Podcasts about Blind Blake

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2024 59:00

Talkin' Blues // Charlie Hunter

American Songcatcher

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2024 60:26

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

Episode 2312: 24-07 Black History Month, Pt.1

Sing Out! Radio Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2024 58:30

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

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Crossroad Blues (1/3) La Chanson

Un Dernier Disque avant la fin du monde

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2023 80:32

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 !

love world blues wolf beer sitting crossroads bottle whites robert johnson louis blues crawling ciro ma rainey crossroad howlin la chanson bessie smith john mayall staple singers willie brown son house tommy johnson bluesbreakers big bill broonzy skip james one o blind lemon jefferson memphis blues i saw her standing there bert williams blind blake manumission charlie patton poor me will the circle be unbroken parchman farm mississippi sheiks smokestack lightnin big road blues davey graham victor military band

BBB#027: An Old Soul Guitarist - Jack Rose

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2023 41:02

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.

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"Good as I Been to You (You Gonna Quit Me Blues")

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2023 4:33

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

Charlie Hunter: Graduating Busking Boot Camp

Wong Notes

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2023 52:28

"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:

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"Yas Yas Duck"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 20, 2023 5:22

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

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Chris Yakopcic is Making a Scene

Making a Scene Presents

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2023 44:58

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.

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CRÓNICAS APASIONADAS T05C009 Rama lama ding dong!! (07/10/2023)

CRÓNICAS APASIONADAS

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2023 54:47

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

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

15. Revival of the country blues in the tweties: Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson

Into the Soul of the Blues

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 25, 2023 75:08

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

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M'agraden les bananes perqu

Jazz Watusi

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2023 61:48

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

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Episode 166: “Crossroads” by Cream

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2023

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 --

united states america god tv love american new york death live history texas canada black world thanksgiving chicago power art europe uk mother house england woman water british germany san francisco sound club european home green fire spiritual depression sales devil european union army south detroit tales irish new orleans african bbc grammy band temple blues mexican stone union wolf britain sony atlantic mothers beatles animal oxford bond mississippi arkansas greece columbia cd boy shadows manchester sitting rolling stones recording thompson scottish searching delta released rappers san antonio richmond i am politicians waters stones preaching david bowie phantom delight swing clock bob dylan crossroads escaping beck organisation bottle compare trio paramount musicians wheels invention disc goodbye bach range lament reaction cream armstrong elvis presley arabic pink floyd jamaican handy biography orchestras communists watts circles powerhouses great depression steady hurry davies aretha franklin sixteen wills shines afro pig jimi hendrix monty python smithsonian hammond vernon leases vain fleetwood mac excerpt cambridge university dobbs black swan kinks mick jagger eric clapton toad library of congress dada substitute patton zimmerman carnegie hall ozzy osbourne empress george harrison red hot mclaughlin badge rollin rod stewart whites tilt mccormick bee gees ray charles tulips johnson johnson castles mixcloud emi quartets louis armstrong chuck berry monkees keith richards showbiz robert johnson louis blues velvet underground partly rock music garfunkel elektra jimi herbie hancock crawling jimmy page smokey robinson muddy waters creme lockwood royal albert hall ciro savages hard days my mind carry on walkin otis redding charlie watts ma rainey jethro tull spoonful ramblin muppet show fillmore your love columbia records seaman brian jones drinkin debbie reynolds tiny tim peter sellers clapton dodds howlin joe smith all you need buddy guy sittin terry jones wexler charters yardbirds pete townshend korner john lee hooker steve winwood wardlow john hammond glenn miller peter green manchester metropolitan university hollies benny goodman john mclaughlin sgt pepper django reinhardt paul jones tomorrow night auger michael palin buffalo springfield decca bessie smith strange brew wilson pickett mick fleetwood leadbelly mike taylor ginger baker manfred mann smithsonian institute john mayall be true ornette coleman marchetti rory gallagher delta blues canned heat beano claud brian epstein robert spencer jack bruce willie brown gene autry fats waller bill wyman gamblin polydor white room clarksdale hold your hand dinah washington american blacks alan lomax blues festival 10cc macclesfield tin pan alley godley melody maker lonnie johnson reading festival dave davies continental europe ian stewart willie dixon my face western swing nems chicago blues bob wills wrapping paper phil ochs dave stevens your baby son house chicken shack john entwistle sweet home chicago booker t jones dave thompson jimmie rodgers ten years after mellotron chris winter rock around octet go now chris barber pete brown andy white love me do country blues tommy johnson dave clark five spencer davis group tamla albert hammond bluesbreakers john fahey paul scott mitch ryder brian auger motherless child mighty quinn al wilson winwood mayall peter ward streatham big bill broonzy t bone walker preachin jon landau joe boyd charlie christian so glad paul dean georgie fame skip james lavere ben palmer one o james chapman roger dean charley patton sonny terry chris welch tom dowd robert jr blind lemon jefferson john mcvie ahmet ertegun memphis blues are you being served merseybeat jerry wexler chattanooga choo choo mike vernon parnes jeff beck group lonnie donegan brownie mcghee john carson gail collins fiddlin i saw her standing there billy j kramer chatmon bill oddie bert williams mcvie blind blake elijah wald bonzo dog doo dah band disraeli gears peter guralnick screaming lord sutch lady soul wythenshawe robert stigwood uncle dave macon noel redding those were tony palmer sir douglas quintet chas chandler devil blues charlie patton leroy smith parchman farm noah johnson paramount records paul nicholas bonzo dog band terry scott cross road blues hoochie coochie man klaus voorman johnny shines i wanna be your man mike jagger train it dust my broom instant party america rca smokestack lightnin mike vickers manchester college radio corporation songsters ertegun bobby graham stephen dando collins bruce conforth christmas pantomime before elvis new york mining disaster beer it davey graham chris stamp victor military band tilt araiza

Episode 508: WEDNESDAY'S EVEN WORSE EXTRA JULY 05, 2023

artist dead rights crown vol summertime release date even worse bo diddley seven wonders less is more eric gales kilowatts blind blake joanna connor big daddy wilson track dogs

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2023 59:00

"France Blues (Hey, Lawdy, Mama, Mama, Hey, Lawdy, Papa, Papa)”

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2023 4:41

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

15. Revival of the country blues in the twenties (deel 1): Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson

Into the Soul of the Blues

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2023 74:33

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

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CloudwatcherUno™ Podcast S9 Ep 4 ~ Kaspar 'Berry' Rapkin

CloudwatcherUno

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2022 34:52

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.

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Episode 481: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #481 APRIL 06, 2020

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2022 58:59

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Episode 473: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #473 FEBRUARY 09 , 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2022 58:59

BF Presents: American Songcatcher

Basic Folk

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2022 80:47

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

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Episode 474: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #474 FEBRUARY 16 , 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2022 59:00

Episode 468: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #468 JANUARY 05, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2022 58:59

Episode 465: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #465, DECEMBER 15, 2021

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 16, 2021 58:59

Episode 464: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #464, DECEMBER 08, 2021

Old Codger with Courtney T. Edison | WFMU

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2021 58:59

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He'll steal anything that isn't nailed down. And anything he can pry loose isn't nailed down. from Nov 23, 2021

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2021

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

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Episode 460: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #460, NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2021 58:59

Episode 135: “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel

Jam Logs, the Podcast of The 1937 Flood

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2021

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.""

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Happy Birthday, Veezy!

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2021

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!

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Episode 31 - Noah Engh - Uke In A Suit

Live from Banjo

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 3, 2021 70:19

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

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Episode 79: Those Old Familiars

Deeper Roots Radio Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2021 117:35

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.

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Ep 166 - July 14, 2021 (Sea Pinks, Endless Boogie, Flat Worms, Crack Cloud, Gal Costa)

3 Songs Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2021 73:30

Bob and Mike play one song each from Blind Blake, Gal Costa, Flat Worms, Endless Boogie, Sea Pinks, and Crack Cloud. Topics of discussion include how people traveled in the 1920s and 1930s, Brazilian geography, the Indie Pop Hall of Fame, moms, college radio, and the stupid ads that play when using a certain streaming service that shall go unnamed (deliberately not edited out).

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BONUS: Sitting In // Lon Eldridge and the Hawaiian Steel Guitar

American Songcatcher

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2021 12:44

Good people! I'm so pleased to share my fourth guest to embark on this “Sitting In” mini-series, a local legend in my neck of the woods, Chattanooga's own Lon Eldridge. Harboring a unique blend of traditional pre-war blues, ragtime, jazz and swing, Lon has spent the last two decades evoking the styles of those who laid the framework of these genres, from the likes of Mississippi John Hurt to Robert Johnson to Blind Blake and countless other musical masters. He's an avid collector of 78rpm records and restores old Victrola record players, and showcases his deep collection under the guise of DJ Passe. Lon's also a member of a gypsy jazz and swing group called The 9th Street Stompers, who cull up the musical scenery of an era when the lines between swing, gypsy jazz, blues, rockabilly, and if all that wasn't enough, he also has his own bolo tie business, Lookout Bolo Ties.⁠ For this collaboration, Lon expanded his skills once again to celebrate the work of Hawaiian steel guitarist Pale K. Lua, who was instrumental in bringing the unique sound to America at the turn of the century, before it was adopted by blues, western, bluegrass and country music starting in the 1920's. Lon is the only person to assemble all of Pale's recordings and release them as a complete set. Here's his story, enjoy.⁠ Follow Lon: @dj_Passe @bolo_knee Links: Pale K. Lua Complete Recordings Lon's Official Website --- Support American Songcatcher! Join the Patreon Community for as little as $3 a month - https://www.Patreon.com/AmericanSongcatcher Send a one-time donation via: Venmo PayPal --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

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Episode 118: "Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy" by Manfred Mann

