Earlier this week, for example, we got together to plan for our show tonight at Sal's Speakeasy. As you'll hear in this track, between songs Charlie starts singing a bit of this old 1920s song. Immediately, Randy jumps in with some great harmony. Then Sam brightens it up with his harmonica and Danny puts a bow on the whole thing with a cookin' guitar part. And just like that the tune has inserted itself into the set list. All that's missing now is you. Come on down to Sal's Italian Eatery & Speakeasy tonight, 1624 Carter Avenue in beautiful downtown Ashland, Ky., and we'll getting you singing along on that hey-lawdy-mama-mama / hey-lawdy-papa-papa part! We play from 6 to 9. Come on out and party with us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Kaspar 'Berry' Rapkin sits down with CloudwatcherUno to record a special live interview podcast and play two live tracks "Police Dog Blues" originally recorded by Blind Blake in 1929 and "Window Peepin' Mama" from his self titled album "Kaspar 'Berry' Rapkin and The Swamp Dogs". All of this was recorded live at CloudwatcherUno Podcast HQ. Love the podcast?  Then by all means feel free to share the news with your friends on social media and help the show grow!  PLAY. LISTEN. ENJOY.

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Catfish Keith  | Scoodle Oot 'n' Doo | Land of the Sky  |  | Mat Walklate & Alex Haynes  | My Turn  | Bopflix Session  |  | Half Deaf Clatch  | Pony Blues  | A Tribute To Charley Patton | Hans Theessink and Big Daddy Wilson  | Old Man Touble  | Pay Day  |   |  | Moonshine Society  | The One Who Got Away (Acoustic-Bonus)  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition) | Dean Haitani  | Fairlight Walking  | RED DUST  |  | Prakash Slim  | Crossroad Blues  | Country Blues From Nepal | Manny Fizzotti  | Sliding Away [Feat Giles Robson]  | Nobody Understands | Little G Weevil  | When The King Was Told  | Live Acoustic Session | Ruth Wyand & The Tribe Of One  | Bad Mojo (Working Overtime)  | Tribe Of One  |  | Doug MacLeod, & Dave Smith, Rick Steff, Steve Potts  | Be What You Is  | A Soul to Claim | Lightnin' Hopkins  | I Feel Like Balling The Jack  | Houston Gold (1968) | Blind Blake  | Wilson Dam  | All The Recorded Sides | Ramblin' Jack Elliott  | Talking Fishing Blues  | Catch Me A Freight Train | Mississippi Fred McDowell & Hunter's Chapel Singers  | Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed  | Amazing Grace  | 

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Little G Weevil  | Early In The Morning  | Live Acoustic Session | Prakash Slim  | Me And The Devil Blues  | Country Blues From Nepal | Moonshine Society  | Biscuits, Bacon, and the Blues (Acoustic-Bonus)  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition) | Hans Theessink and Big Daddy Wilson  | Ballerina  | Pay Day  |   |  | Doc Watson  | Rising Sun Blues  | Vibraphonic Acoustic March 2005 | Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton  | Handsome Molly  | Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton | Big Bill Broonzy w Albert Ammons  | Done Got Wise (Carnegie Hall 1938 Concert)  | Big Bill Broonzy (Document Vol 8) | Half Deaf Clatch  | Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues  | A Tribute To Charley Patton | Stompin' Dave  | Fool Me Round  | Acoustic Blues  |  | Furry Lewis  | Billy Lyons And Stack OLee  | The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of | Blind Lemon Jefferson and his feet  | Hot Dogs  | The Best Of Blind Lemon Jefferson | Lightnin' Hopkins  | My Black Cadillac  | The Swarthmore Concert (1964) | Jerimiah Marques  | Sitting On Top Of The World  | Down By The River  |  | Neil Bob Herd and the Dirty Little Acoustic Band  | The Colour of History  | Every Soul a Story | Buckwheat Zydeco  | When The Levee Breaks  | TR Downloads 2010-2 | Blind Blake  | Cherry Hill Blues  | All The Recorded Sides