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021 49:27

Episode 118 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy" by Manfred Mann, and how a jazz group with a blues singer had one of the biggest bubblegum pop hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Walk on By" by Dionne Warwick. 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/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of tracks by Manfred Mann. Information on the group comes from Mannerisms: The Five Phases of Manfred Mann, by Greg Russo, and from the liner notes of this eleven-CD box set of the group's work. For a much cheaper collection of the group's hits -- but without the jazz, blues, and baroque pop elements that made them more interesting than the average sixties singles band -- this has all the hit singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript: So far, when we've looked at the British blues and R&B scene, we've concentrated on the bands who were influenced by Chicago blues, and who kept to a straightforward guitar/bass/drums lineup. But there was another, related, branch of the blues scene in Britain that was more musically sophisticated, and which while its practitioners certainly enjoyed playing songs by Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, was also rooted in the jazz of people like Mose Allison. Today we're going to look at one of those bands, and at the intersection of jazz and the British R&B scene, and how a jazz band with a flute player and a vibraphonist briefly became bubblegum pop idols. We're going to look at "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Do Wah Diddy Diddy"] Manfred Mann is, annoyingly when writing about the group, the name of both a band and of one of its members. Manfred Mann the human being, as opposed to Manfred Mann the group, was born Manfred Lubowitz in South Africa, and while he was from a wealthy family, he was very opposed to the vicious South African system of apartheid, and considered himself strongly anti-racist. He was also a lover of jazz music, especially some of the most progressive music being made at the time -- musicians like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane -- and he soon became a very competent jazz pianist, playing with musicians like Hugh Masakela at a time when that kind of fraternisation between people of different races was very much frowned upon in South Africa. Manfred desperately wanted to get out of South Africa, and he took his chance in June 1961, at the last point at which he was a Commonwealth citizen. The Commonwealth, for those who don't know, is a political association of countries that were originally parts of the British Empire, and basically replaced the British Empire when the former colonies gained their independence. These days, the Commonwealth is of mostly symbolic importance, but in the fifties and sixties, as the Empire was breaking up, it was considered a real power in its own right, and in particular, until some changes to immigration law in the mid sixties, Commonwealth citizens had the right to move to the UK. At that point, South Africa had just voted to become a republic, and there was a rule in the Commonwealth that countries with a head of state other than the Queen could only remain in the Commonwealth with the unanimous agreement of all the other members. And several of the other member states, unsurprisingly, objected to the continued membership of a country whose entire system of government was based on the most virulent racism imaginable. So, as soon as South Africa became a republic, it lost its Commonwealth membership, and that meant that its citizens lost their automatic right to emigrate to the UK. But they were given a year's grace period, and so Manfred took that chance and moved over to England, where he started playing jazz keyboards, giving piano lessons, and making some money on the side by writing record reviews. For those reviews, rather than credit himself as Manfred Lubowitz, he decided to use a pseudonym taken from the jazz drummer Shelly Manne, and he became Manfred Manne -- spelled with a silent e on the end, which he later dropped. Mann was rather desperate for gigs, and he ended up taking a job playing with a band at a Butlin's holiday camp. Graham Bond, who we've seen in several previous episodes as the leader of The Graham Bond Organisation, was at that time playing Hammond organ there, but only wanted to play a few days a week. Mann became the substitute keyboard player for that holiday camp band, and struck up a good musical rapport with the drummer and vibraphone player, Mike Hugg. When Bond went off to form his own band, Mann and Hugg decided to form their own band along the same lines, mixing the modern jazz that they liked with the more commercial R&B that Bond was playing. They named their group the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, and it initially consisted of Mann on keyboards, Hugg on drums and vibraphone, Mike Vickers on guitar, flute, and saxophone, Dave Richmond on bass, Tony Roberts and Don Fay on saxophone and Ian Fenby on trumpet. As their experiences were far more in the jazz field than in blues, they decided that they needed to get in a singer who was more familiar with the blues side of things. The person they chose was a singer who was originally named Paul Pond, and who had been friends for a long time with Brian Jones, before Jones had formed the Rolling Stones. While Jones had been performing under the name Elmo Lewis, his friend had taken on Jones' surname, as he thought "Paul Pond" didn't sound like a good name for a singer. He'd first kept his initials, and performed as P.P. Jones, but then he'd presumably realised that "pee-pee" is probably not the best stage name in the world, and so he'd become just Paul Jones, the name by which he's known to this day. Jones, like his friend Brian, was a fan particularly of Chicago blues, and he had occasionally appeared with Alexis Korner. After auditioning for the group at a ska club called The Roaring 20s, Jones became the group's lead singer and harmonica player, and the group soon moved in Jones' musical direction, playing the kind of Chicago blues that was popular at the Marquee club, where they soon got a residency, rather than the soul style that was more popular at the nearby Flamingo club, and which would be more expected from a horn-centric lineup. Unsurprisingly, given this, the horn players soon left, and the group became a five-piece core of Jones, Mann, Hugg, Vickers, and Richmond. This group was signed to HMV records by John Burgess. Burgess was a producer who specialised in music of a very different style from what the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers played. We've already heard some of his production work -- he was the producer for Adam Faith from "What Do You Want?" on: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, "What Do You Want?"] And at the time he signed the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, he was just starting to work with a new group, Freddie and the Dreamers, for whom he would produce several hits: [Excerpt: Freddie and the Dreamers, "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody"] Burgess liked the group, but he insisted that they had to change their name -- and in fact, he insisted that the group change their name to Manfred Mann. None of the group members liked the idea -- even Mann himself thought that this seemed a little unreasonable, and Paul Jones in particular disagreed strongly with the idea, but they were all eventually mollified by the idea that all the publicity would emphasise that all five of them were equal members of the group, and that while the group might be named after their keyboard player, there were five members. The group members themselves always referred to themselves as "the Manfreds" rather than as Manfred Mann. The group's first single showed that despite having become a blues band and then getting produced by a pop producer, they were still at heart a jazz group. "Why Should We Not?" is an instrumental led by Vickers' saxophone, Mann's organ, and Jones' harmonica: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Why Should We Not?"] Unsurprisingly, neither that nor the B-side, a jazz instrumental version of "Frere Jacques", charted -- Britain in 1963 wanted Gerry and the Pacemakers and Freddie and the Dreamers, not jazz instrumentals. The next single, an R&B song called "Cock-A-Hoop" written by Jones, did little better. The group's big breakthrough came from Ready, Steady, Go!, which at this point was using "Wipe Out!" by the Surfaris as its theme song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Wipe Out"] We've mentioned Ready, Steady, Go! in passing in previous episodes, but it was the most important pop music show of the early and mid sixties, just as Oh Boy! had been for the late fifties. Ready, Steady, Go! was, in principle at least, a general pop music programme, but in practice it catered primarily for the emerging mod subculture. "Mod" stood for "modernist", and the mods emerged from the group of people who liked modern jazz rather than trad, but by this point their primary musical interests were in soul and R&B. Mod was a working-class subculture, based in the South-East of England, especially London, and spurred on by the newfound comparative affluence of the early sixties, when for the first time young working-class people, while still living in poverty, had a small amount of disposable income to spend on clothes, music, and drugs. The Mods had a very particular sense of style, based around sharp Italian suits, pop art and op art, and Black American music or white British imitations of it. For them, music was functional, and primarily existed for the purposes of dancing, and many of them would take large amounts of amphetamines so they could spend the entire weekend at clubs dancing to soul and R&B music. And that entire weekend would kick off on Friday with Ready, Steady, Go!, whose catchphrase was "the weekend starts here!" Ready, Steady, Go! featured almost every important pop act of the early sixties, but while groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers or the Beatles would appear on it, it became known for its promotion of Black artists, and it was the first major British TV exposure for Motown artists like the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Marvelettes, for Stax artists like Otis Redding, and for blues artists like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. Ready Steady Go! was also the primary TV exposure for British groups who were inspired by those artists, and it's through Ready Steady Go! that the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Them, and the Who, among others reached national popularity -- all of them acts that were popular among the Mods in particular. But "Wipe Out" didn't really fit with this kind of music, and so the producers of Ready Steady Go were looking for something more suitable for their theme music. They'd already tried commissioning the Animals to record something, as we saw a couple of weeks back, but that hadn't worked out, and instead they turned to Manfred Mann, who came up with a song that not only perfectly fit the style of the show, but also handily promoted the group themselves: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "5-4-3-2-1"] That was taken on as Ready, Steady, Go!s theme song, and made the top five in the UK. But by the time it charted, the group had already changed lineup. Dave Richmond was seen by the other members of the group as a problem at this point. Richmond was a great bass player, but he was a great *jazz* bass player -- he wanted to be Charles Mingus, and play strange cross-rhythms, and what the group needed at this point was someone who would just play straightforward blues basslines without complaint -- they needed someone closer to Willie Dixon than to Mingus. Tom McGuinness, who replaced him, had already had a rather unusual career trajectory. He'd started out as a satirist, writing for the magazine Private Eye and the TV series That Was The Week That Was, one of the most important British comedy shows of the sixties, but he had really wanted to be a blues musician instead. He'd formed a blues band, The Roosters, with a guitarist who went to art school with his girlfriend, and they'd played a few gigs around London before the duo had been poached by the minor Merseybeat band Casey Jones and his Engineers, a group which had been formed by Brian Casser, formerly of Cass & The Cassanovas, the group that had become The Big Three. Casey Jones and his Engineers had just released the single "One Way Ticket": [Excerpt: Casey Jones and His Engineers, "One-Way Ticket"] However, the two guitarists soon realised, after just a handful of gigs, that they weren't right for that group, and quit. McGuinness' friend, Eric Clapton, went on to join the Yardbirds, and we'll be hearing more about him in a few weeks' time, but McGuinness was at a loose end, until he discovered that Manfred Mann were looking for a bass player. McGuinness was a guitarist, but bluffed to Paul Jones that he'd switched to bass, and got the job. He said later that the only question he'd been asked when interviewed by the group was "are you willing to play simple parts?" -- as he'd never played bass in his life until the day of his first gig with the group, he was more than happy to say yes to that. McGuinness joined only days after the recording of "5-4-3-2-1", and Richmond was out -- though he would have a successful career as a session bass player, playing on, among others, "Je t'Aime" by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, "Your Song" by Elton John, Labi Siffre's "It Must Be Love", and the music for the long-running sitcoms Only Fools and Horses and Last of the Summer Wine. As soon as McGuinness joined, the group set out on tour, to promote their new hit, but also to act as the backing group for the Crystals, on a tour which also featured Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Joe Brown and his Bruvvers. The group's next single, "Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble" was another original, and made number eleven on the charts, but the group saw it as a failure anyway, to the extent that they tried their best to forget it ever existed. In researching this episode I got an eleven-CD box set of the group's work, which contains every studio album or compilation they released in the sixties, a collection of their EPs, and a collection of their BBC sessions. In all eleven CDs, "Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble" doesn't appear at all. Which is quite odd, as it's a perfectly serviceable, if unexceptional, piece of pop R&B: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble"] But it's not just the group that were unimpressed with the record. John Burgess thought that the record only getting to number eleven was proof of his hypothesis that groups should not put out their own songs as singles. From this point on, with one exception in 1968, everything they released as an A-side would be a cover version or a song brought to them by a professional songwriter. This worried Jones, who didn't want to be forced to start singing songs he disliked, which he saw as a very likely outcome of this edict. So he made it his role in the group to seek out records that the group could cover, which would be commercial enough that they could get hit singles from them, but which would be something he could sing while keeping his self-respect. His very first selection certainly met the first criterion. The song which would become their biggest hit had very little to do with the R&B or jazz which had inspired the group. Instead, it was a perfect piece of Brill Building pop. The Exciters, who originally recorded it, were one of the great girl groups of the early sixties (though they also had one male member), and had already had quite an influence on pop music. They had been discovered by Leiber and Stoller, who had signed them to Red Bird Records, a label we'll be looking at in much more detail in an upcoming episode, and they'd had a hit in 1962 with a Bert Berns song, "Tell Him", which made the top five: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] That record had so excited a young British folk singer who was in the US at the time to record an album with her group The Springfields that she completely reworked her entire style, went solo, and kickstarted a solo career singing pop-soul songs under the name Dusty Springfield. The Exciters never had another top forty hit, but they became popular enough among British music lovers that the Beatles asked them to open for them on their American tour in summer 1964. Most of the Exciters' records were of songs written by the more R&B end of the Brill Building songwriters -- they would record several more Bert Berns songs, and some by Ritchie Barrett, but the song that would become their most well-known legacy was actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Like many of Barry and Greenwich's songs, it was based around a nonsense phrase, but in this case the phrase they used had something of a longer history, though it's not apparent whether they fully realised that. In African-American folklore of the early twentieth century, the imaginary town of Diddy Wah Diddy was something like a synonym for heaven, or for the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the folk song -- a place where people didn't have to work, and where food was free everywhere. This place had been sung about in many songs, like Blind Blake's "Diddie Wah Diddie": [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Diddie Wah Diddie"] And a song written by Willie Dixon for Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddy Wah Diddy"] And "Diddy" and "Wah" had often been used by other Black artists, in various contexts, like Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew's "Diddy-Y-Diddy-O": [Excerpt: Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew, "Diddy-Y-Diddy-O"] And Junior and Marie's "Boom Diddy Wah Wah", a "Ko Ko Mo" knockoff produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Junior and Marie, "Boom Diddy Wah Wah"] So when Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich wrote "Do-Wah-Diddy", as the song was originally called, they were, wittingly or not, tapping into a rich history of rhythm and blues music. But the song as Greenwich demoed it was one of the first examples of what would become known as "bubblegum pop", and is particularly notable in her demo for its very early use of the fuzz guitar that would be a stylistic hallmark of that subgenre: [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich, "Do-Wah-Diddy (demo)"] The Exciters' version of the song took it into more conventional girl-group territory, with a strong soulful vocal, but with the group's backing vocal call-and-response chant showing up the song's resemblance to the kind of schoolyard chanting games which were, of course, the basis of the very first girl group records: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Do-Wah-Diddy"] Sadly, that record only reached number seventy-eight on the charts, and the Exciters would have no more hits in the US, though a later lineup of the group would make the UK top forty in 1975 with a song written and produced by the Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine. But in 1964 Jones had picked up on "Do-Wah-Diddy", and knew it was a potential hit. Most of the group weren't very keen on "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", as the song was renamed. There are relatively few interviews with any of them about it, but from what I can gather the only member of the band who thought anything much of the song was Paul Jones. However, the group did their best with the recording, and were particularly impressed with Manfred's Hammond organ solo -- which they later discovered was cut out of the finished recording by Burgess. The result was an organ-driven stomping pop song which had more in common with the Dave Clark Five than with anything else the group were doing: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Do Wah Diddy Diddy"] The record reached number one in both the UK and the US, and the group immediately went on an American tour, packaged with Peter & Gordon, a British duo who were having some success at the time because Peter Asher's sister was dating Paul McCartney, who'd given them a hit song, "World Without Love": [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "World Without Love"] The group found the experience of touring the US a thoroughly miserable one, and decided that they weren't going to bother going back again, so while they would continue to have big hits in Britain for the rest of the decade, they only had a few minor successes in the States. After the success of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", EMI rushed out an album by the group, The Five Faces of Manfred Mann, which must have caused some confusion for anyone buying it in the hope of more "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" style pop songs. Half the album's fourteen tracks were covers of blues and R&B, mostly by Chess artists -- there were covers of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Ike & Tina Turner, and more. There were also five originals, written or co-written by Jones, in the same style as those songs, plus a couple of instrumentals, one written by the group and one a cover of Cannonball Adderly's jazz classic "Sack O'Woe", arranged to show off the group's skills at harmonica, saxophone, piano and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Sack O'Woe"] However, the group realised that the formula they'd hit on with "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" was a useful one, and so for their next single they once again covered a girl-group track with a nonsense-word chorus and title -- their version of "Sha La La" by the Shirelles took them to number three on the UK charts, and number twelve in the US. They followed that with a ballad, "Come Tomorrow", one of the few secular songs ever recorded by Marie Knight, the gospel singer who we discussed briefly way back in episode five, who was Sister Rosetta Tharpe's duet partner, and quite possibly her partner in other senses. They released several more singles and were consistently charting, to the point that they actually managed to get a top ten hit with a self-written song despite their own material not being considered worth putting out as singles. Paul Jones had written "The One in the Middle" for his friends the Yardbirds, but when they turned it down, he rewrote the song to be about Manfred Mann, and especially about himself: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "The One in the Middle"] Like much of their material, that was released on an EP, and the EP was so successful that as well as making number one on the EP charts, it also made number ten on the regular charts, with "The One in the Middle" as the lead-off track. But "The One in the Middle" was a clue to something else as well -- Jones was getting increasingly annoyed at the fact that the records the group was making were hits, and he was the frontman, the lead singer, the person picking the cover versions, and the writer of much of the original material, but all the records were getting credited to the group's keyboard player. But Jones wasn't the next member of the group to leave. That was Mike Vickers, who went off to work in arranging film music and session work, including some work for the Beatles, the music for the film Dracula AD 1972, and the opening and closing themes for This Week in Baseball. The last single the group released while Vickers was a member was the aptly-titled "If You Gotta Go, Go Now". Mann had heard Bob Dylan performing that song live, and had realised that the song had never been released. He'd contacted Dylan's publishers, got hold of a demo, and the group became the first to release a version of the song, making number two in the charts: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Before Vickers' departure, the group had recorded their second album, Mann Made, and that had been even more eclectic than the first album, combining versions of blues classics like "Stormy Monday Blues", Motown songs like "The Way You Do The Things You Do", country covers like "You Don't Know Me", and oddities like "Bare Hugg", an original jazz instrumental for flute and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Bare Hugg"] McGuinness took the opportunity of Vickers leaving the group to switch from bass back to playing guitar, which had always been his preferred instrument. To fill in the gap, on Graham Bond's recommendation they hired away Jack Bruce, who had just been playing in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with McGuinness' old friend Eric Clapton, and it's Bruce who played bass on the group's next big hit, "Pretty Flamingo", the only UK number one that Bruce ever played on: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] Bruce stayed with the band for several months, before going off to play in another band who we'll be covering in a future episode. He was replaced in turn by Klaus Voorman. Voorman was an old friend of the Beatles from their Hamburg days, who had been taught the rudiments of bass by Stuart Sutcliffe, and had formed a trio, Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, with two Merseybeat musicians, Paddy Chambers of the Big Three and Gibson Kemp of Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, "No Good Without You Baby"] Like Vickers, Voorman could play the flute, and his flute playing would become a regular part of the group's later singles. These lineup changes didn't affect the group as either a chart act or as an act who were playing a huge variety of different styles of music. While the singles were uniformly catchy pop, on album tracks, B-sides or EPs you'd be likely to find versions of folk songs collected by Alan Lomax, like "John Hardy", or things like "Driva Man", a blues song about slavery in 5/4 time, originally by the jazz greats Oscar Brown and Max Roach: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Driva Man"] But by the time that track was released, Paul Jones was out of the group. He actually announced his intention to quit the group at the same time that Mike Vickers left, but the group had persuaded him to stay on for almost a year while they looked for his replacement, auditioning singers like Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry with little success. They eventually decided on Mike d'Abo, who had previously been the lead singer of a group called A Band of Angels: [Excerpt: A Band of Angels, "(Accept My) Invitation"] By the point d'Abo joined, relations between the rest of the group and Jones were so poor that they didn't tell Jones that they were thinking of d'Abo -- Jones would later recollect that the group decided to stop at a pub on the way to a gig, ostensibly to watch themselves on TV, but actually to watch A Band of Angels on the same show, without explaining to Jones that that was what they were doing – Jones actually mentioned d'Abo to his bandmates as a possible replacement, not realising he was already in the group. Mann has talked about how on the group's last show with Jones, they drove to the gig in silence, and their first single with the new singer, a version of Dylan's "Just Like a Woman", came on the radio. There was a lot of discomfort in the band at this time, because their record label had decided to stick with Jones as a solo performer, and the rest of the group had had to find another label, and were worried that without Jones their career was over. Luckily for everyone involved, "Just Like a Woman" made the top ten, and the group's career was able to continue. Meanwhile, Jones' first single as a solo artist made the top five: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "High Time"] But after that and his follow-up, "I've Been a Bad, Bad, Boy", which made number five, the best he could do was to barely scrape the top forty. Manfred Mann, on the other hand, continued having hits, though there was a constant struggle to find new material. d'Abo was himself a songwriter, and it shows the limitations of the "no A-sides by group members" rule that while d'Abo was the lead singer of Manfred Mann, he wrote two hit singles which the group never recorded. The first, "Handbags and Gladrags", was a hit for Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Handbags and Gladrags"] That was only a minor hit, but was later recorded successfully by Rod Stewart, with d'Abo arranging, and the Stereophonics. d'Abo also co-wrote, and played piano on, "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations: [Excerpt: The Foundations, "Build Me Up Buttercup"] But the group continued releasing singles written by other people. Their second post-Jones single, from the perspective of a spurned lover insulting their ex's new fiancee, had to have its title changed from what the writers intended, as the group felt that a song insulting "semi-detached suburban Mr. Jones" might be taken the wrong way. Lightly retitled, "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James" made number two, while the follow-up, "Ha Ha! Said the Clown", made number four. The two singles after that did significantly less well, though, and seemed to be quite bizarre choices -- an instrumental Hammond organ version of Tommy Roe's "Sweet Pea", which made number thirty-six, and a version of Randy Newman's bitterly cynical "So Long, Dad", which didn't make the charts at all. After this lack of success, the group decided to go back to what had worked for them before. They'd already had two hits with Dylan songs, and Mann had got hold of a copy of Dylan's Basement Tapes, a bootleg which we'll be talking about later. He picked up on one song from it, and got permission to release "The Mighty Quinn", which became the group's third number one: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "The Mighty Quinn"] The album from which that came, Mighty Garvey, is the closest thing the group came to an actual great album. While the group's earlier albums were mostly blues covers, this was mostly made up of original material by either Hugg or d'Abo, in a pastoral baroque pop style that invites comparisons to the Kinks or the Zombies' material of that period, but with a self-mocking comedy edge in several songs that was closer to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Probably the highlight of the album was the mellotron-driven "It's So Easy Falling": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "It's So Easy Falling"] But Mighty Garvey didn't chart, and it was the last gasp of the group as a creative entity. They had three more top-ten hits, all of them good examples of their type, but by January 1969, Tom McGuinness was interviewed saying "It's not a group any more. It's just five people who come together to make hit singles. That's the only aim of the group at the moment -- to make hit singles -- it's the only reason the group exists. Commercial success is very important to the group. It gives us financial freedom to do the things we want." The group split up in 1969, and went their separate ways. d'Abo appeared on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album, and then went into writing advertising jingles, most famously writing "a finger of fudge is just enough" for Cadbury's. McGuinness formed McGuinness Flint, with the songwriters Gallagher and Lyle, and had a big hit with "When I'm Dead and Gone": [Excerpt: McGuinness Flint, "When I'm Dead and Gone"] He later teamed up again with Paul Jones, to form a blues band imaginatively named "the Blues Band", who continue performing to this day: [Excerpt: The Blues Band, "Mean Ol' Frisco"] Jones became a born-again Christian in the eighties, and also starred in a children's TV show, Uncle Jack, and presented the BBC Radio 2 Blues Programme for thirty-two years. Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg formed another group, Manfred Mann Chapter Three, who released two albums before splitting. Hugg went on from that to write for TV and films, most notably writing the theme music to "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?": [Excerpt: Highly Likely, "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?"] Mann went on to form Manfred Mann's Earth Band, who had a number of hits, the biggest of which was the Bruce Springsteen song "Blinded by the Light": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "Blinded by the Light"] Almost uniquely for a band from the early sixties, all the members of the classic lineup of Manfred Mann are still alive. Manfred Mann continues to perform with various lineups of his Earth Band. Hugg, Jones, McGuinness, and d'Abo reunited as The Manfreds in the 1990s, with Vickers also in the band until 1999, and continue to tour together -- I still have a ticket to see them which was originally for a show in April 2020, but has just been rescheduled to 2022. McGuinness and Jones also still tour with the Blues Band. And Mike Vickers now spends his time creating experimental animations. Manfred Mann were a band with too many musical interests to have a coherent image, and their reliance on outside songwriters and their frequent lineup changes meant that they never had the consistent sound of many of their contemporaries. But partly because of this, they created a catalogue that rewards exploration in a way that several more well-regarded bands' work doesn't, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a major critical reassessment of them at some point. But whether that happens or not, almost sixty years on people around the world still respond instantly to the opening bars of their biggest hit, and "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" remains one of the most fondly remembered singles of the early sixties.

tv american history black chicago uk england woman british walk italian dad angels south africa dead bbc band baseball horses zombies empire states wolf britain animals beatles bond cd boy rolling stones engineers pirates clowns richmond fool sean combs south africans hamburg trouble bob dylan elton john bruce springsteen cds paul mccartney commonwealth chess temptations southeast black americans steady klaus gallagher bbc radio crystals dreamers eps paddy motown hammond kinks eric clapton british empire big three burgess roaring mod rod stewart flamingos blinded tilt manfred emi whatever happened mods greenwich rock music jesus christ superstar john coltrane supremes british tv muddy waters randy newman lightly cadbury otis redding roosters marquee dionne warwick handbags private eyes wipeout vickers brian jones wah serge gainsbourg pacemakers stax howlin mcguinness yardbirds dusty springfield john lee hooker jane birkin bo diddley casey jones charles mingus know me paul jones what do you want stoller sister rosetta tharpe sweet peas manfred mann john mayall stereophonics ornette coleman hmv mingus jack bruce joe brown only fools alan lomax blues band leiber shirelles willie dixon your song uncle jack summer wine tony roberts peter gordon go now earth band brill building dave clark five mose allison bluesbreakers peter asher sonny boy williamson marvelettes basement tapes mighty quinn hugg john hardy butlin glad rags merseybeat labi siffre jeff barry john burgess tommy roe surfaris long john baldry roy brown five faces blind blake bonzo dog doo dah band shelly manne big rock candy mountain ellie greenwich stuart sutcliffe greg russo manfreds springfields dracula ad build me up buttercup dave bartholomew it must be love bert berns exciters likely lads marie knight come tomorrow klaus voorman oscar brown that was the week that was mike vickers tilt araiza

Episode 118: “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021

Episode 118 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann, and how a jazz group with a blues singer had one of the biggest bubblegum pop hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Walk on By” by Dionne Warwick. 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/ —-more—- Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of tracks by Manfred Mann. Information on the group comes from Mannerisms: The Five Phases of Manfred Mann, by Greg Russo, and from the liner notes of this eleven-CD box set of the group’s work. For a much cheaper collection of the group’s hits — but without the jazz, blues, and baroque pop elements that made them more interesting than the average sixties singles band — this has all the hit singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript: So far, when we’ve looked at the British blues and R&B scene, we’ve concentrated on the bands who were influenced by Chicago blues, and who kept to a straightforward guitar/bass/drums lineup. But there was another, related, branch of the blues scene in Britain that was more musically sophisticated, and which while its practitioners certainly enjoyed playing songs by Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters, was also rooted in the jazz of people like Mose Allison. Today we’re going to look at one of those bands, and at the intersection of jazz and the British R&B scene, and how a jazz band with a flute player and a vibraphonist briefly became bubblegum pop idols. We’re going to look at “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”] Manfred Mann is, annoyingly when writing about the group, the name of both a band and of one of its members. Manfred Mann the human being, as opposed to Manfred Mann the group, was born Manfred Lubowitz in South Africa, and while he was from a wealthy family, he was very opposed to the vicious South African system of apartheid, and considered himself strongly anti-racist. He was also a lover of jazz music, especially some of the most progressive music being made at the time — musicians like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane — and he soon became a very competent jazz pianist, playing with musicians like Hugh Masakela at a time when that kind of fraternisation between people of different races was very much frowned upon in South Africa. Manfred desperately wanted to get out of South Africa, and he took his chance in June 1961, at the last point at which he was a Commonwealth citizen. The Commonwealth, for those who don’t know, is a political association of countries that were originally parts of the British Empire, and basically replaced the British Empire when the former colonies gained their independence. These days, the Commonwealth is of mostly symbolic importance, but in the fifties and sixties, as the Empire was breaking up, it was considered a real power in its own right, and in particular, until some changes to immigration law in the mid sixties, Commonwealth citizens had the right to move to the UK. At that point, South Africa had just voted to become a republic, and there was a rule in the Commonwealth that countries with a head of state other than the Queen could only remain in the Commonwealth with the unanimous agreement of all the other members. And several of the other member states, unsurprisingly, objected to the continued membership of a country whose entire system of government was based on the most virulent racism imaginable. So, as soon as South Africa became a republic, it lost its Commonwealth membership, and that meant that its citizens lost their automatic right to emigrate to the UK. But they were given a year’s grace period, and so Manfred took that chance and moved over to England, where he started playing jazz keyboards, giving piano lessons, and making some money on the side by writing record reviews. For those reviews, rather than credit himself as Manfred Lubowitz, he decided to use a pseudonym taken from the jazz drummer Shelly Manne, and he became Manfred Manne — spelled with a silent e on the end, which he later dropped. Mann was rather desperate for gigs, and he ended up taking a job playing with a band at a Butlin’s holiday camp. Graham Bond, who we’ve seen in several previous episodes as the leader of The Graham Bond Organisation, was at that time playing Hammond organ there, but only wanted to play a few days a week. Mann became the substitute keyboard player for that holiday camp band, and struck up a good musical rapport with the drummer and vibraphone player, Mike Hugg. When Bond went off to form his own band, Mann and Hugg decided to form their own band along the same lines, mixing the modern jazz that they liked with the more commercial R&B that Bond was playing. They named their group the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, and it initially consisted of Mann on keyboards, Hugg on drums and vibraphone, Mike Vickers on guitar, flute, and saxophone, Dave Richmond on bass, Tony Roberts and Don Fay on saxophone and Ian Fenby on trumpet. As their experiences were far more in the jazz field than in blues, they decided that they needed to get in a singer who was more familiar with the blues side of things. The person they chose was a singer who was originally named Paul Pond, and who had been friends for a long time with Brian Jones, before Jones had formed the Rolling Stones. While Jones had been performing under the name Elmo Lewis, his friend had taken on Jones’ surname, as he thought “Paul Pond” didn’t sound like a good name for a singer. He’d first kept his initials, and performed as P.P. Jones, but then he’d presumably realised that “pee-pee” is probably not the best stage name in the world, and so he’d become just Paul Jones, the name by which he’s known to this day. Jones, like his friend Brian, was a fan particularly of Chicago blues, and he had occasionally appeared with Alexis Korner. After auditioning for the group at a ska club called The Roaring 20s, Jones became the group’s lead singer and harmonica player, and the group soon moved in Jones’ musical direction, playing the kind of Chicago blues that was popular at the Marquee club, where they soon got a residency, rather than the soul style that was more popular at the nearby Flamingo club, and which would be more expected from a horn-centric lineup. Unsurprisingly, given this, the horn players soon left, and the group became a five-piece core of Jones, Mann, Hugg, Vickers, and Richmond. This group was signed to HMV records by John Burgess. Burgess was a producer who specialised in music of a very different style from what the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers played. We’ve already heard some of his production work — he was the producer for Adam Faith from “What Do You Want?” on: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “What Do You Want?”] And at the time he signed the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, he was just starting to work with a new group, Freddie and the Dreamers, for whom he would produce several hits: [Excerpt: Freddie and the Dreamers, “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody”] Burgess liked the group, but he insisted that they had to change their name — and in fact, he insisted that the group change their name to Manfred Mann. None of the group members liked the idea — even Mann himself thought that this seemed a little unreasonable, and Paul Jones in particular disagreed strongly with the idea, but they were all eventually mollified by the idea that all the publicity would emphasise that all five of them were equal members of the group, and that while the group might be named after their keyboard player, there were five members. The group members themselves always referred to themselves as “the Manfreds” rather than as Manfred Mann. The group’s first single showed that despite having become a blues band and then getting produced by a pop producer, they were still at heart a jazz group. “Why Should We Not?” is an instrumental led by Vickers’ saxophone, Mann’s organ, and Jones’ harmonica: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Why Should We Not?”] Unsurprisingly, neither that nor the B-side, a jazz instrumental version of “Frere Jacques”, charted — Britain in 1963 wanted Gerry and the Pacemakers and Freddie and the Dreamers, not jazz instrumentals. The next single, an R&B song called “Cock-A-Hoop” written by Jones, did little better. The group’s big breakthrough came from Ready, Steady, Go!, which at this point was using “Wipe Out!” by the Surfaris as its theme song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, “Wipe Out”] We’ve mentioned Ready, Steady, Go! in passing in previous episodes, but it was the most important pop music show of the early and mid sixties, just as Oh Boy! had been for the late fifties. Ready, Steady, Go! was, in principle at least, a general pop music programme, but in practice it catered primarily for the emerging mod subculture. “Mod” stood for “modernist”, and the mods emerged from the group of people who liked modern jazz rather than trad, but by this point their primary musical interests were in soul and R&B. Mod was a working-class subculture, based in the South-East of England, especially London, and spurred on by the newfound comparative affluence of the early sixties, when for the first time young working-class people, while still living in poverty, had a small amount of disposable income to spend on clothes, music, and drugs. The Mods had a very particular sense of style, based around sharp Italian suits, pop art and op art, and Black American music or white British imitations of it. For them, music was functional, and primarily existed for the purposes of dancing, and many of them would take large amounts of amphetamines so they could spend the entire weekend at clubs dancing to soul and R&B music. And that entire weekend would kick off on Friday with Ready, Steady, Go!, whose catchphrase was “the weekend starts here!” Ready, Steady, Go! featured almost every important pop act of the early sixties, but while groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers or the Beatles would appear on it, it became known for its promotion of Black artists, and it was the first major British TV exposure for Motown artists like the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Marvelettes, for Stax artists like Otis Redding, and for blues artists like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. Ready Steady Go! was also the primary TV exposure for British groups who were inspired by those artists, and it’s through Ready Steady Go! that the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Them, and the Who, among others reached national popularity — all of them acts that were popular among the Mods in particular. But “Wipe Out” didn’t really fit with this kind of music, and so the producers of Ready Steady Go were looking for something more suitable for their theme music. They’d already tried commissioning the Animals to record something, as we saw a couple of weeks back, but that hadn’t worked out, and instead they turned to Manfred Mann, who came up with a song that not only perfectly fit the style of the show, but also handily promoted the group themselves: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “5-4-3-2-1”] That was taken on as Ready, Steady, Go!s theme song, and made the top five in the UK. But by the time it charted, the group had already changed lineup. Dave Richmond was seen by the other members of the group as a problem at this point. Richmond was a great bass player, but he was a great *jazz* bass player — he wanted to be Charles Mingus, and play strange cross-rhythms, and what the group needed at this point was someone who would just play straightforward blues basslines without complaint — they needed someone closer to Willie Dixon than to Mingus. Tom McGuinness, who replaced him, had already had a rather unusual career trajectory. He’d started out as a satirist, writing for the magazine Private Eye and the TV series That Was The Week That Was, one of the most important British comedy shows of the sixties, but he had really wanted to be a blues musician instead. He’d formed a blues band, The Roosters, with a guitarist who went to art school with his girlfriend, and they’d played a few gigs around London before the duo had been poached by the minor Merseybeat band Casey Jones and his Engineers, a group which had been formed by Brian Casser, formerly of Cass & The Cassanovas, the group that had become The Big Three. Casey Jones and his Engineers had just released the single “One Way Ticket”: [Excerpt: Casey Jones and His Engineers, “One-Way Ticket”] However, the two guitarists soon realised, after just a handful of gigs, that they weren’t right for that group, and quit. McGuinness’ friend, Eric Clapton, went on to join the Yardbirds, and we’ll be hearing more about him in a few weeks’ time, but McGuinness was at a loose end, until he discovered that Manfred Mann were looking for a bass player. McGuinness was a guitarist, but bluffed to Paul Jones that he’d switched to bass, and got the job. He said later that the only question he’d been asked when interviewed by the group was “are you willing to play simple parts?” — as he’d never played bass in his life until the day of his first gig with the group, he was more than happy to say yes to that. McGuinness joined only days after the recording of “5-4-3-2-1”, and Richmond was out — though he would have a successful career as a session bass player, playing on, among others, “Je t’Aime” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, “Your Song” by Elton John, Labi Siffre’s “It Must Be Love”, and the music for the long-running sitcoms Only Fools and Horses and Last of the Summer Wine. As soon as McGuinness joined, the group set out on tour, to promote their new hit, but also to act as the backing group for the Crystals, on a tour which also featured Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Joe Brown and his Bruvvers. The group’s next single, “Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble” was another original, and made number eleven on the charts, but the group saw it as a failure anyway, to the extent that they tried their best to forget it ever existed. In researching this episode I got an eleven-CD box set of the group’s work, which contains every studio album or compilation they released in the sixties, a collection of their EPs, and a collection of their BBC sessions. In all eleven CDs, “Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble” doesn’t appear at all. Which is quite odd, as it’s a perfectly serviceable, if unexceptional, piece of pop R&B: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble”] But it’s not just the group that were unimpressed with the record. John Burgess thought that the record only getting to number eleven was proof of his hypothesis that groups should not put out their own songs as singles. From this point on, with one exception in 1968, everything they released as an A-side would be a cover version or a song brought to them by a professional songwriter. This worried Jones, who didn’t want to be forced to start singing songs he disliked, which he saw as a very likely outcome of this edict. So he made it his role in the group to seek out records that the group could cover, which would be commercial enough that they could get hit singles from them, but which would be something he could sing while keeping his self-respect. His very first selection certainly met the first criterion. The song which would become their biggest hit had very little to do with the R&B or jazz which had inspired the group. Instead, it was a perfect piece of Brill Building pop. The Exciters, who originally recorded it, were one of the great girl groups of the early sixties (though they also had one male member), and had already had quite an influence on pop music. They had been discovered by Leiber and Stoller, who had signed them to Red Bird Records, a label we’ll be looking at in much more detail in an upcoming