Help produce Basic Folk by contributing at basicfolk.com/donateEditor's note: Basic Folk is pleased to introduce our listeners to one of our favorite podcasts by sharing an episode in our feed! American Songcatcher with Nicholas Edward Williams, is an independent audio documentary-style podcast hosted by the folk musician and music history enthusiast.Each episode has five stories: starting with one traditional song's journey to America, followed by the stories of four musicians in American roots starting with legends of the past going all the way to current artists of the day.You'll hear the stories behind songs of immigrants from the British Isles and Europe who brought their tunes into the Appalachian mountains…To songs of the South: Gospel, Bluegrass, Ragtime, Blues, Old-Time, Country, and the Folk music derived from it all.This podcast goes behind the curtain of legends, and shines a light on integral artists who have influenced generations: Bessie Smith, Ola Belle Reed, Blind Blake, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk. I am SHOCKED that Nicholas does not have a journalism background. His approach is warm, insightful and he has the true spirit of a detective uncovering the mysteries of these songs and musicians. It's a wonderful listen!In this Season 2, Episode 2 of American Songcatcher, Nicholas has the following lineup:Traditional – “Lil' Liza Jane” (:28)Dock Boggs (11:22)Snooks Eaglin (25:54)Nina Simone (43:36)Billy Strings (1:04:18) Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Mat Walklate & Alex Haynes  | My Turn  | Bopflix Session  |  | Little G Weevil  | Roll And Boogie  | Live Acoustic Session | Hans Theessink and Big Daddy Wilson  | Train  | Pay Day  |   |  | Prakash Slim  | You Gotta Move  | Country Blues From Nepal | Tom Malachowski and Paul Gillings  | Andy's Song  | Norfolk Boy  |  | Bunk Johnson  | Kinklets  | The Last Testament  |  | Bob Margolin  | Steady Rollin' On  | Steady Rollin single  |  | Blind Willie McTell  | Statesboro Blues  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1927-1931) | Blind Blake  | Hey Hey Daddy Blues  | All The Recorded Sides | Donna Herula Band with special guest, Anne Harris  | Got What I Deserve  | LIve at the Old Town School of Folk Music 2021 | Moonshine Society  | The One Who Got Away (Acoustic-Bonus)  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition) | Chad Strentz  | They Tell Me  | Acoustically Yours Vol 1 | Reverend Gary Davis  | I Won't Be Back No More  | Blues At Newport  |  | Mance Lipscomb  | Sugar Babe  | Live at the Ash Grove July 13, 1963 | Lonnie Johnson  | No Love For Sale  | Blues By Lonnie Johnson | Donna Herula Trio  | Who's Been Cookin' In My Kitchen  | LIve at the Old Town School of Folk Music 2021

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Little G Weevil  | Sasha Said  | Live Acoustic Session | Corey Harris  | Afton Mountain Blues | Insurrection Blues  |  | Tennessee Chocolate Drops  | Knox Country Stomp  | A Richer Tradition - Country Blues & String Band Music, 1923-19 | Blind Blake  | Ramblin' Mama Blues  | All The Recorded Sides | Dik Banovich  | Pay Day  | Run to You  |  | Adam Franklin  | Save The Roach For Me  | Till I Hear You Talking | Elvie Thomas  | Motherless Child Blues  | The Paramount Masters - CD 2/4 | Big Joe Turner  | Little Bittle Gal's Blues  | Total Blues - 100 Essential Songs | John Hammond  | I Live The Life I Love  | You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover | Malcolm Holcombe  | Shaky Ground  | Tricks of the Trade | Scott Joplin  | Weeping Willow  | Piano Rags  |  | Boozoo Chavis  | Zydeco Coteau  | Zydeco Trail Ride  |  | Moonshine Society  | The One Who Got Away (Acoustic-Bonus)  | Sweet Thing (Special Edition) | Martha Copeland  | The Pawn Shop Blues  | Banker's Blues:  A Study In The Effects Of Fiscal Mischief | Big Joe Wiliams. Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry,  Brownie McGhee  | 19. You Steal My Chickens, You Can T Make Em Lay  | Folk Blues Revival  |  | Donna Herula Trio  | Who's Been Cookin' In My Kitchen  | LIve at the Old Town School of Folk Music 2021