episode, and they’d had a hit in 1962 with a Bert Berns song, “Tell Him”, which made the top five: [Excerpt: The Exciters, “Tell Him”] That record had so excited a young British folk singer who was in the US at the time to record an album with her group The Springfields that she completely reworked her entire style, went solo, and kickstarted a solo career singing pop-soul songs under the name Dusty Springfield. The Exciters never had another top forty hit, but they became popular enough among British music lovers that the Beatles asked them to open for them on their American tour in summer 1964. Most of the Exciters’ records were of songs written by the more R&B end of the Brill Building songwriters — they would record several more Bert Berns songs, and some by Ritchie Barrett, but the song that would become their most well-known legacy was actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Like many of Barry and Greenwich’s songs, it was based around a nonsense phrase, but in this case the phrase they used had something of a longer history, though it’s not apparent whether they fully realised that. In African-American folklore of the early twentieth century, the imaginary town of Diddy Wah Diddy was something like a synonym for heaven, or for the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the folk song — a place where people didn’t have to work, and where food was free everywhere. This place had been sung about in many songs, like Blind Blake’s “Diddie Wah Diddie”: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Diddie Wah Diddie”] And a song written by Willie Dixon for Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddy Wah Diddy”] And “Diddy” and “Wah” had often been used by other Black artists, in various contexts, like Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew’s “Diddy-Y-Diddy-O”: [Excerpt: Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew, “Diddy-Y-Diddy-O”] And Junior and Marie’s “Boom Diddy Wah Wah”, a “Ko Ko Mo” knockoff produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Junior and Marie, “Boom Diddy Wah Wah”] So when Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich wrote “Do-Wah-Diddy”, as the song was originally called, they were, wittingly or not, tapping into a rich history of rhythm and blues music. But the song as Greenwich demoed it was one of the first examples of what would become known as “bubblegum pop”, and is particularly notable in her demo for its very early use of the fuzz guitar that would be a stylistic hallmark of that subgenre: [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich, “Do-Wah-Diddy (demo)”] The Exciters’ version of the song took it into more conventional girl-group territory, with a strong soulful vocal, but with the group’s backing vocal call-and-response chant showing up the song’s resemblance to the kind of schoolyard chanting games which were, of course, the basis of the very first girl group records: [Excerpt: The Exciters, “Do-Wah-Diddy”] Sadly, that record only reached number seventy-eight on the charts, and the Exciters would have no more hits in the US, though a later lineup of the group would make the UK top forty in 1975 with a song written and produced by the Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine. But in 1964 Jones had picked up on “Do-Wah-Diddy”, and knew it was a potential hit. Most of the group weren’t very keen on “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, as the song was renamed. There are relatively few interviews with any of them about it, but from what I can gather the only member of the band who thought anything much of the song was Paul Jones. However, the group did their best with the recording, and were particularly impressed with Manfred’s Hammond organ solo — which they later discovered was cut out of the finished recording by Burgess. The result was an organ-driven stomping pop song which had more in common with the Dave Clark Five than with anything else the group were doing: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”] The record reached number one in both the UK and the US, and the group immediately went on an American tour, packaged with Peter & Gordon, a British duo who were having some success at the time because Peter Asher’s sister was dating Paul McCartney, who’d given them a hit song, “World Without Love”: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, “World Without Love”] The group found the experience of touring the US a thoroughly miserable one, and decided that they weren’t going to bother going back again, so while they would continue to have big hits in Britain for the rest of the decade, they only had a few minor successes in the States. After the success of “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, EMI rushed out an album by the group, The Five Faces of Manfred Mann, which must have caused some confusion for anyone buying it in the hope of more “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” style pop songs. Half the album’s fourteen tracks were covers of blues and R&B, mostly by Chess artists — there were covers of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Ike & Tina Turner, and more. There were also five originals, written or co-written by Jones, in the same style as those songs, plus a couple of instrumentals, one written by the group and one a cover of Cannonball Adderly’s jazz classic “Sack O’Woe”, arranged to show off the group’s skills at harmonica, saxophone, piano and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Sack O’Woe”] However, the group realised that the formula they’d hit on with “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” was a useful one, and so for their next single they once again covered a girl-group track with a nonsense-word chorus and title — their version of “Sha La La” by the Shirelles took them to number three on the UK charts, and number twelve in the US. They followed that with a ballad, “Come Tomorrow”, one of the few secular songs ever recorded by Marie Knight, the gospel singer who we discussed briefly way back in episode five, who was Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s duet partner, and quite possibly her partner in other senses. They released several more singles and were consistently charting, to the point that they actually managed to get a top ten hit with a self-written song despite their own material not being considered worth putting out as singles. Paul Jones had written “The One in the Middle” for his friends the Yardbirds, but when they turned it down, he rewrote the song to be about Manfred Mann, and especially about himself: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “The One in the Middle”] Like much of their material, that was released on an EP, and the EP was so successful that as well as making number one on the EP charts, it also made number ten on the regular charts, with “The One in the Middle” as the lead-off track. But “The One in the Middle” was a clue to something else as well — Jones was getting increasingly annoyed at the fact that the records the group was making were hits, and he was the frontman, the lead singer, the person picking the cover versions, and the writer of much of the original material, but all the records were getting credited to the group’s keyboard player. But Jones wasn’t the next member of the group to leave. That was Mike Vickers, who went off to work in arranging film music and session work, including some work for the Beatles, the music for the film Dracula AD 1972, and the opening and closing themes for This Week in Baseball. The last single the group released while Vickers was a member was the aptly-titled “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”. Mann had heard Bob Dylan performing that song live, and had realised that the song had never been released. He’d contacted Dylan’s publishers, got hold of a demo, and the group became the first to release a version of the song, making number two in the charts: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”] Before Vickers’ departure, the group had recorded their second album, Mann Made, and that had been even more eclectic than the first album, combining versions of blues classics like “Stormy Monday Blues”, Motown songs like “The Way You Do The Things You Do”, country covers like “You Don’t Know Me”, and oddities like “Bare Hugg”, an original jazz instrumental for flute and vibraphone: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Bare Hugg”] McGuinness took the opportunity of Vickers leaving the group to switch from bass back to playing guitar, which had always been his preferred instrument. To fill in the gap, on Graham Bond’s recommendation they hired away Jack Bruce, who had just been playing in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with McGuinness’ old friend Eric Clapton, and it’s Bruce who played bass on the group’s next big hit, “Pretty Flamingo”, the only UK number one that Bruce ever played on: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Pretty Flamingo”] Bruce stayed with the band for several months, before going off to play in another band who we’ll be covering in a future episode. He was replaced in turn by Klaus Voorman. Voorman was an old friend of the Beatles from their Hamburg days, who had been taught the rudiments of bass by Stuart Sutcliffe, and had formed a trio, Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, with two Merseybeat musicians, Paddy Chambers of the Big Three and Gibson Kemp of Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson, “No Good Without You Baby”] Like Vickers, Voorman could play the flute, and his flute playing would become a regular part of the group’s later singles. These lineup changes didn’t affect the group as either a chart act or as an act who were playing a huge variety of different styles of music. While the singles were uniformly catchy pop, on album tracks, B-sides or EPs you’d be likely to find versions of folk songs collected by Alan Lomax, like “John Hardy”, or things like “Driva Man”, a blues song about slavery in 5/4 time, originally by the jazz greats Oscar Brown and Max Roach: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “Driva Man”] But by the time that track was released, Paul Jones was out of the group. He actually announced his intention to quit the group at the same time that Mike Vickers left, but the group had persuaded him to stay on for almost a year while they looked for his replacement, auditioning singers like Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry with little success. They eventually decided on Mike d’Abo, who had previously been the lead singer of a group called A Band of Angels: [Excerpt: A Band of Angels, “(Accept My) Invitation”] By the point d’Abo joined, relations between the rest of the group and Jones were so poor that they didn’t tell Jones that they were thinking of d’Abo — Jones would later recollect that the group decided to stop at a pub on the way to a gig, ostensibly to watch themselves on TV, but actually to watch A Band of Angels on the same show, without explaining to Jones that that was what they were doing – Jones actually mentioned d’Abo to his bandmates as a possible replacement, not realising he was already in the group. Mann has talked about how on the group’s last show with Jones, they drove to the gig in silence, and their first single with the new singer, a version of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman”, came on the radio. There was a lot of discomfort in the band at this time, because their record label had decided to stick with Jones as a solo performer, and the rest of the group had had to find another label, and were worried that without Jones their career was over. Luckily for everyone involved, “Just Like a Woman” made the top ten, and the group’s career was able to continue. Meanwhile, Jones’ first single as a solo artist made the top five: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, “High Time”] But after that and his follow-up, “I’ve Been a Bad, Bad, Boy”, which made number five, the best he could do was to barely scrape the top forty. Manfred Mann, on the other hand, continued having hits, though there was a constant struggle to find new material. d’Abo was himself a songwriter, and it shows the limitations of the “no A-sides by group members” rule that while d’Abo was the lead singer of Manfred Mann, he wrote two hit singles which the group never recorded. The first, “Handbags and Gladrags”, was a hit for Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, “Handbags and Gladrags”] That was only a minor hit, but was later recorded successfully by Rod Stewart, with d’Abo arranging, and the Stereophonics. d’Abo also co-wrote, and played piano on, “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations: [Excerpt: The Foundations, “Build Me Up Buttercup”] But the group continued releasing singles written by other people. Their second post-Jones single, from the perspective of a spurned lover insulting their ex’s new fiancee, had to have its title changed from what the writers intended, as the group felt that a song insulting “semi-detached suburban Mr. Jones” might be taken the wrong way. Lightly retitled, “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James” made number two, while the follow-up, “Ha Ha! Said the Clown”, made number four. The two singles after that did significantly less well, though, and seemed to be quite bizarre choices — an instrumental Hammond organ version of Tommy Roe’s “Sweet Pea”, which made number thirty-six, and a version of Randy Newman’s bitterly cynical “So Long, Dad”, which didn’t make the charts at all. After this lack of success, the group decided to go back to what had worked for them before. They’d already had two hits with Dylan songs, and Mann had got hold of a copy of Dylan’s Basement Tapes, a bootleg which we’ll be talking about later. He picked up on one song from it, and got permission to release “The Mighty Quinn”, which became the group’s third number one: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “The Mighty Quinn”] The album from which that came, Mighty Garvey, is the closest thing the group came to an actual great album. While the group’s earlier albums were mostly blues covers, this was mostly made up of original material by either Hugg or d’Abo, in a pastoral baroque pop style that invites comparisons to the Kinks or the Zombies’ material of that period, but with a self-mocking comedy edge in several songs that was closer to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Probably the highlight of the album was the mellotron-driven “It’s So Easy Falling”: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, “It’s So Easy Falling”] But Mighty Garvey didn’t chart, and it was the last gasp of the group as a creative entity. They had three more top-ten hits, all of them good examples of their type, but by January 1969, Tom McGuinness was interviewed saying “It’s not a group any more. It’s just five people who come together to make hit singles. That’s the only aim of the group at the moment — to make hit singles — it’s the only reason the group exists. Commercial success is very important to the group. It gives us financial freedom to do the things we want.” The group split up in 1969, and went their separate ways. d’Abo appeared on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album, and then went into writing advertising jingles, most famously writing “a finger of fudge is just enough” for Cadbury’s. McGuinness formed McGuinness Flint, with the songwriters Gallagher and Lyle, and had a big hit with “When I’m Dead and Gone”: [Excerpt: McGuinness Flint, “When I’m Dead and Gone”] He later teamed up again with Paul Jones, to form a blues band imaginatively named “the Blues Band”, who continue performing to this day: [Excerpt: The Blues Band, “Mean Ol’ Frisco”] Jones became a born-again Christian in the eighties, and also starred in a children’s TV show, Uncle Jack, and presented the BBC Radio 2 Blues Programme for thirty-two years. Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg formed another group, Manfred Mann Chapter Three, who released two albums before splitting. Hugg went on from that to write for TV and films, most notably writing the theme music to “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”: [Excerpt: Highly Likely, “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”] Mann went on to form Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, who had a number of hits, the biggest of which was the Bruce Springsteen song “Blinded by the Light”: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, “Blinded by the Light”] Almost uniquely for a band from the early sixties, all the members of the classic lineup of Manfred Mann are still alive. Manfred Mann continues to perform with various lineups of his Earth Band. Hugg, Jones, McGuinness, and d’Abo reunited as The Manfreds in the 1990s, with Vickers also in the band until 1999, and continue to tour together — I still have a ticket to see them which was originally for a show in April 2020, but has just been rescheduled to 2022. McGuinness and Jones also still tour with the Blues Band. And Mike Vickers now spends his time creating experimental animations. Manfred Mann were a band with too many musical interests to have a coherent image, and their reliance on outside songwriters and their frequent lineup changes meant that they never had the consistent sound of many of their contemporaries. But partly because of this, they created a catalogue that rewards exploration in a way that several more well-regarded bands’ work doesn’t, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a major critical reassessment of them at some point. But whether that happens or not, almost sixty years on people around the world still respond instantly to the opening bars of their biggest hit, and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” remains one of the most fondly remembered singles of the early sixties.

tv american history black chicago uk england woman british walk italian dad angels south africa dead bbc band baseball horses zombies empire states wolf britain animals beatles bond cd boy rolling stones engineers pirates clowns richmond fool sean combs south africans hamburg trouble bob dylan elton john bruce springsteen cds paul mccartney commonwealth chess temptations southeast black americans steady klaus tina turner gallagher bbc radio crystals dreamers eps paddy motown hammond kinks eric clapton british empire big three woe burgess roaring mod rod stewart flamingos blinded tilt ike manfred emi whatever happened abo frisco mods greenwich rock music jesus christ superstar john coltrane supremes british tv muddy waters randy newman lightly cadbury otis redding roosters marquee dionne warwick handbags private eyes wipeout vickers brian jones wah serge gainsbourg pacemakers stax howlin mcguinness yardbirds dusty springfield john lee hooker jane birkin bo diddley casey jones charles mingus know me one way ticket paul jones what do you want stoller sister rosetta tharpe sweet peas high time manfred mann john mayall stereophonics ornette coleman hmv mingus jack bruce joe brown only fools alan lomax blues band leiber shirelles willie dixon your song uncle jack tony roberts summer wine go now earth band dave clark five brill building mose allison bluesbreakers peter asher sonny boy williamson marvelettes basement tapes mighty quinn hugg john hardy butlin glad rags merseybeat jeff barry labi siffre john burgess tommy roe surfaris long john baldry roy brown five faces bonzo dog doo dah band blind blake shelly manne big rock candy mountain greg russo ellie greenwich stuart sutcliffe springfields manfreds dracula ad build me up buttercup dave bartholomew it must be love bert berns exciters likely lads marie knight come tomorrow klaus voorman oscar brown that was the week that was mike vickers tilt araiza

Episode 118: “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann

election special georgia on my mind maria muldaur mike bloomfield blind blake

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021

Episode 118 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann, and how a jazz group with a blues singer had one of the biggest bubblegum pop hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Walk on By” by Dionne Warwick. 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/ (more…)

Ruta 61 - Blues de Blind Blake a Neal Black - 07/12/20

Ruta 61

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 60:26

Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It – Junior Wells; Georgia Bound, West Coast Blues – Blind Blake; Gonna Stop You From Giving Me The Blues – Ann Rabson; Kansas City – Albert King; Change With The Times – Whitney Shay; She's Fine – A.C. Reed, Bonnie Raitt; This Mess – Tim Woods; Killing Floor – The BC Combo; Black Dress – Mark Telesca; Things About Comin' My Way – Ndidi Onukwulu; The Devil's Gonna Lie – Otis Taylor; Awesome Sauce – Patty Reese; Lie To Be Loved – Neal Black. Escuchar audio

black radio devil blues jazz kansas city escuchar arial ruta my way bonnie raitt calibri killing floor albert king awesome sauce programas de rne junior wells otis taylor tim woods blind blake hold it west coast blues whitney shay this mess

Election Special: Georgia On My Mind Pt. 1

Blues You Should Know

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2020 47:09

In honor of the recent election, this show is dedicated to the great Peach State: Georgia. All songs will either contain the word "Georgia" in the title, or will be by an artist or group whose name includes "Georgia". Pt. 1 features Blind Blake, BBQ Bob, the Skillet Lickers, Mike Bloomfield & Maria Muldaur, Hoagy Charmichael and more!Support the show (https://paypal.me/BFrank53?locale.x=en_US)

Melodías Pizarras - El no parar - 14/11/20

Melodías pizarras

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2020 59:02

Sí, pizarristas, esta noche otro no parar de discazos de figuras venerables. A velocidad absurda sonarán entre otros grandes: Victoria Spivey, Shelton Brothers, John Lee Hooker, Blind Blake, The Mills Brothers, Kalama's Quartet. Tada esta locura, a partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

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Ep. 138 - Turntable Round Table (Vol. 10)

Schizophrenic Music's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 16:14

Welcome to the Turntable Round Table!Here’s what the crew were into this past week. Give em a listen and see what you think!Shawn’s PickThose Pretty Wrongs – “You & Me” from Zed For Zulu (2019)Kevin’s PickNubya Garcia – “Stand With Each Other” from Source (2020)Mark’s PickBlind Blake – “Diddie Wa Diddie” from Diddie Wa Didde [Single] (1929) Tom’s PickShampoo – “Don’t Call Me Babe” from Girl Power (1996)Craig’s PickSecret Machines – “Dreaming Is Alright” from Awake In The Brain Chamber (2020)Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/SchizoMusic)

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Sleepy John Estes

Blues You Should Know

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2020 24:15

The community of Brownsville, Tennessee lies about 60 miles or so just East of Memphis, just a short ways off of Highway 40, the long interstate that runs the entire width of Tennessee from North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi River. Brownsville, whose population was roughly ten thousand at the last census, has recently come to recognize two of its most accomplished offspring. Located in the former Flagg Grove School, once a one-room schoolhouse for “colored” children, is the Tina Turner Museum. Immediately nextdoor, and also maintained as a public attraction, is the tiny home, a cottage or really a shack, once lived in by Brownsville’s other great artist, the blues singer Sleepy John Estes. Both Estes and Turner, by the way, actually grew up in Ripley aka./Nutbush, an unincorporated community adjacent to Brownsville once populated almost exclusively by black residents. At the time of Tina Turner’s birth in 1939, Sleep John, born either in 1899 or 1900-no one’s really sure, was already in the middle of a recording and performing career that extended from 1929 right up to his death in 1977. As a child in Ripley/Nutbush, John, like so many bluesmen before and after him, helped out on his family’s share-crop cotton farm and tried to pick out tunes on a homemade cigar box guitar. After a particularly productive season his mother awarded John for his hard work on the farm by buying him a real guitar. For the first decade or so of his musical career, John, along with his “Brownsville Gang” which included harmonica player Hammie Nixon, mandolinist Yank Rachell, jug and piano player Jab Jones, and guitarists Son Bonds and Charlie Pickett, performed and traveled throughout the Western Tennesssee area often performing in Memphis. In 1929 Victor Records talent scout Ralph Peer arranged for John’s first recording session, a three-day affair, which produced one of his most well known songs Diving Duck Blues as well as five others. Legend has it that the gang followed the sessions with a week long binge of drinking, gambling and whoring in West Memphis, the wide-open mostly black community located just across the river from Memphis proper. The following year, 1930 saw John and his gang recording another fourteen songs. John, it seemed, was a highly prolific songwriter. Three things distinguish the music of Sleepy John Estes. First, was his guitar playing. It wasn’t very good. Many have described his playing as “thrashing”. But while John certainly wasn’t in a class with virtuosos like Blind Blake or Big Bill Broonzy, his playing did have a strong propulsive quality that served his music well. He usually played in standard tuning in the key of G, or in G position with a capo. Second, was his “crying” vocal style that made him sound like an old man long before he was one. The final quality that sets his music apart and was his songwriting; his ability to craft a musical story. While many of John’s songs concern the usual blues subject matter, ie whiskey and women, John was also a chronicler of people and events around him. He wrote about people he knew, people he worked for, people he dealt with and people he admired. In Liquor Store Blues John sings his admiration for the man he buys hootch from: Now if you're ever in Forrest City, I'll tell you what to doLet Mr. Peter Adams get acquainted with youWell, you won't have to go, well, you won't have to goYou can get what you want, oh, right here in my liquor store In Brownsville Blues, John sings the praises of local mechanic Vassar Williams: Now, he can straighten your wiSupport the show (https://paypal.me/BFrank53?locale.x=en_US)

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S1: Trailer "American Songcatcher"

American Songcatcher

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2020 2:03

Tracing the roots of American music from it's emigrated past to current artists playing the songs forward, folk singer-songwriter and amateur musicologist Nicholas Edward Williams is not hosting your typical music podcast. Each episode uncovers unique stories and lesser-known facts behind five songs, spanning from those created centuries ago to those carrying tradition today. Then, as folk artists have always done, Williams re-creates them. From European immigrants who brought their tunes into the Appalachian mountains, to songs of the South: Gospel, Ragtime, Blues, Country, and the Folk music derived from it all. We'll go behind the curtain of legends, and shine the limelight on many integral lesser-known artists who have influenced generations, such as Bessie Smith, Ola Belle Reed, Blind Blake, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk. Here's to the songs of old, may they live on forever. Find American Songcatcher, available wherever you get your podcasts. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

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Steve Howell is Making a Scene