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Corey Harris  | Special Rider Blues.mp3  | Insurrection Blues  |  | Louis Prima & His New Orleans  | What Will Santa Claus Say. (When He Finds Eveybody Swingin')  | Big Band Swing Christmas | Tommie Bradley  | Nobody's Business if I do  | Harmonicas, Washboards, Fiddles & Jugs | Benny Goodman & His Orchestra  | Santa Claus Came In The Spring  | Big Band Swing Christmas | Taj Mahal and the Blind Boys Of Alabama  | Christ Was Born on Christmas Morn  | Talkin' Christmas!  |  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Merry Christmas  | Christmas Blues  CD 1 | The Moonglows  | Hey Santa Claus  | Papa Ain't No Santa Claus, Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree | Blind Blake  | Stingaree Man Blues  | All The Recorded Sides | The Count Basie Orchestra  | Good Morning Blues (I Wanna See Santa Claus)  | Big Band Swing Christmas | Joe Bonamassa  | Ball Peen Hammer  | Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House | Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon  | Cadillac Baby Passed So Fast  | CD4 Bea & Baby Records Definitive Collection | Charles Brown  | Boogie Woogie Santa Claus  | Alligator Christmas  | Alligator Christmas | Paul Cowley  | Memphis Jug Blues | Just What I Know  |  | Jody Levins  | Jingle Bells Boogie  | Papa Ain't No Santa Claus, Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree | Fruit Jar Guzzlers  | Stack-O-Lee  | The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of | Pete Johnson And Albert Ammons  | Barrelhouse Boogie  |  Pete Johnson And Albert Ammons 

    | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Corey Harris  | Mama Africa.mp3  | Insurrection Blues  |  | Marcia Ball  | Christmas Fais Do Do  | Alligator Records Christmas Collections Greetings  |  | John Hammond  | Guitar King  | Solo  |  | Muddy Gurdy  | Strange Fruit  | Homecoming  | Chantilly Negra | Joe Bonamassa  | Seagull  | Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House  |  | Leroy Carr  | Christmas In Jail. Ain't That A Pain  | Rockin' Blues Christmas  |  | Joordan Mackay & Joordan Mackay, Juki Välipakka, Sirpa Suomalai  | I Have Tried  | One Fell Swoop  |  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Freight Train Blues  | Blues Master Works: Lightnin' Hopkins  |  | Butterbeans And Susie  | Papa Ain't No Santa Claus, Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree  | Papa Ain't No Santa Claus, Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree  |  | Kyla Brox  | Too Toung To Care  | Kyla Brox .. Live At Last (Acoustic)  |  | Charles Brown  | Merry Christmas Baby  | Papa Ain't No Santa Claus, Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree  |  | Mississippi Fred McDowell & Annie Mae McDowell  | Waiting For My Baby  | My Home Is In The Delta  |  | Blind Blake  | Blake's Worried Blues  | All The Recorded Sides  |  | New Mayfair Orchestra  | Savoy Christmas Medley  | Big Band Swing Christmas  |  | Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton  | Double File  | Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton  | Smithsonian Folkways | Blind Blake  | Skeedle Loo Doo Blues   | All The Recorded Sides  | 

Gus Bodenheim - "Old Codger Updated Terms of Service" Dodo Marmarosa - "Dodo's Bounce" The Georgia Browns - "Decatur Street 81" Red Norvo - "Blues in E Flat" Slim Gaillard - "Travelin' Blues" Lecuona Cuban Boys - "Ay Si, Ay No" Memphis Minnie - "Keep on Eatin'" Joe Venuti & Eddie Lang - "Cheese and Crackers" Gus Bodenheim - "The Maxwell Bodenheim Diaries, Part 1" Wilmoth Houdini - "Rum and Coca-Cola - Parts 1 and 2" Blind Blake - "Dry Bone Shuffle (unissued take)" The Cook Sisters - "Make My Cot Where the Cot-Cot-Cotton Grows" Betty Boop featuring Wiffle Piffle - "Hot Air Salesman" George Formby - "The Lancashire Toreador" Noël Coward - "Imagine the Duchess's Feelings" Ruth Etting - "At Sundown" Euneeda Bodenheim - "The Des Jardins Canderriere" Hoagy Carmichael - "Cosmics" Edmond Hall - "Jammin' in Four" Lionel Belasco y su Orquesta - "Juliana" Duke Ellington with Dolores Parker - "The Wildest Gal in Town" Bruz Fletcher - "Miss Day" Gus Bodenheim - "The Maxwell Bodenheim Diaries, Part 2" Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orchestra - "Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F: II. Andante con moto - Adagio" Frank Socolow's Duke Quintet - "Reverse the Charges" The Be-Bop Boys - "Webb City" Flip the Frog - "The Cuckoo Murder Case (1930)" Blind Blake and Charlie Spand - "Hastings Street" Cliff Jackson's Krazy Kats - "Desert Blues" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/109859