Making a Scene Presents

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2020 41:02

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Steve HowellSteve Howell was thirteen when he first heard Mississippi John Hurt fingerpicking country blues. The year was 1965, and the experience became a revelation that opened the door to a new musical universe. Steve knew immediately that tame, folky strumming of the guitar was a thing of the past for him. As Steve’s journey progressed, Mississippi John Hurt begat Blind Willie McTell and Leadbelly. They in turn begat Robert Johnson, Son House, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Blake, and a host of other black acoustic guitar players and vocalists. His interest in rural, folk-blues styles and the history of the music led him to learn more about how this music came to town and melded with the horn-oriented bands prevalent in the cities, creating a strong affinity for him with traditional jazz and the music of New Orleans from the first half of the twentieth century. His musical Odyssey naturally included the pop, country, rock, and blues music of the last half of the century, but always in the background stood the music of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Lester Young, Jack Teagarden, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chet Atkins, Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery, Bucky Pizzarelli, Joe Pass, George Van Eps, Lenny Breau, and many other great jazz artists. Although very interested in many other music styles (bebop, rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, and others), the heart of Steve’s playing and singing is rooted in the rural acoustic blues and traditional jazz genres born in the American South. Steve Howell,Dindi,Long AgoSteve Howell,Z's,Long Agowww.makingascene.org,Steve Howell,Steve Howell,I'll Remember April,Long AgoSteve Howell,Song for my Father,Long Ago

Caffe Lena 60 Episode 23 1982

Caffe Lena 60 Years of Song

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2020 2:01

Who can say they were friends with the Rev. Gary Davis, Pink Anderson and Robert Lockwood? Stay tuned for the original, the bare-knuckle, the low-down... the blues. This is episode 23 of Caffe Lena: 60 Years of Song. Thank you to Sarah at the Caffe for compiling the list of artists and songs for this feature. Roy Book Binder is an American blues guitarist, singer-songwriter, and storyteller . He moved out of his New York City apartment in the 1970s and lived in his tour bus, going around the country for 15 years. The Tampa Tribune said "Book Binder breathes life into the great blues songs of people like Blind Blake." Looking to learn guitar? He currently has a video series where he gives step by step guitar lessons on songs from his album "The Good Book." Roy Book Binder appeared first at Caffe Lena in 1982. Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton is a great example of true blues music in the modern day. Legally blind since age 16, he draws inspiration from blues and jazz that predates World War II

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Whizzz & Confinement ( Semaine 2 )

WHIZZZ AND LOVE

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2020

Mix 1The Avalanches feat. Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu - Running Red Lights - ModularPrincess Chelsea - The Cigarette Duet - Lil' ChiefClubz - Pronto! - ClubzThe Oriellles - Sugar Tastes Like Salt ( Radioactive Man Remix ) - Heavenly La VO Soutirée : dédicace japonaise à tous ceux qui sont confinés sur des yachtsCruisic - Inspector Norse - Flower >> Todd Terje - Inspector Norse - Olsen Mix 2El Michels Affair & The Shacks - Enfant - Big CrownI Gres - Restless - GlobevisionManu Dibango - Soul Makossa (Long version) - AtlanticHarvey Sutherland - Superego - Clarity Special Bongo Joe Part 1Yin Yin - Dis ko dis ko - Bongo Joe ( BJR 45 09 ) ou ( BJR 046 )Nordine Staifi - Zine Ezzinet - Bongo Joe ( BJR 045 )Mameen 3 - Kudreda - Bongo Joe ( BJR45 12 )L'Eclair + The Mauskovic Dance Band - Homo Sapiens - Bongo Joe ( BJR45 13 ) Part 2Africa Negra - Mino Bo Be Quacueda - Bongo Joe ( BJR 040 )Blind Blake & His Royal Victorian Hotel Calypso Orchestra - Gombay rock - Bongo Joe ( BJR 002 )Altin Gün - Kırşehirin Gülleri - Bongo Joe ( BJR45 02 )Amami - Ivory - Bongo Joe ( BJR 047 ) L’info du 20h : le retour de l'immense Ben & Bertie Show offert par Tricatel pour confiner avec éléganceKaterine & Bertrand Burgalat - Ma langue au chat - Tricatel Le morceau Trap de FinLil Uzi Vert - Pop - Generation Now

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Let's Talk About the Country Blues

Let's Talk About Rock

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2020 34:06

In the second episode about the early days of the blues, Vinnie talks about the blues music styles of the 1930's with famous musicians of the Piedmont Blues like Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell, and the legends in the Mississippi Delta, the heart of the blues, like Charley Patton, Son House, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson who were not well known in their time, but left behind a legacy that opened the door for Chicago blues artists like Muddy Waters to help pave the way for what would become rock and roll music.

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Christmas Blues

Blues on My Mind

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2019 27:29

Christmas blues are rarely about the actual holiday and certainly never religious. They more often discuss loneliness, jail time, illness, cheating or sex. Explore these themes in songs by Blind Blake, Peetie Wheatstraw, Champion Jack Dupree and Eddie C. Campbell.

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Holiday Hit Parade, Part 4 - Christmas Special

Jack Spins Shellac

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2019 43:26

A very special Christmas episode! Jack talks record collecting, hunting down rare old 78s and plays the music of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Artists mentioned in this episode: The Andrews Sisters, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, Blind Blake, Vicki Dale and the Peter Pan Orchestra, The Kidoodlers, Bud Roman and the Toppers, The Mariners and The McGuire Sisters, The Korn Kobblers. Visit: www.JackAndKitty.com for more info. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jackspinsshellac/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jackspinsshellac/support

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Bordeaux Blues du 11/12/2019

Nos émissions

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2019 87:03

Blind Blake

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The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll: Robert Johnson and the Progenitors of The Blues

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2019 62:33

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.

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Robert Johnson and the Progenitors of The Blues

The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2019 60:58

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.

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Robert Johnson and the Progenitors of The Blues

The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2019 64:43

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.

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The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll: Robert Johnson and the Progenitors of The Blues

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2019 63:18

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.

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BONUS: Question and Answer Episode 1

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2019 36:21 Very Popular

This week's episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Patreon backers can ask questions for next episode at this link. Books mentioned -- Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hello, and welcome to the first of our two-part question and answer session. For those who didn't hear the little admin podcast I did last week, this week and next week are not regular episodes of the podcast -- I'm taking two weeks out to get the book version of the first fifty episodes edited and published, and to get a bit of a backlog in writing future episodes. I'm planning on doing this every year from now on, and doing it this way will mean that the podcast will take exactly ten years, rather than the nine years and eight months it would otherwise take, But to fill in the gaps while you wait, I asked for any questions from my Patreon backers, about anything to do with the podcast. This week and next week I'm going to be answering those questions. Now, I'll be honest, I wasn't even sure that anyone would have any questions at all, and I was worried I'd have to think of something else to do next week, but it turns out there are loads of them. I've actually had so many questions, some of them requiring quite long answers, that I'll probably have enough to not only do this week and next week's episodes based on questions, but to do a bonus backer-only half-hour podcast of more questions next week. Anyway, to start with, a question that I've been asked quite a bit, and that both Melissa Williams and Claire Boothby asked -- what's the theme music for the podcast, and how does it fit in with the show? [Excerpt: Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The song is called "Rock and Roll", and it's from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase "rock and roll" in those words -- there was an earlier song called "rocking and rolling", but I think it's the first one to use the phrase "rock and roll". It's performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare. They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple -- they're the people who wrote "On the Good Ship Lollipop" -- but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead. The version I'm using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That's just because the film version was easier for me to obtain. As for why I'm using it, a few reasons. One is that it's of historical note, as I said, because it's the first song to use the phrase, and that seemed appropriate for a podcast on the history of rock music. The other main reason is that it's in the public domain, and I try wherever possible to keep to copyright laws. I think all the uses of music in the podcast fall under fair use or fair dealing, because they're short excerpts used for educational purposes and I link to legal versions of the full thing, but using a recording as the theme music doesn't, so I had to choose something that was in the public domain. Next we have a question from David Gerard: "piece of trivia from waaaaay back: in "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", why "*democratic* fellows named Mack"? what's that line about?" [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie”] Well, I've never actually seen an interview with the writers of the song, but I can hazard two educated guesses. One of them is boring and probably right, the other one is more interesting and probably wrong. The boring and probably right one is very simple -- the word "democratic" scans, and there aren't that many words that fit that syllable pattern. There are some -- "existential", "sympathetic", "diuretic" -- but not that many, and "democratic" happens to be assonant with the song's rhyme scheme, too -- the "cratic" doesn't actually rhyme with all those "alack", "track" "jack", and so on, but it sounds good in combination with them. I suspect that the solution is as simple as that. The more interesting one is probably not the case, and I say this because the songwriters who wrote "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" were white. BUT, Milt Gabler, one of the three credited writers, was familiar enough with black culture that this might be the case. Now, the character in "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is a soldier returning from the second world war -- we know this from the first two lines, "Heading for the station with a pack on my back/I'm tired of transportation in the back of a hack", plus the date the song was recorded, 1946. So we've got someone who's recently been discharged from the army and has no job. BUT, given it's Louis Jordan singing, we can presume this someone is black. And that puts the song in a rather different light. Because 1946 is slap in the middle of what's known as the second great migration -- the second big wave of black people moving from the rural deep south to the urban north and (in the case of the second migration, but not really the first) the west. This is something we've touched on a bit in the podcast, because it was the second great migration that was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of the urban jump blues that became R&B -- and separately, it was also the cause of the creation of the electric blues in Chicago. And Chicago is an interesting one here. Because Chicago was one of the biggest destinations -- possibly the single biggest destination -- for black people looking to move around this time. And so we recontextualise a bit. Our black soldier has returned to the US, but he's travelling by train to somewhere where there's no job waiting for him, and there's no mention of going to see his friends or his wife or anything like that. So maybe, he's someone who grew up in the rural deep south, but has decided to use the opportunity of his discharge from the military to go and build himself a new life in one of the big cities, quite probably Chicago. And he's looking for work and doesn't have many contacts there. We can tell that because in the second verse he's looking at the classified ads for jobs in the paper. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie”] Now, at this time, especially during and immediately after the Second World War, the single biggest employer in the US in the big cities was the government, and in the big cities there was a *lot* of patronage being handed out by the party in charge -- basically, in most of the big cities, the political parties, especially the Democrats at this time, were an arm of organised crime, with the mayor of the city acting much as a Mafia don would. And the only way to get a job, if you didn't have any special qualifications, if you weren't a "man with a knack" as the song puts it -- especially a sinecure where you didn't have to work very hard -- the only way to get such a job was to be owed a favour by the local Democratic Party. Now, in Chicago -- again, Chicago is not named in the song, but it would seem the most logical place for our protagonist to be travelling, and this was true of other big Northern cities like New York, too -- the Democratic Party was run at this time almost entirely by Irish-Americans. The Mayor of Chicago, at the time was Edward Kelly, and he was the head of a formidable electoral machine, a coalition of several different ethnic groups, but dominated by Irish people. So, if you wanted one of those jobs that were being handed out, you'd have to do favours for Kelly's Irish Democrats -- you'd have to pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch'Boogie”] Now I come to a few questions that I'm going to treat as one -- questions from Jeff Stanzler, Steven Hinkle, and Matthew Elmslie. They ask, between them, how I plan out what songs I'm going to include, and if I have to make difficult choices about what to include and what not to include, and who the most significant performer I don't plan to include at all is. Jeremy Wilson also asks if I've got all five hundred songs planned out and how close to the current day I plan to get. These are all, actually, very different questions, but they all centre around the same thing, and so I'm going to address them all together here. If any of you don't think I've addressed your question sufficiently, please say and I'll come back to it next week. Now, I don't have the whole five hundred songs mapped out. To do that would be for me to assume that in the next nine years none of my research will cause me to revise my opinions on what's important. So far, in the first fifty, I've not really had to make any difficult choices at all -- the only things I've wished I could include have either been things where there's just not enough information out there to put together an interesting episode, or where my own self-imposed restrictions like the starting point cut them off. Like if I'd decided to start a few years earlier, I *would* have included Jimmie Rodgers, but you have to have a cut-off point, and if I hadn't set 1938 and the Goodman Carnegie Hall concerts as a good starting point I could have gone all the way back at least to the mid nineteenth century, and it would have been more the prehistory of rock. Maybe I'll do that as a project when I've finished this one. But even those people I've excluded, I've ended up being able to cover as bonus episodes, so I've not really had to leave anything out. But that means so far, since we're still really at the very beginning of rock and roll, there have been no difficult choices. That will change as the story goes on -- in the sixties there are so many important records that I'm going to have to cut out a lot, and by the mid-seventies rock has diversified so much that there will be *tons* of things I'll just have to gloss over. But right now I've had to make no tough decisions. Now, the way I do this -- I have a list of about two hundred or so songs that I'm pretty sure are going to make the final list. Like I'm sure nobody will be surprised to find that I'll be covering, say, "Peggy Sue", "Satisfaction", "Stairway to Heaven", "God Save the Queen" and "Walk This Way". You can't leave those things out of the story and still have it be anything like an actual history of rock music. That's my sort of master list, but I don't consult that all that often. What I do, is at any given point I'm working on the next ten scripts simultaneously -- I do things that way because I use the same research materials for multiple episodes, so for example I was writing the Chess episodes all at the same time, and the rockabilly episodes all at the same time, so I might be reading a biography of Carl Perkins, see an interesting fact about Johnny Cash, and stick the fact in the Johnny Cash episode or whatever. I have another list of about twenty probables, just titles, that I'm planning to work on soon after. Every time I finish a script, I look through the list of probables, pull out a good one to work on next, and add that to the ten I'm writing. I'll also, when I'm doing that, add any more titles I've thought of to the list. So I know exactly what I'm going to be doing in the next two and a half months, have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing for the next six, and only a basic outline after that. That means that I can't necessarily say for certain who I *won't* be including. There will, undoubtedly, be some significant performers who don't get included, but I can't say who until we get past their part in the story. Steven also asked as part of this if I've determined an end point. Yes I have. That may change over the next nine years, but when I was planning out the podcast -- even before it became a podcast, when I was thinking of it as just a series of books -- I thought of what I think would make the perfect ending for the series -- a song from 1999 -- and I'm going to use that. Related to that, William Maybury asked "Why 1999?" Well, a few reasons -- partly because it's a nice cut-off point -- the end of the nineties and so on. Partly because it's about the time that I disengaged totally from popular culture -- I like plenty of music from the last couple of decades, but not really much that has made any impact on the wider world. Partly because, when I finish the podcast, 1999 will be thirty years ago, which seems like about the right sort of length of time to have a decent historical perspective on things; partly because one of the inspirations for this was Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music and that cut off -- well, it cut off in 2001, but close enough; and partly because the final song I'm going to cover came out then, and it's a good ending song. William also asked "What's the bottom standard for notability to be covered? (We heard about "Ooby Dooby" before "Crying," are we going to hear about "Take My Tip" before "Space Oddity"? Bootlegs beyond the Million Dollar Band that you mentioned on Twitter? Archival groundbreakers like Parson Sound?)" [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Ooby Dooby”] That's an interesting question... there's no bottom standard for notability *as such*. It's more that notability is just one of a number of factors I'm using to decide on the songs I cover. So the question I ask myself when I'm choosing one to include isn't just "is this song influential or important?" though that's a primary one. There's also "is there a particularly fascinating story behind the recording of this track?" "Does this illustrate something important about music or about cultural history?", “Is this just a song I really like and want to talk about?” And also, "does this provide a link between otherwise disconnected strands of the story?" There are also things like "have I not covered anything by a woman or a black person or whatever in a while?" because one of the things I want to do is make sure that this isn't just the story of white men, however much they dominate the narrative, and I know I will have to consciously correct for my own biases, so I pay attention to that. And there's *also* the question of mixing the stuff everyone knows about with the stuff they'll be hearing about for the first time -- you have to cover "Satisfaction" because everyone would notice it's missing, but if you just do Beatles-Stones-Led Zep-Pink Floyd-whoever's-on-the-cover-of-Mojo-this-month, nobody's going to hear anything they can't get in a million different places. So to take the example of "Ooby Dooby", it's only a relatively important track in itself, though it is notable for being the start of Roy Orbison's career. But it also ties Orbison in to the story of Sam Phillips and Sun Records, and thus into the stories of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and so on. It allows me to set up something for the future while tying the story together and moving the stories of multiple people forward a bit. So... as a tiny bit of a spoiler, though this won't be too much of a surprise to those who've read my book California Dreaming, I am almost certainly going to cover the GTOs, who are almost a footnote to a footnote. I'll cover them because their one album was co-produced by Frank Zappa and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, it featured the Jeff Beck Group, including Rod Stewart, and it had songs co-written by Davy Jones of the Monkees -- and the songs Davy Jones co-wrote were about Captain Beefheart and about Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. That's an enormous nexus of otherwise unconnected musicians, and it allows me to move several strands of the story forwards at the same time -- and it also allows me to talk about groupie culture and misogyny in the rock world from the perspective of the women who were involved. [Excerpt: GTOs, “The Captain's Fat Theresa Shoes”] I'm not *definitely* going to cover that, but I'm likely to -- and I'm likely to cover it rather than covering some more well-known but less interesting track. Dean Mattson asks what my favourite three books are on the music I've covered so far. That's a good question. I'm actually going to name more than three, though... The book that has been of most value in terms of sheer information density is Before Elvis, by Larry Birnbaum. This is a book that covers the prehistory of rock and roll to an absurd level of detail, and it's absolutely wonderful, but it's also absolutely hard going. Birnbaum seems to have heard, without exaggeration, every record released before 1954, and he'll do things like trace a musical motif from a Chuck Berry solo to a Louis Jordan record, and from the Louis Jordan record to one by Count Basie, and from that to Blind Blake, to Blind Lemon Jefferson, to Jelly Roll Morton, to a 1918 recording by Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra. And he does that kind of thing in every single paragraph of a 474-page book. He must reference, at a very conservative estimate, five thousand different recordings. Now this is information density at the expense of everything else, and Birnbaum's book has something of the air of those dense 18th and 19th century omnium gatherum type books like Origin of Species or Capital or The Golden Bough, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where there are a million examples provided to prove a point in the most exhaustive detail possible. I've done entire episodes of the podcast which are just expanding on a single paragraph of Birnbaum and providing enough context and narrative for a lay audience to appreciate it. It's not a book you read for fun. It's a book you read a paragraph at a time, with a notepad, looking up recordings of all the songs he covers as he gets to them. But if you're willing to put that time in, the book will reward you with a truly comprehensive understanding of American popular music of the period up to 1954. The book that surprised me the most with its quality was Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. I've always quite liked Bragg as a songwriter, but I'd never expected him to be much good at writing a work of non-fiction. I only actually got hold of a copy because it had just come out when I started the podcast, and it had a certain amount of publicity behind it. I thought if I didn't read it I would then get people asking questions like, "But Billy Bragg says X, why do you say Y?" But in fact, if you want a book on the skiffle movement and early British rock and roll, you could not do better than this one. It's exhaustively researched, and it's written in a staggeringly readable prose style, by someone who has spent his life as both a folk musician and a political activist, and so understands the culture of the skiffle movement on a bone-deep level. If there was one book I was to urge people to read just to read a really good, entertaining, book, it would be that one. The book that's been the most use to me is Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw -- an account of the 50s R&B scene from someone who was part of it. Shaw worked for a music publisher at the time, and had a lot of contacts in the industry. When he came to write the book in the 70s, he was able to call upon those contacts and interview a huge number of people -- many of whom gave him their last interviews before they died. The podcast wouldn't be as good without some of the other books, but it wouldn't exist at all without this one, because Shaw added so much to our knowledge of 50s R&B. But I also want to recommend all of Peter Guralnick's books, but especially Last Train to Memphis, the first of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick's written a lot of books on Southern US music, including ones on Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke which have also been important resources. But the thing that sets Guralnick apart as a writer is his ability to make the reader thoroughly understand why people admired extraordinarily flawed individuals, but without minimising their flaws. With all Guralnick's biographies, I've come away both thinking less of his subjects as people *and* admiring them more as creators. He doesn't flinch from showing the men he writes about as egocentric, often misogynist, manipulators who damaged the people around him, but nor does he turn his books into Albert Goldman style denunciations of his subjects. Indeed, in the case of Elvis, I've got more understanding of who Elvis was from Guralnick than from any of the hundreds of thousands of other words I've read on the subject. Elvis as he turns up in this podcast is the Elvis that Guralnick wrote about, rather than anything else. Magic at Mungos asked what the best song I've discovered, that I hadn't heard before doing the podcast, is. Well, I've discovered very little doing the podcast, really. The only song I've covered that I didn't know before starting work on the podcast was "Ko Ko Mo", and I can't say that one was a favourite of mine -- it's not a bad record by any means, but it's not one that changed my life or anything. But there have been a few things that I've heard that I didn't do full episodes about but which made an impression -- the McHouston Baker album I talked about towards the end of the “Love is Strange” episode, for example, is well worth a listen. [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] What the podcast *has* done, though, is make me reevaluate a few people I already knew about. In particular I'd been very dismissive of Lonnie Donegan previously -- I just hadn't got him -- but having to cover him for the podcast meant listening to all his fifties and early sixties work, and I came out of that hugely impressed. I had a similar experience with Bo Diddley, who I *did* admire beforehand, and whose music I knew fairly well, but listening to his work as a body of work, rather than as isolated tracks and albums, made me think of him as a far more subtle, interesting, musician and songwriter than I'd given him the credit for previously. Another one from William Maybury, who wants to know about my recording setup. I actually don't have very good recording equipment -- I just use a thirty-pound USB condenser mic plugged into my laptop on my dining room table. This is partly because I don't have a huge budget for the podcast, but also because there's only so much that can be done with the sound quality anyway. I live in an acoustically... fairly horrible... house, which has a weird reverb to a lot of the rooms. It's a terraced house with relatively thin walls, so you can hear the neighbours, and I live underneath a major flight path and by a main road in a major city, often driven on by people with the kind of in-car sound systems that inflict themselves on everyone nearby. While I would like better equipment, at a certain point all it would be doing is giving a really clear recording of the neighbours' arguments or the TV shows they're watching, and the sound systems in the cars driving past – like today, I was woken at 3AM by someone driving by, playing “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips in their car so loud it woke me up. Acoustic perfection when recording somewhere like here would just be wasted. So I make up for this by doing a *LOT* of editing on the podcast. I've not done so much on this episode, because these are specifically designed to be low-stress episodes for me, but I've been known to spend literally twenty hours on editing some individual episodes, cutting out extraneous noises, fixing sound quality issues, and so on. And finally for this week, Russell Stallings asks, "my son Pete wants to know if you are a musician? And , who is your favorite beatle?" The answer to whether I'm a musician is "yes and no", I'm afraid. I can play a lot of instruments badly. I'm dyspraxic, so I have natural limits to my dexterity, and so no matter how much I practiced I never became more than a competent rhythm guitarist at best. But I manage to be not very good on a whole variety of instruments -- I've been in bands before, and played guitar, keyboards, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and banjo on recordings -- and I can, more or less, get a tune out of a clarinet or saxophone with a good run-up. Where I think my own musical skills lie is as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. I've not done much of that in over a decade, as I don't really have the personality for collaboration, but I did a lot of it in my twenties and thirties. Here's an example, from a band I used to be in called The National Pep. [Excerpt: The National Pep, "Think Carefully For Victory"] In the section you just heard, I wrote the music, co-produced, and played all the instruments except the drums. Tilt -- who does a podcast called The Sitcom Club I know some of you listen to -- sang lead, wrote the lyrics, played drums, and co-produced. So, sort of a musician, sort of not. As to the question about my favourite Beatle, John Lennon has always been my favourite, though as I grow older I'm growing more and more to appreciate Paul McCartney. I'm also, though, someone who thinks the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts in that particular case. All four of them did solo work I like a lot, but also the group was immensely better than any of the solo work. It's very, very, rare that every member of a band is utterly irreplaceable -- normally, even when every member of a band is talented, you can imagine them carrying on with one or more members swapped out for other, equally competent, people. But in the case of the Beatles, I don't think you can. Anyway, that's all for this week. I'll be answering more questions next week, then the podcast will be back to normal on October the sixth with an episode on Carl Perkins. If you have any questions you'd like to ask, you can still ask by signing up on patreon.com/andrewhickey – and if you've not signed up for that, you can do so for as little as a dollar a month. Patreon backers also get a ten minute bonus podcast every week I do a regular podcast, and when the book version of the podcast comes out, backers at the $5 or higher level will be getting free copies of that. They also get copies of my other books. Thanks for listening.