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Big Bill Broonzy  | Key To The Highway  | Where The Blues Began  | Washington (Bukka) White  | The Panama Limited  | The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of  | Mike Goudreau  | I'm So Glad I Have You  | Acoustic Sessions  |   | Muddy Waters  | My Home Is In The Delta  | Acoustic Blues Kings and Queens, Vol. 1  | Marie Knight  | Samson & Delilah  | Let Us Get Together: A Tribute To The Rev Gary Davis  | Dixie Frog  | Sonny Terry  | Worried Man Blues  | Total Blues - 100 Essential Songs  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Hear Me Talkin'  | Total Blues - 100 Essential Songs  | Adam Franklin  | Sunny Side Of The Street  | Till I Hear You Talking  | John Hammond  | Five Long Years  | Bluesman  |   | Skip James  | Devil Got My Woman  | Hampton Jazz Festival  06-27-68  | Billy Boy Arnold  | Looking Up At Down  | Billy Boy Arnold Sings: Big Bill Broonzy  | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee  | I'm A Poor Man But A Good Man  | American Folk Blues Festival Live In Manchester 1962  | Blind Blake  | Skeedle Loo Doo Blues  | All The Recorded Sides  | Bunk Johnson  | Teasin' Rag  | The Last Testament  |   | Reverend Gary Davis  | 'Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus  | See What The Lord Has Done For Me(Disc 1)  | Tommy McClennan  | Blues Trip me this Morning (1942)  | Broadcasting the Blues, volume 2

Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about a tour of Lancashire towns, but some of the towns I mention were in Cheshire at the time, and some are in Greater Manchester or Merseyside now. They're all very close together though. I say Mose Rager was Black. I was misremembering, confusing Mose Rager, a white player in the Muhlenberg style, with Arnold Schultz, a Black player who invented it. I got this right in the episode on "Bye Bye Love". Also, I couldn't track down a copy of the Paul Kane single version of “He Was My Brother” in decent quality, so I used the version on The Paul Simon Songbook instead, as they're basically identical performances. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This compilation collects all Simon and Garfunkel's studio albums, with bonus tracks, plus a DVD of their reunion concert. There are many collections of the pre-S&G recordings by the two, as these are now largely in the public domain. This one contains a good selection. I've referred to several books for this episode: Simon and Garfunkel: Together Alone by Spencer Leigh is a breezy, well-researched, biography of the duo. Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn is the closest thing there is to an authorised biography of Simon. And What is it All But Luminous? is Art Garfunkel's memoir. It's not particularly detailed, being more a collection of thoughts and poetry than a structured narrative, but gives a good idea of Garfunkel's attitude to people and events in his life. Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to take a look at a hit record that almost never happened -- a record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how a duo who started off as an Everly Brothers knockoff, before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village folkies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the sixties by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play.  Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his "one and only friend" in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child -- and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio -- "It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun." Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person -- on his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to one thousand three hundred and ten books, and he has always had a habit of starting elaborate projects and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seems to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close, friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour. Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block on the middle-of-the-road radio show Make Believe Ballroom announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Paul Simon later said that that record was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed's show on WINS, loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age -- his first public performance had been singing Nat "King" Cole's hit "Too Young" in a school talent contest when he was nine -- but the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and, depending on which source you read, was a performance either of "Sh'Boom" or of Big Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Flip, Flop, and Fly"] The duo also wrote at least one song together as early as 1955 -- or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time -- but Simon has later performed it: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Girl For Me"] Even at this point, though, while Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Kooper was another friend of Simon's at the time, and apparently Simon and Kooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came on to Paul's radar, he also bought a guitar, but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly Brothers that they realised what it was that they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly Brothers as soon as he heard "Bye Bye Love": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records -- he spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents, a comic book was ten cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? But he needed that record, he couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour-long two-bus journey to a record shop in Queens, bought the record, took it home, played it... and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home, and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Everlys' harmonies, and would spend hours together, singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for two hundred dollars. They would record themselves singing, and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player -- "the family bassman", as he would later sing -- and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like "you went from four-four to a bar of nine-eight, you can't do that" -- to which his son would say "I just did" -- but this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song -- and first hit -- came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wop group the Clovers had released the hit single "Devil or Angel". Its B-side had a version of "Hey Doll Baby", a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner, and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin'": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Doll Baby"] That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Hey Doll Baby"] Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me, because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform "Hey Doll Baby", but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it, and to work a version of it out together, and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to "Wake Up Little Suzie" as to "Hey Doll Baby". Their new song, "Hey Schoolgirl", was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prosen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realised he might have his own Everly Brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract, and they went into a professional studio to rerecord "Hey Schoolgirl", this time with Paul's father on bass, and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey Schoolgirl"] Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names -- there was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel. So instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis -- a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. "Hey Schoolgirl" became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show (after Sid Prosen gave Freed two hundred dollars), and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American Bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. "Hey Schoolgirl" only made number forty-nine nationally, because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over a hundred thousand copies, mostly in the New York area. And Sid Prosen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook -- the two boys got about two thousand dollars each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prosen, to see what the duo's next single should be, and Prosen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers soundalikes, others were Elvis soundalikes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those, too? Obviously Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father on the other: [Excerpt: True Taylor, "True or False"] But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it, and the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of Art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says "the friendship was shattered for life" -- he decided then and there that Paul Simon was a "base" person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon, over and over again, in that book as still being his friend, even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as "Hey Schoolgirl" had been, with material like "Two Teenagers", written by Rose Marie McCoy: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Two Teenagers"] But as they'd stopped being friends, and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name "Artie Garr": [Excerpt: Artie Garr, "Beat Love"] But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, planning to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished, he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass, and drums, could sing harmonies, and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of C, he could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo, and do it well: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Boys Were Made For Girls"] That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Burt Bacharach, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carole Klein, sometimes under the name The Cosines: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] As we heard back in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", Carole Klein went on to change her name to Carole King, and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era -- something which spurred Paul Simon on, as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirshner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirshner turned Simon down -- an expensive mistake for Kirshner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing. Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player, and played lead guitar on "The Shape I'm In" by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Johnny Restivo, "The Shape I'm In"] Between 1959 and 1963 Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles. including as a member of the Mystics: [Excerpt: The Mystics, "All Through the Night"] He even had a couple of very minor chart hits -- he got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs: [Excerpt: Tico and the Triumphs, "Motorcycle"] and number ninety-seven as Jerry Landis: [Excerpt: Jerry Landis, "The Lone Teen Ranger"] But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed, and not getting anywhere. And then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than "ooh-bop-a-loochy-ba" when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] Simon got to meet Varese after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different, and much more commercial, direction than Varese's, he was nonetheless influenced by what Varese's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From the North Country"] Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a folkie, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music other than the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere, and inspired by the liner notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England, he made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American and owning a better acoustic guitar -- a Martin -- than most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working round the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk-club audiences, who were used to rather earnest, scholarly, people, not to someone like Simon who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted mostly of songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's "Fever", and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called "He Was My Brother", which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane: [Excerpt: Paul Kane, "He Was My Brother"] Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his who was murdered when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders -- but while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a song plugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side, which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts: [Excerpt: Val Doonican, "Carlos Dominguez"] Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Doonican track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a folkie, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to perform in Greenwich Village as Kane and Garr, but they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there he continued work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song while a fifth would include a snippet of it. "The Sound of Silence" was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA, and back working as a song plugger. It was while working as a song plugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia. Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them, "He Was My Brother", for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who were supposed to be the Black answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: The Pilgrims, "He Was My Brother"] Wilson was also interested in "The Sound of Silence", but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts perform his songs. Wilson was cautious, though -- he was already producing one folkie singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one. But he *could* probably do with a vocal group... Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before, as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal *duo*? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday Morning, 3AM, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Kornfeld, a Greenwich Village folkie, on guitars, and Bill Lee, the double bass player who'd played with Dylan and others, on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six originals written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of hootenanny staples like "Go Tell it on the Mountain", plus Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one, "The Sun is Burning", written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sun is Burning"] But the song that everyone was keenest on was "The Sound of Silence", the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence (Wednesday Morning 3AM version)"] In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde's Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke -- Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing "Hello darkness, my old friend", for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance -- though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them, specifically, he'd just had a fit of the giggles -- and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964, and was scheduled for release  in October. In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but was still spending most of his time travelling, and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next eighteen months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Kathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs, and an older woman called Judith Piepe (and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard) who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. Piepe ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time were Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart, whose bedroom was next door to Simon's. Piepe became Simon's de facto unpaid manager and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Les Cousins, the London club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are, roughly, three styles of acoustic folk guitar -- to be clear, I'm talking about very broad-brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones. Two of these are American styles -- there's the simple style known as Carter scratching, popularised by Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter family, and for this all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this: [Excerpt: Carter picking] That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late forties and fifties, though, another style had become popularised -- Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Muhlenberg picking, after Muhlenberg County, where he'd learned the style from Ike Everly -- the Everly Brothers' father -- and Mose Rager, a Black guitarist. In Travis picking, the thumb alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers play simple patterns on the treble strings, like this: [Excerpt: Travis picking] That's, again, a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ike Everly, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor, and more. But there's a third style, British baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davey Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart when Bart started working with Tommy Steele, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Korner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, “Anji”, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "Anji"] Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ragtime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan oud music, and by Celtic bagpipe music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord -- D-A-D-G-A-D -- which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque, so here's an excerpt of Davey Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad "She Moved Through the Fair", recast as a raga and retitled "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre"] Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influences into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at Les Cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and John Martyn, and it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham -- but while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Broonzy songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs, including Carthy's own arrangement of the traditional "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Simon would later record that arrangement, without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time, who seem to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home, and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick (now himself one of the greats of British guitar) but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again. Similarly, in 1965 Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop band based in the UK, best known for "Georgy Girl". The two wrote "Red Rubber Ball", which became a hit for the Cyrkle: [Excerpt: The Cyrke, "Red Rubber Ball"] and also "Cloudy", which the Seekers recorded as an album track: [Excerpt: The Seekers, "Cloudy"] When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credits, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point there *was* no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist working the folk clubs in Britain, and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies. They did, when Simon briefly returned to the US in March, record two tracks for a prospective single, this time with an electric backing band. One was a rewrite of the title track of their first album, now titled "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and with a new chorus and some guitar parts nicked from Davey Graham's "Anji"; the other a Twist-beat song that could almost be Manfred Mann or Georgie Fame -- "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'". That was also influenced by “Anji”, though by Bert Jansch's version rather than Graham's original. Jansch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, “Anji”] Which became the chorus to “We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'”: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'"] But that single was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Art Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith Piepe, who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed -- though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. He was given his own radio show -- a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' Choice, which got twenty million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously he didn't have any out yet, and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals. Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday Morning 3AM -- "He Was My Brother" and a new version of "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"] The other ten songs were newly-written pieces like "April Come She Will", "Kathy's Song", a parody of Bob Dylan entitled "A Simple Desultory Philippic", and the song that was chosen as the single, "I am a Rock": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"] That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on Bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready, Steady, Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on  a small folk music series, Heartsong, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Rediffusion, the company that made the series, also made Ready, Steady, Go, and since they'd already paid Simon they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances -- the show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to perform the whole thing because "it's a story". Lindsay-Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who'd called the BBC asking about it -- the joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piepe doing different voices -- and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs, and birthday parties, sometimes performing with Garfunkel, when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing “Johnny B Goode” at a birthday party, backed by a band called Joker's Wild who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] The guitarist from Joker's Wild would later join the other band who'd played at that party, but the story of David Gilmour joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C Frank, though there wasn't much production involved as like Simon's own album it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded: [Excerpt: Jackson C Frank, "Blues Run the Game"] It seemed like Paul Simon was on his way to becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living. Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph McTell perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in mathematics whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday Morning 3AM hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one song from it, "The Sound of Silence", and it had caught on with the college students, who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contacts at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for "Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun", now he was going to try it with "The Sound of Silence". He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought -- record labels messed with people's records all the time. So "The Sound of Silence" was released as an electric folk-rock single: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge, but the fact is that they had *already* gone folk-rock, back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well. Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying "I can remember going into the gents in The Three Horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig, and we're having a pee together. He was very excited, and he turns round to me and and says, “Guess what, man? We're number sixteen in Boston with The Sound of Silence'”. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a beeline for me. “Guess what?” I said “You're No. 15 in Boston”. He said, “No man, we're No. 1 in Boston”. I thought, “Wow. No. 1 in Boston, eh?” It was almost a joke, because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all." Simon was even more excited when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it, and thought the arrangement was a Byrds rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] I have to say that, while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the charts, Simon was called back to America, to record an album to go along with it. The Paul Simon Songbook hadn't been released in the US,  and they needed an album *now*, and Simon was a slow songwriter, so the duo took six songs from that album and rerecorded them in folk-rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with "The Sound of Silence", the two electric tracks from March, one new song, "Blessed", and a version of "Anji", which came straight after "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of “Anji” also followed Jansch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns (he wrote it in Widnes, but a friend of Simon's who lived in Widnes later said that while it was written in Widnes it was written *about* Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wigan, both of which are so close to Widnes and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up.) [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound"] These tracks were all recorded in December 1965, and they featured the Wrecking Crew -- Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glen Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with A-team players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, "The Sound of Silence" had reached number one, knocking "We Can Work it Out" by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon, who said of the achievement: "I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house, too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel." And Artie said to me, "That Simon & Garfunkel, they must be having a great time.""