tv love american new york history world chicago fall books irish strange world war ii mayors captain capital beatles roots democrats mac origin elvis democratic rock and roll heading mafia crying decline shaw northern john lennon satisfaction paul mccartney democratic party chess elvis presley roman empire usb johnny cash mojo species acoustic rod stewart tilt frank zappa mixcloud chuck berry beatle monkees ella fitzgerald sam cooke partly rock music stairway bragg god save hold on rockers radicals walk this way roy orbison steppenwolf irish americans shirley temple billy bragg popular music count basie archival davy jones space oddity bo diddley last train richard thompson birnbaum california dreaming captain beefheart bootlegs little feat carl perkins sam phillips sun records wilson phillips southern us peggy sue louis jordan jimmie rodgers jazz orchestra jelly roll morton honkers lowell george orbison jeremy wilson blind lemon jefferson melissa williams jeff beck group david gerard lonnie donegan golden bough edward kelly blind blake peter guralnick boswell sisters ooby dooby before elvis rockers how skiffle changed matthew elmslie

BONUS: Question and Answer Episode 1

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2019

This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Patreon backers can ask questions for next episode at this link. Books mentioned — Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hello, and welcome to the first of our two-part question and answer session. For those who didn’t hear the little admin podcast I did last week, this week and next week are not regular episodes of the podcast — I’m taking two weeks out to get the book version of the first fifty episodes edited and published, and to get a bit of a backlog in writing future episodes. I’m planning on doing this every year from now on, and doing it this way will mean that the podcast will take exactly ten years, rather than the nine years and eight months it would otherwise take, But to fill in the gaps while you wait, I asked for any questions from my Patreon backers, about anything to do with the podcast. This week and next week I’m going to be answering those questions. Now, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even sure that anyone would have any questions at all, and I was worried I’d have to think of something else to do next week, but it turns out there are loads of them. I’ve actually had so many questions, some of them requiring quite long answers, that I’ll probably have enough to not only do this week and next week’s episodes based on questions, but to do a bonus backer-only half-hour podcast of more questions next week. Anyway, to start with, a question that I’ve been asked quite a bit, and that both Melissa Williams and Claire Boothby asked — what’s the theme music for the podcast, and how does it fit in with the show? [Excerpt: Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The song is called “Rock and Roll”, and it’s from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in those words — there was an earlier song called “rocking and rolling”, but I think it’s the first one to use the phrase “rock and roll”. It’s performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare. They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple — they’re the people who wrote “On the Good Ship Lollipop” — but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead. The version I’m using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That’s just because the film version was easier for me to obtain. As for why I’m using it, a few reasons. One is that it’s of historical note, as I said, because it’s the first song to use the phrase, and that seemed appropriate for a podcast on the history of rock music. The other main reason is that it’s in the public domain, and I try wherever possible to keep to copyright laws. I think all the uses of music in the podcast fall under fair use or fair dealing, because they’re short excerpts used for educational purposes and I link to legal versions of the full thing, but using a recording as the theme music doesn’t, so I had to choose something that was in the public domain. Next we have a question from David Gerard: “piece of trivia from waaaaay back: in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”, why “*democratic* fellows named Mack”? what’s that line about?” [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”] Well, I’ve never actually seen an interview with the writers of the song, but I can hazard two educated guesses. One of them is boring and probably right, the other one is more interesting and probably wrong. The boring and probably right one is very simple — the word “democratic” scans, and there aren’t that many words that fit that syllable pattern. There are some — “existential”, “sympathetic”, “diuretic” — but not that many, and “democratic” happens to be assonant with the song’s rhyme scheme, too — the “cratic” doesn’t actually rhyme with all those “alack”, “track” “jack”, and so on, but it sounds good in combination with them. I suspect that the solution is as simple as that. The more interesting one is probably not the case, and I say this because the songwriters who wrote “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” were white. BUT, Milt Gabler, one of the three credited writers, was familiar enough with black culture that this might be the case. Now, the character in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is a soldier returning from the second world war — we know this from the first two lines, “Heading for the station with a pack on my back/I’m tired of transportation in the back of a hack”, plus the date the song was recorded, 1946. So we’ve got someone who’s recently been discharged from the army and has no job. BUT, given it’s Louis Jordan singing, we can presume this someone is black. And that puts the song in a rather different light. Because 1946 is slap in the middle of what’s known as the second great migration — the second big wave of black people moving from the rural deep south to the urban north and (in the case of the second migration, but not really the first) the west. This is something we’ve touched on a bit in the podcast, because it was the second great migration that was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of the urban jump blues that became R&B — and separately, it was also the cause of the creation of the electric blues in Chicago. And Chicago is an interesting one here. Because Chicago was one of the biggest destinations — possibly the single biggest destination — for black people looking to move around this time. And so we recontextualise a bit. Our black soldier has returned to the US, but he’s travelling by train to somewhere where there’s no job waiting for him, and there’s no mention of going to see his friends or his wife or anything like that. So maybe, he’s someone who grew up in the rural deep south, but has decided to use the opportunity of his discharge from the military to go and build himself a new life in one of the big cities, quite probably Chicago. And he’s looking for work and doesn’t have many contacts there. We can tell that because in the second verse he’s looking at the classified ads for jobs in the paper. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”] Now, at this time, especially during and immediately after the Second World War, the single biggest employer in the US in the big cities was the government, and in the big cities there was a *lot* of patronage being handed out by the party in charge — basically, in most of the big cities, the political parties, especially the Democrats at this time, were an arm of organised crime, with the mayor of the city acting much as a Mafia don would. And the only way to get a job, if you didn’t have any special qualifications, if you weren’t a “man with a knack” as the song puts it — especially a sinecure where you didn’t have to work very hard — the only way to get such a job was to be owed a favour by the local Democratic Party. Now, in Chicago — again, Chicago is not named in the song, but it would seem the most logical place for our protagonist to be travelling, and this was true of other big Northern cities like New York, too — the Democratic Party was run at this time almost entirely by Irish-Americans. The Mayor of Chicago, at the time was Edward Kelly, and he was the head of a formidable electoral machine, a coalition of several different ethnic groups, but dominated by Irish people. So, if you wanted one of those jobs that were being handed out, you’d have to do favours for Kelly’s Irish Democrats — you’d have to pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”] Now I come to a few questions that I’m going to treat as one — questions from Jeff Stanzler, Steven Hinkle, and Matthew Elmslie. They ask, between them, how I plan out what songs I’m going to include, and if I have to make difficult choices about what to include and what not to include, and who the most significant performer I don’t plan to include at all is. Jeremy Wilson also asks if I’ve got all five hundred songs planned out and how close to the current day I plan to get. These are all, actually, very different questions, but they all centre around the same thing, and so I’m going to address them all together here. If any of you don’t think I’ve addressed your question sufficiently, please say and I’ll come back to it next week. Now, I don’t have the whole five hundred songs mapped out. To do that would be for me to assume that in the next nine years none of my research will cause me to revise my opinions on what’s important. So far, in the first fifty, I’ve not really had to make any difficult choices at all — the only things I’ve wished I could include have either been things where there’s just not enough information out there to put together an interesting episode, or where my own self-imposed restrictions like the starting point cut them off. Like if I’d decided to start a few years earlier, I *would* have included Jimmie Rodgers, but you have to have a cut-off point, and if I hadn’t set 1938 and the Goodman Carnegie Hall concerts as a good starting point I could have gone all the way back at least to the mid nineteenth century, and it would have been more the prehistory of rock. Maybe I’ll do that as a project when I’ve finished this one. But even those people I’ve excluded, I’ve ended up being able to cover as bonus episodes, so I’ve not really had to leave anything out. But that means so far, since we’re still really at the very beginning of rock and roll, there have been no difficult choices. That will change as the story goes on — in the sixties there are so many important records that I’m going to have to cut out a lot, and by the mid-seventies rock has diversified so much that there will be *tons* of things I’ll just have to gloss over. But right now I’ve had to make no tough decisions. Now, the way I do this — I have a list of about two hundred or so songs that I’m pretty sure are going to make the final list. Like I’m sure nobody will be surprised to find that I’ll be covering, say, “Peggy Sue”, “Satisfaction”, “Stairway to Heaven”, “God Save the Queen” and “Walk This Way”. You can’t leave those things out of the story and still have it be anything like an actual history of rock music. That’s my sort of master list, but I don’t consult that all that often. What I do, is at any given point I’m working on the next ten scripts simultaneously — I do things that way because I use the same research materials for multiple episodes, so for example I was writing the Chess episodes all at the same time, and the rockabilly episodes all at the same time, so I might be reading a biography of Carl Perkins, see an interesting fact about Johnny Cash, and stick the fact in the Johnny Cash episode or whatever. I have another list of about twenty probables, just titles, that I’m planning to work on soon after. Every time I finish a script, I look through the list of probables, pull out a good one to work on next, and add that to the ten I’m writing. I’ll also, when I’m doing that, add any more titles I’ve thought of to the list. So I know exactly what I’m going to be doing in the next two and a half months, have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing for the next six, and only a basic outline after that. That means that I can’t necessarily say for certain who I *won’t* be including. There will, undoubtedly, be some significant performers who don’t get included, but I can’t say who until we get past their part in the story. Steven also asked as part of this if I’ve determined an end point. Yes I have. That may change over the next nine years, but when I was planning out the podcast — even before it became a podcast, when I was thinking of it as just a series of books — I thought of what I think would make the perfect ending for the series — a song from 1999 — and I’m going to use that. Related to that, William Maybury asked “Why 1999?” Well, a few reasons — partly because it’s a nice cut-off point — the end of the nineties and so on. Partly because it’s about the time that I disengaged totally from popular culture — I like plenty of music from the last couple of decades, but not really much that has made any impact on the wider world. Partly because, when I finish the podcast, 1999 will be thirty years ago, which seems like about the right sort of length of time to have a decent historical perspective on things; partly because one of the inspirations for this was Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music and that cut off — well, it cut off in 2001, but close enough; and partly because the final song I’m going to cover came out then, and it’s a good ending song. William also asked “What’s the bottom standard for notability to be covered? (We heard about “Ooby Dooby” before “Crying,” are we going to hear about “Take My Tip” before “Space Oddity”? Bootlegs beyond the Million Dollar Band that you mentioned on Twitter? Archival groundbreakers like Parson Sound?)” [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Ooby Dooby”] That’s an interesting question… there’s no bottom standard for notability *as such*. It’s more that notability is just one of a number of factors I’m using to decide on the songs I cover. So the question I ask myself when I’m choosing one to include isn’t just “is this song influential or important?” though that’s a primary one. There’s also “is there a particularly fascinating story behind the recording of this track?” “Does this illustrate something important about music or about cultural history?”, “Is this just a song I really like and want to talk about?” And also, “does this provide a link between otherwise disconnected strands of the story?” There are also things like “have I not covered anything by a woman or a black person or whatever in a while?” because one of the things I want to do is make sure that this isn’t just the story of white men, however much they dominate the narrative, and I know I will have to consciously correct for my own biases, so I pay attention to that. And there’s *also* the question of mixing the stuff everyone knows about with the stuff they’ll be hearing about for the first time — you have to cover “Satisfaction” because everyone would notice it’s missing, but if you just do Beatles-Stones-Led Zep-Pink Floyd-whoever’s-on-the-cover-of-Mojo-this-month, nobody’s going to hear anything they can’t get in a million different places. So to take the example of “Ooby Dooby”, it’s only a relatively important track in itself, though it is notable for being the start of Roy Orbison’s career. But it also ties Orbison in to the story of Sam Phillips and Sun Records, and thus into the stories of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and so on. It allows me to set up something for the future while tying the story together and moving the stories of multiple people forward a bit. So… as a tiny bit of a spoiler, though this won’t be too much of a surprise to those who’ve read my book California Dreaming, I am almost certainly going to cover the GTOs, who are almost a footnote to a footnote. I’ll cover them because their one album was co-produced by Frank Zappa and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, it featured the Jeff Beck Group, including Rod Stewart, and it had songs co-written by Davy Jones of the Monkees — and the songs Davy Jones co-wrote were about Captain Beefheart and about Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. That’s an enormous nexus of otherwise unconnected musicians, and it allows me to move several strands of the story forwards at the same time — and it also allows me to talk about groupie culture and misogyny in the rock world from the perspective of the women who were involved. [Excerpt: GTOs, “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes”] I’m not *definitely* going to cover that, but I’m likely to — and I’m likely to cover it rather than covering some more well-known but less interesting track. Dean Mattson asks what my favourite three books are on the music I’ve covered so far. That’s a good question. I’m actually going to name more than three, though… The book that has been of most value in terms of sheer information density is Before Elvis, by Larry Birnbaum. This is a book that covers the prehistory of rock and roll to an absurd level of detail, and it’s absolutely wonderful, but it’s also absolutely hard going. Birnbaum seems to have heard, without exaggeration, every record released before 1954, and he’ll do things like trace a musical motif from a Chuck Berry solo to a Louis Jordan record, and from the Louis Jordan record to one by Count Basie, and from that to Blind Blake, to Blind Lemon Jefferson, to Jelly Roll Morton, to a 1918 recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. And he does that kind of thing in every single paragraph of a 474-page book. He must reference, at a very conservative estimate, five thousand different recordings. Now this is information density at the expense of everything else, and Birnbaum’s book has something of the air of those dense 18th and 19th century omnium gatherum type books like Origin of Species or Capital or The Golden Bough, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where there are a million examples provided to prove a point in the most exhaustive detail possible. I’ve done entire episodes of the podcast which are just expanding on a single paragraph of Birnbaum and providing enough context and narrative for a lay audience to appreciate it. It’s not a book you read for fun. It’s a book you read a paragraph at a time, with a notepad, looking up recordings of all the songs he covers as he gets to them. But if you’re willing to put that time in, the book will reward you with a truly comprehensive understanding of American popular music of the period up to 1954. The book that surprised me the most with its quality was Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. I’ve always quite liked Bragg as a songwriter, but I’d never expected him to be much good at writing a work of non-fiction. I only actually got hold of a copy because it had just come out when I started the podcast, and it had a certain amount of publicity behind it. I thought if I didn’t read it I would then get people asking questions like, “But Billy Bragg says X, why do you say Y?” But in fact, if you want a book on the skiffle movement and early British rock and roll, you could not do better than this one. It’s exhaustively researched, and it’s written in a staggeringly readable prose style, by someone who has spent his life as both a folk musician and a political activist, and so understands the culture of the skiffle movement on a bone-deep level. If there was one book I was to urge people to read just to read a really good, entertaining, book, it would be that one. The book that’s been the most use to me is Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw — an account of the 50s R&B scene from someone who was part of it. Shaw worked for a music publisher at the time, and had a lot of contacts in the industry. When he came to write the book in the 70s, he was able to call upon those contacts and interview a huge number of people — many of whom gave him their last interviews before they died. The podcast wouldn’t be as good without some of the other books, but it wouldn’t exist at all without this one, because Shaw added so much to our knowledge of 50s R&B. But I also want to recommend all of Peter Guralnick’s books, but especially Last Train to Memphis, the first of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick’s written a lot of books on Southern US music, including ones on Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke which have also been important resources. But the thing that sets Guralnick apart as a writer is his ability to make the reader thoroughly understand why people admired extraordinarily flawed individuals, but without minimising their flaws. With all Guralnick’s biographies, I’ve come away both thinking less of his subjects as people *and* admiring them more as creators. He doesn’t flinch from showing the men he writes about as egocentric, often misogynist, manipulators who damaged the people around him, but nor does he turn his books into Albert Goldman style denunciations of his subjects. Indeed, in the case of Elvis, I’ve got more understanding of who Elvis was from Guralnick than from any of the hundreds of thousands of other words I’ve read on the subject. Elvis as he turns up in this podcast is the Elvis that Guralnick wrote about, rather than anything else. Magic at Mungos asked what the best song I’ve discovered, that I hadn’t heard before doing the podcast, is. Well, I’ve discovered very little doing the podcast, really. The only song I’ve covered that I didn’t know before starting work on the podcast was “Ko Ko Mo”, and I can’t say that one was a favourite of mine — it’s not a bad record by any means, but it’s not one that changed my life or anything. But there have been a few things that I’ve heard that I didn’t do full episodes about but which made an impression — the McHouston Baker album I talked about towards the end of the “Love is Strange” episode, for example, is well worth a listen. [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] What the podcast *has* done, though, is make me reevaluate a few people I already knew about. In particular I’d been very dismissive of Lonnie Donegan previously — I just hadn’t got him — but having to cover him for the podcast meant listening to all his fifties and early sixties work, and I came out of that hugely impressed. I had a similar experience with Bo Diddley, who I *did* admire beforehand, and whose music I knew fairly well, but listening to his work as a body of work, rather than as isolated tracks and albums, made me think of him as a far more subtle, interesting, musician and songwriter than I’d given him the credit for previously. Another one from William Maybury, who wants to know about my recording setup. I actually don’t have very good recording equipment — I just use a thirty-pound USB condenser mic plugged into my laptop on my dining room table. This is partly because I don’t have a huge budget for the podcast, but also because there’s only so much that can be done with the sound quality anyway. I live in an acoustically… fairly horrible… house, which has a weird reverb to a lot of the rooms. It’s a terraced house with relatively thin walls, so you can hear the neighbours, and I live underneath a major flight path and by a main road in a major city, often driven on by people with the kind of in-car sound systems that inflict themselves on everyone nearby. While I would like better equipment, at a certain point all it would be doing is giving a really clear recording of the neighbours’ arguments or the TV shows they’re watching, and the sound systems in the cars driving past – like today, I was woken at 3AM by someone driving by, playing “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips in their car so loud it woke me up. Acoustic perfection when recording somewhere like here would just be wasted. So I make up for this by doing a *LOT* of editing on the podcast. I’ve not done so much on this episode, because these are specifically designed to be low-stress episodes for me, but I’ve been known to spend literally twenty hours on editing some individual episodes, cutting out extraneous noises, fixing sound quality issues, and so on. And finally for this week, Russell Stallings asks, “my son Pete wants to know if you are a musician? And , who is your favorite beatle?” The answer to whether I’m a musician is “yes and no”, I’m afraid. I can play a lot of instruments badly. I’m dyspraxic, so I have natural limits to my dexterity, and so no matter how much I practiced I never became more than a competent rhythm guitarist at best. But I manage to be not very good on a whole variety of instruments — I’ve been in bands before, and played guitar, keyboards, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and banjo on recordings — and I can, more or less, get a tune out of a clarinet or saxophone with a good run-up. Where I think my own musical skills lie is as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. I’ve not done much of that in over a decade, as I don’t really have the personality for collaboration, but I did a lot of it in my twenties and thirties. Here’s an example, from a band I used to be in called The National Pep. [Excerpt: The National Pep, “Think Carefully For Victory”] In the section you just heard, I wrote the music, co-produced, and played all the instruments except the drums. Tilt — who does a podcast called The Sitcom Club I know some of you listen to — sang lead, wrote the lyrics, played drums, and co-produced. So, sort of a musician, sort of not. As to the question about my favourite Beatle, John Lennon has always been my favourite, though as I grow older I’m growing more and more to appreciate Paul McCartney. I’m also, though, someone who thinks the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts in that particular case. All four of them did solo work I like a lot, but also the group was immensely better than any of the solo work. It’s very, very, rare that every member of a band is utterly irreplaceable — normally, even when every member of a band is talented, you can imagine them carrying on with one or more members swapped out for other, equally competent, people. But in the case of the Beatles, I don’t think you can. Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll be answering more questions next week, then the podcast will be back to normal on October the sixth with an episode on Carl Perkins. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, you can still ask by signing up on patreon.com/andrewhickey – and if you’ve not signed up for that, you can do so for as little as a dollar a month. Patreon backers also get a ten minute bonus podcast every week I do a regular podcast, and when the book version of the podcast comes out, backers at the $5 or higher level will be getting free copies of that. They also get copies of my other books. Thanks for listening.