 We were so pleased that our newest band mate, Vanessa Coffman, chose last night to spend part of a very big birthday — her 21st — with us. It's also her first anniversary as a member of The Flood, and, to celebrate, she also brought a special guest. Now, ordinarily in the Floodisphere, Veezy plays “Blue,” her sweet and mellow tenor, but last night it was Blue's big brother, the bari, that tagged along with her. All evening that the baritone sax, which Veezy named “Viper” (for its reptilian tubing), rocked the walls of the Bowen house just the way they love to be rocked. Listen the magic Veezy and Viper bring to this century-old Blind Blake tune midway through last night's jam. Happiest birthday, Miss V, from your Family Flood!

In Episode 31, I talk with roots musician Noah Engh known for his distinct singing and ragtime and blues guitar and ukulele.  We discuss both Noah's and Uke's journies in music; we reminisce about our time in Hollywood and discuss a portion of blues and roots music history.  We also walk back through the pandemic and how Uke In A Suit came to exist, record a full-length album, and the pains of social media. Banjo, CO, also gets blessed with a live performance from “Uke In A Suit,” performing Blind Blake's Too Time Blues.  In this week's wrap-up, Crystal and I discuss Hollywood decapitations, hot dogs, the Iowa State Fair, the difference between a square and gerrymandering.  Now please enjoy as Noah and I “come correct” in our entertaining conversation. Noah Engh's Bandcamp Uke in A Suit's BandcampUke in A Suit's InstagramNoah Engh's InstagramKansas City Bankroll webpageLive from Banjo Podcast PatreonLive from Banjo Podcast InstagramLive from Banjo Podcast Webpage 

Quaint, sweet, nostalgic…just a few adjectives to describe today's music. Digging into the digital bins we've surfaced some of the more familiar of tunes from the last century. Early century pop, country, jazz and vocal harmonies all being serenades with upbeat and good natured favorites of the Great American Songbook. We'll hear from Fats Waller, Eddie Condon, Ted Lewis, the Sons of the Pioneers, and Blind Blake with songs that ring a true bell in the heart. Songs about lazy rivers, love letters, the lovesick blues, and Kentucky moon. Don't let yourself get carried away as you lean in closer to the speakers. We certainly don't want you to hurt yourself. KOWS Community radio is a connection worth making with an eclectic blend of sounds from up and down the genre expanses…streaming to planet Earth at http://www.FreeSpeechNoBull.com. Join us.

Robert Johnson is a central figure of The Blues! In this episode, Markus and Ray discuss Johnson and those Blues artists who preceded him. Not only do we go over Johnson's life and the lives of some of his contemporaries, but we also dig back on Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Patton, "The Mississippis" (John and Fred), Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Robert Johnson is a central figure of The Blues! In this episode, Markus and Ray discuss Johnson and those Blues artists who preceded him. Not only do we go over Johnson's life and the lives of some of his contemporaries, but we also dig back on Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Patton, "The Mississippis" (John and Fred), Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Lemon Jefferson.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

A photograph taken around 1960 appeared recently at Ebony magazine's website featuring renowned actors and activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee with their three kids at an anti-war protest. One of those kids – about six years old – is Guy Davis. He made the cardboard signs that the family is carrying. Guy Davis, now 64 years old, still has a lot to say as one of America's finest blues musician and folk singers.  Traditional acoustic blues is arguably the bedrock of American popular music, but even in today's roots revival, the legacy of artists like Robert Johnson, Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt – takes a bit of a backseat. We'd have to talk about Taj Mahal and Corey Harris. I had Rory Block on this show some time ago. Ben Harper and Keb Mo keep traditional blues in their mix. Less celebrated than he should be is Guy Davis. His most recent album is a duo recording with Italian harmonica master Fabrizio Poggi on an album-length tribute to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. In our conversation, Davis talks about growing up at the epicenter of New York culture and how the ethos of engagement he learned from his parents is translating to the here and now.