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BONUS: Question and Answer Episode 1

master explore style blues piedmont blind blake

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2019

This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Patreon backers can ask questions for next episode at this link. Books mentioned — Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hello, and welcome to the first of our two-part question and answer session. For those who didn’t hear the little admin podcast I did last week, this week and next week are not regular episodes of the podcast — I’m taking two weeks out to get the book version of the first fifty episodes edited and published, and to get a bit of a backlog in writing future episodes. I’m planning on doing this every year from now on, and doing it this way will mean that the podcast will take exactly ten years, rather than the nine years and eight months it would otherwise take, But to fill in the gaps while you wait, I asked for any questions from my Patreon backers, about anything to do with the podcast. This week and next week I’m going to be answering those questions. Now, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even sure that anyone would have any questions at all, and I was worried I’d have to think of something else to do next week, but it turns out there are loads of them. I’ve actually had so many questions, some of them requiring quite long answers, that I’ll probably have enough to not only do this week and next week’s episodes based on questions, but to do a bonus backer-only half-hour podcast of more questions next week. Anyway, to start with, a question that I’ve been asked quite a bit, and that both Melissa Williams and Claire Boothby asked — what’s the theme music for the podcast, and how does it fit in with the show? [Excerpt: Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The song is called “Rock and Roll”, and it’s from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in those words — there was an earlier song called “rocking and rolling”, but I think it’s the first one to use the phrase “rock and roll”. It’s performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare. They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple — they’re the people who wrote “On the Good Ship Lollipop” — but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead. The version I’m using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That’s just because the film version was easier for me to obtain. As for why I’m using it, a few reasons. One is that it’s of historical note, as I said, because it’s the first song to use the phrase, and that seemed appropriate for a podcast on the history of rock music. The other main reason is that it’s in the public domain, and I try wherever possible to keep to copyright laws. I think all the uses of music in the podcast fall under fair use or fair dealing, because they’re short excerpts used for educational purposes and I link to legal versions of the full thing, but using a recording as the theme music doesn’t, so I had to choose something that was in the public domain. Next we have a question from David Gerard: “piece of trivia from waaaaay back: in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”, why “*democratic* fellows named Mack”? what’s that line about?” [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”] Well, I’ve never actually seen an interview with the writers of the song, but I can hazard two educated guesses. One of them is boring and probably right, the other one is more interesting and probably wrong. The boring and probably right one is very simple — the word “democratic” scans, and there aren’t that many words that fit that syllable pattern. There are some — “existential”, “sympathetic”, “diuretic” — but not that many, and “democratic” happens to be assonant with the song’s rhyme scheme, too — the “cratic” doesn’t actually rhyme with all those “alack”, “track” “jack”, and so on, but it sounds good in combination with them. I suspect that the solution is as simple as that. The more interesting one is probably not the case, and I say this because the songwriters who wrote “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” were white. BUT, Milt Gabler, one of the three credited writers, was familiar enough with black culture that this might be the case. Now, the character in “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is a soldier returning from the second world war — we know this from the first two lines, “Heading for the station with a pack on my back/I’m tired of transportation in the back of a hack”, plus the date the song was recorded, 1946. So we’ve got someone who’s recently been discharged from the army and has no job. BUT, given it’s Louis Jordan singing, we can presume this someone is black. And that puts the song in a rather different light. Because 1946 is slap in the middle of what’s known as the second great migration — the second big wave of black people moving from the rural deep south to the urban north and (in the case of the second migration, but not really the first) the west. This is something we’ve touched on a bit in the podcast, because it was the second great migration that was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of the urban jump blues that became R&B — and separately, it was also the cause of the creation of the electric blues in Chicago. And Chicago is an interesting one here. Because Chicago was one of the biggest destinations — possibly the single biggest destination — for black people looking to move around this time. And so we recontextualise a bit. Our black soldier has returned to the US, but he’s travelling by train to somewhere where there’s no job waiting for him, and there’s no mention of going to see his friends or his wife or anything like that. So maybe, he’s someone who grew up in the rural deep south, but has decided to use the opportunity of his discharge from the military to go and build himself a new life in one of the big cities, quite probably Chicago. And he’s looking for work and doesn’t have many contacts there. We can tell that because in the second verse he’s looking at the classified ads for jobs in the paper. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”] Now, at this time, especially during and immediately after the Second World War, the single biggest employer in the US in the big cities was the government, and in the big cities there was a *lot* of patronage being handed out by the party in charge — basically, in most of the big cities, the political parties, especially the Democrats at this time, were an arm of organised crime, with the mayor of the city acting much as a Mafia don would. And the only way to get a job, if you didn’t have any special qualifications, if you weren’t a “man with a knack” as the song puts it — especially a sinecure where you didn’t have to work very hard — the only way to get such a job was to be owed a favour by the local Democratic Party. Now, in Chicago — again, Chicago is not named in the song, but it would seem the most logical place for our protagonist to be travelling, and this was true of other big Northern cities like New York, too — the Democratic Party was run at this time almost entirely by Irish-Americans. The Mayor of Chicago, at the time was Edward Kelly, and he was the head of a formidable electoral machine, a coalition of several different ethnic groups, but dominated by Irish people. So, if you wanted one of those jobs that were being handed out, you’d have to do favours for Kelly’s Irish Democrats — you’d have to pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”] Now I come to a few questions that I’m going to treat as one — questions from Jeff Stanzler, Steven Hinkle, and Matthew Elmslie. They ask, between them, how I plan out what songs I’m going to include, and if I have to make difficult choices about what to include and what not to include, and who the most significant performer I don’t plan to include at all is. Jeremy Wilson also asks if I’ve got all five hundred songs planned out and how close to the current day I plan to get. These are all, actually, very different questions, but they all centre around the same thing, and so I’m going to address them all together here. If any of you don’t think I’ve addressed your question sufficiently, please say and I’ll come back to it next week. Now, I don’t have the whole five hundred songs mapped out. To do that would be for me to assume that in the next nine years none of my research will cause me to revise my opinions on what’s important. So far, in the first fifty, I’ve not really had to make any difficult choices at all — the only things I’ve wished I could include have either been things where there’s just not enough information out there to put together an interesting episode, or where my own self-imposed restrictions like the starting point cut them off. Like if I’d decided to start a few years earlier, I *would* have included Jimmie Rodgers, but you have to have a cut-off point, and if I hadn’t set 1938 and the Goodman Carnegie Hall concerts as a good starting point I could have gone all the way back at least to the mid nineteenth century, and it would have been more the prehistory of rock. Maybe I’ll do that as a project when I’ve finished this one. But even those people I’ve excluded, I’ve ended up being able to cover as bonus episodes, so I’ve not really had to leave anything out. But that means so far, since we’re still really at the very beginning of rock and roll, there have been no difficult choices. That will change as the story goes on — in the sixties there are so many important records that I’m going to have to cut out a lot, and by the mid-seventies rock has diversified so much that there will be *tons* of things I’ll just have to gloss over. But right now I’ve had to make no tough decisions. Now, the way I do this — I have a list of about two hundred or so songs that I’m pretty sure are going to make the final list. Like I’m sure nobody will be surprised to find that I’ll be covering, say, “Peggy Sue”, “Satisfaction”, “Stairway to Heaven”, “God Save the Queen” and “Walk This Way”. You can’t leave those things out of the story and still have it be anything like an actual history of rock music. That’s my sort of master list, but I don’t consult that all that often. What I do, is at any given point I’m working on the next ten scripts simultaneously — I do things that way because I use the same research materials for multiple episodes, so for example I was writing the Chess episodes all at the same time, and the rockabilly episodes all at the same time, so I might be reading a biography of Carl Perkins, see an interesting fact about Johnny Cash, and stick the fact in the Johnny Cash episode or whatever. I have another list of about twenty probables, just titles, that I’m planning to work on soon after. Every time I finish a script, I look through the list of probables, pull out a good one to work on next, and add that to the ten I’m writing. I’ll also, when I’m doing that, add any more titles I’ve thought of to the list. So I know exactly what I’m going to be doing in the next two and a half months, have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing for the next six, and only a basic outline after that. That means that I can’t necessarily say for certain who I *won’t* be including. There will, undoubtedly, be some significant performers who don’t get included, but I can’t say who until we get past their part in the story. Steven also asked as part of this if I’ve determined an end point. Yes I have. That may change over the next nine years, but when I was planning out the podcast — even before it became a podcast, when I was thinking of it as just a series of books — I thought of what I think would make the perfect ending for the series — a song from 1999 — and I’m going to use that. Related to that, William Maybury asked “Why 1999?” Well, a few reasons — partly because it’s a nice cut-off point — the end of the nineties and so on. Partly because it’s about the time that I disengaged totally from popular culture — I like plenty of music from the last couple of decades, but not really much that has made any impact on the wider world. Partly because, when I finish the podcast, 1999 will be thirty years ago, which seems like about the right sort of length of time to have a decent historical perspective on things; partly because one of the inspirations for this was Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music and that cut off — well, it cut off in 2001, but close enough; and partly because the final song I’m going to cover came out then, and it’s a good ending song. William also asked “What’s the bottom standard for notability to be covered? (We heard about “Ooby Dooby” before “Crying,” are we going to hear about “Take My Tip” before “Space Oddity”? Bootlegs beyond the Million Dollar Band that you mentioned on Twitter? Archival groundbreakers like Parson Sound?)” [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Ooby Dooby”] That’s an interesting question… there’s no bottom standard for notability *as such*. It’s more that notability is just one of a number of factors I’m using to decide on the songs I cover. So the question I ask myself when I’m choosing one to include isn’t just “is this song influential or important?” though that’s a primary one. There’s also “is there a particularly fascinating story behind the recording of this track?” “Does this illustrate something important about music or about cultural history?”, “Is this just a song I really like and want to talk about?” And also, “does this provide a link between otherwise disconnected strands of the story?” There are also things like “have I not covered anything by a woman or a black person or whatever in a while?” because one of the things I want to do is make sure that this isn’t just the story of white men, however much they dominate the narrative, and I know I will have to consciously correct for my own biases, so I pay attention to that. And there’s *also* the question of mixing the stuff everyone knows about with the stuff they’ll be hearing about for the first time — you have to cover “Satisfaction” because everyone would notice it’s missing, but if you just do Beatles-Stones-Led Zep-Pink Floyd-whoever’s-on-the-cover-of-Mojo-this-month, nobody’s going to hear anything they can’t get in a million different places. So to take the example of “Ooby Dooby”, it’s only a relatively important track in itself, though it is notable for being the start of Roy Orbison’s career. But it also ties Orbison in to the story of Sam Phillips and Sun Records, and thus into the stories of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and so on. It allows me to set up something for the future while tying the story together and moving the stories of multiple people forward a bit. So… as a tiny bit of a spoiler, though this won’t be too much of a surprise to those who’ve read my book California Dreaming, I am almost certainly going to cover the GTOs, who are almost a footnote to a footnote. I’ll cover them because their one album was co-produced by Frank Zappa and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, it featured the Jeff Beck Group, including Rod Stewart, and it had songs co-written by Davy Jones of the Monkees — and the songs Davy Jones co-wrote were about Captain Beefheart and about Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. That’s an enormous nexus of otherwise unconnected musicians, and it allows me to move several strands of the story forwards at the same time — and it also allows me to talk about groupie culture and misogyny in the rock world from the perspective of the women who were involved. [Excerpt: GTOs, “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes”] I’m not *definitely* going to cover that, but I’m likely to — and I’m likely to cover it rather than covering some more well-known but less interesting track. Dean Mattson asks what my favourite three books are on the music I’ve covered so far. That’s a good question. I’m actually going to name more than three, though… The book that has been of most value in terms of sheer information density is Before Elvis, by Larry Birnbaum. This is a book that covers the prehistory of rock and roll to an absurd level of detail, and it’s absolutely wonderful, but it’s also absolutely hard going. Birnbaum seems to have heard, without exaggeration, every record released before 1954, and he’ll do things like trace a musical motif from a Chuck Berry solo to a Louis Jordan record, and from the Louis Jordan record to one by Count Basie, and from that to Blind Blake, to Blind Lemon Jefferson, to Jelly Roll Morton, to a 1918 recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. And he does that kind of thing in every single paragraph of a 474-page book. He must reference, at a very conservative estimate, five thousand different recordings. Now this is information density at the expense of everything else, and Birnbaum’s book has something of the air of those dense 18th and 19th century omnium gatherum type books like Origin of Species or Capital or The Golden Bough, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where there are a million examples provided to prove a point in the most exhaustive detail possible. I’ve done entire episodes of the podcast which are just expanding on a single paragraph of Birnbaum and providing enough context and narrative for a lay audience to appreciate it. It’s not a book you read for fun. It’s a book you read a paragraph at a time, with a notepad, looking up recordings of all the songs he covers as he gets to them. But if you’re willing to put that time in, the book will reward you with a truly comprehensive understanding of American popular music of the period up to 1954. The book that surprised me the most with its quality was Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. I’ve always quite liked Bragg as a songwriter, but I’d never expected him to be much good at writing a work of non-fiction. I only actually got hold of a copy because it had just come out when I started the podcast, and it had a certain amount of publicity behind it. I thought if I didn’t read it I would then get people asking questions like, “But Billy Bragg says X, why do you say Y?” But in fact, if you want a book on the skiffle movement and early British rock and roll, you could not do better than this one. It’s exhaustively researched, and it’s written in a staggeringly readable prose style, by someone who has spent his life as both a folk musician and a political activist, and so understands the culture of the skiffle movement on a bone-deep level. If there was one book I was to urge people to read just to read a really good, entertaining, book, it would be that one. The book that’s been the most use to me is Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw — an account of the 50s R&B scene from someone who was part of it. Shaw worked for a music publisher at the time, and had a lot of contacts in the industry. When he came to write the book in the 70s, he was able to call upon those contacts and interview a huge number of people — many of whom gave him their last interviews before they died. The podcast wouldn’t be as good without some of the other books, but it wouldn’t exist at all without this one, because Shaw added so much to our knowledge of 50s R&B. But I also want to recommend all of Peter Guralnick’s books, but especially Last Train to Memphis, the first of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick’s written a lot of books on Southern US music, including ones on Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke which have also been important resources. But the thing that sets Guralnick apart as a writer is his ability to make the reader thoroughly understand why people admired extraordinarily flawed individuals, but without minimising their flaws. With all Guralnick’s biographies, I’ve come away both thinking less of his subjects as people *and* admiring them more as creators. He doesn’t flinch from showing the men he writes about as egocentric, often misogynist, manipulators who damaged the people around him, but nor does he turn his books into Albert Goldman style denunciations of his subjects. Indeed, in the case of Elvis, I’ve got more understanding of who Elvis was from Guralnick than from any of the hundreds of thousands of other words I’ve read on the subject. Elvis as he turns up in this podcast is the Elvis that Guralnick wrote about, rather than anything else. Magic at Mungos asked what the best song I’ve discovered, that I hadn’t heard before doing the podcast, is. Well, I’ve discovered very little doing the podcast, really. The only song I’ve covered that I didn’t know before starting work on the podcast was “Ko Ko Mo”, and I can’t say that one was a favourite of mine — it’s not a bad record by any means, but it’s not one that changed my life or anything. But there have been a few things that I’ve heard that I didn’t do full episodes about but which made an impression — the McHouston Baker album I talked about towards the end of the “Love is Strange” episode, for example, is well worth a listen. [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] What the podcast *has* done, though, is make me reevaluate a few people I already knew about. In particular I’d been very dismissive of Lonnie Donegan previously — I just hadn’t got him — but having to cover him for the podcast meant listening to all his fifties and early sixties work, and I came out of that hugely impressed. I had a similar experience with Bo Diddley, who I *did* admire beforehand, and whose music I knew fairly well, but listening to his work as a body of work, rather than as isolated tracks and albums, made me think of him as a far more subtle, interesting, musician and songwriter than I’d given him the credit for previously. Another one from William Maybury, who wants to know about my recording setup. I actually don’t have very good recording equipment — I just use a thirty-pound USB condenser mic plugged into my laptop on my dining room table. This is partly because I don’t have a huge budget for the podcast, but also because there’s only so much that can be done with the sound quality anyway. I live in an acoustically… fairly horrible… house, which has a weird reverb to a lot of the rooms. It’s a terraced house with relatively thin walls, so you can hear the neighbours, and I live underneath a major flight path and by a main road in a major city, often driven on by people with the kind of in-car sound systems that inflict themselves on everyone nearby. While I would like better equipment, at a certain point all it would be doing is giving a really clear recording of the neighbours’ arguments or the TV shows they’re watching, and the sound systems in the cars driving past – like today, I was woken at 3AM by someone driving by, playing “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips in their car so loud it woke me up. Acoustic perfection when recording somewhere like here would just be wasted. So I make up for this by doing a *LOT* of editing on the podcast. I’ve not done so much on this episode, because these are specifically designed to be low-stress episodes for me, but I’ve been known to spend literally twenty hours on editing some individual episodes, cutting out extraneous noises, fixing sound quality issues, and so on. And finally for this week, Russell Stallings asks, “my son Pete wants to know if you are a musician? And , who is your favorite beatle?” The answer to whether I’m a musician is “yes and no”, I’m afraid. I can play a lot of instruments badly. I’m dyspraxic, so I have natural limits to my dexterity, and so no matter how much I practiced I never became more than a competent rhythm guitarist at best. But I manage to be not very good on a whole variety of instruments — I’ve been in bands before, and played guitar, keyboards, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and banjo on recordings — and I can, more or less, get a tune out of a clarinet or saxophone with a good run-up. Where I think my own musical skills lie is as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. I’ve not done much of that in over a decade, as I don’t really have the personality for collaboration, but I did a lot of it in my twenties and thirties. Here’s an example, from a band I used to be in called The National Pep. [Excerpt: The National Pep, “Think Carefully For Victory”] In the section you just heard, I wrote the music, co-produced, and played all the instruments except the drums. Tilt — who does a podcast called The Sitcom Club I know some of you listen to — sang lead, wrote the lyrics, played drums, and co-produced. So, sort of a musician, sort of not. As to the question about my favourite Beatle, John Lennon has always been my favourite, though as I grow older I’m growing more and more to appreciate Paul McCartney. I’m also, though, someone who thinks the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts in that particular case. All four of them did solo work I like a lot, but also the group was immensely better than any of the solo work. It’s very, very, rare that every member of a band is utterly irreplaceable — normally, even when every member of a band is talented, you can imagine them carrying on with one or more members swapped out for other, equally competent, people. But in the case of the Beatles, I don’t think you can. Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll be answering more questions next week, then the podcast will be back to normal on October the sixth with an episode on Carl Perkins. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, you can still ask by signing up on patreon.com/andrewhickey – and if you’ve not signed up for that, you can do so for as little as a dollar a month. Patreon backers also get a ten minute bonus podcast every week I do a regular podcast, and when the book version of the podcast comes out, backers at the $5 or higher level will be getting free copies of that. They also get copies of my other books. Thanks for listening.

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Piedmont Style Master: Blind Blake

Blues on My Mind

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2019 20:01

What are the elements that make-up Piedmont Style blues? Explore the mastery of Blind Blake's performance style in "Georgia Bound."

R. Crumb's "Heroes of the Blues" (Part 1) (Hour 1)

Blues Unlimited - The Radio Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2019 58:45

We’re pleased to say that all three volumes of Blues Unlimited: The Complete Radio Show Transcripts have now been published as eBooks! They’re available from Apple Books at https://tinyurl.com/y4rceu7b - Barnes & Noble at https://tinyurl.com/yxkvx6rl - and also available in the Kindle Store from Amazon at https://tinyurl.com/yyuwxbla (And please keep in mind that every dollar from every purchase will help keep an independent voice in blues radio alive and well! And we thank you!) In 1980, the good folks at Yazoo Records issued a box set of 36 trading cards called "The Heroes of the Blues," with drawings by legendary illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb, and text by noted researcher and author Stephen Calt. They've long been favorites with Blues fans, and on this program (the first of three) we dive head first into "The Heroes of the Blues." Among the featured artists on this program are Peg Leg Howell, Blind Blake, Frank Stokes, Jaybird Coleman, Blind Willie Johnson, Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Mississippi Sheiks, and more. Pictured: One of the "Heroes of the Blues" featured on this episode. Illustration by R. Crumb. Are you looking for ways to promote your band’s latest release, product, business, or service? Advertise on the podcast that’s been downloaded over one million times, and reach a global audience of blues lovers! Contact us at bluesunlimited at gmail dot com for more details! This episode is available commercial free and in its original full-fidelity high quality audio exclusively to our subscribers at Bandcamp. Your annual subscription of $27 a year will go directly to support this radio show, and you’ll gain INSTANT DOWNLOAD ACCESS to this and more than 170 other episodes from our extensive archive as well. More info is at http://bluesunlimited.bandcamp.com/subscribe

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R. Crumb's "Heroes of the Blues" (Part 1) (Hour 2)

Blues Unlimited - The Radio Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2019 61:59

We’re pleased to say that all three volumes of Blues Unlimited: The Complete Radio Show Transcripts have now been published as eBooks! They’re available from Apple Books at https://tinyurl.com/y4rceu7b - Barnes & Noble at https://tinyurl.com/yxkvx6rl - and also available in the Kindle Store from Amazon at https://tinyurl.com/yyuwxbla (And please keep in mind that every dollar from every purchase will help keep an independent voice in blues radio alive and well! And we thank you!) In 1980, the good folks at Yazoo Records issued a box set of 36 trading cards called "The Heroes of the Blues," with drawings by legendary illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb, and text by noted researcher and author Stephen Calt. They've long been favorites with Blues fans, and on this program (the first of three) we dive head first into "The Heroes of the Blues." Among the featured artists on this program are Peg Leg Howell, Blind Blake, Frank Stokes, Jaybird Coleman, Blind Willie Johnson, Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Mississippi Sheiks, and more. Pictured: One of the "Heroes of the Blues" featured on this episode. Illustration by R. Crumb. Are you looking for ways to promote your band’s latest release, product, business, or service? Advertise on the podcast that’s been downloaded over one million times, and reach a global audience of blues lovers! Contact us at bluesunlimited at gmail dot com for more details! This episode is available commercial free and in its original full-fidelity high quality audio exclusively to our subscribers at Bandcamp. Your annual subscription of $27 a year will go directly to support this radio show, and you’ll gain INSTANT DOWNLOAD ACCESS to this and more than 170 other episodes from our extensive archive as well. More info is at http://bluesunlimited.bandcamp.com/subscribe

music amazon radio heroes blues blind mississippi ebooks barnes noble carr bandcamp lemon howell illustration stokes leg blackwell twenties advertise crumb podcas 1930s 1920s apple books thirties yazoo scrappers prewar blind willie johnson kindle store blind lemon jefferson sheiks blind blake mississippi sheiks scrapper blackwell pictured one

Episode 38: Rusty Nails Blues Concert

MPL - Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2019 70:46

Rusty Nails Blues present classics of country blues. This is a demonstration and discussion of the country blues genre with emphasis on pre-WWII blues. Recorded on April 24, 2019. Members of Rusty Nails Blues, Steve Heiner and Ben Lillge, are musicians who aim to maintain and preserve the great American art form known as the blues. With a focus on acoustic blues, their repertoire includes songs from the 1930’s to more contemporary material. The original artists the duo covers include Robert Johnson, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Howlin’ Wolf, Reverend Gary Davis, Big Bill Broonzy, and many more.

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#3.5: "Hard Road Blues"

Friday Night Folk

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2019 2:58

Our rendition of Blind Blake's "Hard Road Blues."

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STEAMPUNK! Jules Verne, Battle Croquet, Kat Douglas and Giant Motorized Teapots! Ep.8

RETROGASMIC: The Vintage & Retro Podcast!

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2019 35:06

We talk to the Queen of New Zealand Steampunk Kat Douglas about Jules Verne, Battle Croquet, Hats, Airships, Giant Motorized Teapots and how much fun it is being an eccentric! Also Vintage trivia, and a very rare blues track from 1929 "Diddie-Wah_Diddie" by Blind Blake. Bmovies. Vintage podcast

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44 - Suave es la Noche. Acompasamos la vida con Kiss, The Hi-Risers, Blind Blake, Royal Blood, Cream, Rosendo, Queen...

Suave es la Noche

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2018 72:54

Una nueva descarga de Suave es la Noche, la número 44, resistimos los embustes del tiempo desde la orgullosa torre de Radiopolis, en la 92.3 de la FM, en Sevilla. Gervi Navío os promete una noche de Rock y Metal de ayer y de hoy, sin pausas ni concesiones. Afrontamos el final de Diciembre con el maquillaje de Kiss, surfeamos con The Hi-Risers, lloramos a la dulce Mary con los aullidos de Janis Joplin, rasgamos el lodo primigenio del blues con Blind Blake, Royal Blood y su bajo aguitarrado nos transportan al mañana. Nos montamos en el autobús mágico de The Who, por la ventana vemos la colina que surca la montura sin jinete de Johnny Cash. The Doors nos recuerdan la ventaja de la juventud, Queen nos arranca del ensimismamiento, Rosendo nos enseña todo un ejemplar de primavera, escapamos de las mazmorras de Black Sabbath y estamos tan felices con Cream, que sólo el maldito Marilyn Manson nos puede despedir….de este sucio mundo… Lista de Temas: 1-King of the night time world. Kiss 2-In a place like this. The Hi-Risers 3-Oh! Sweet Mary. Big Brother and the Holding Company 4-Look like you know. Royal Blood 5-Come on boys, let's do that messin´around. Blind Blake 6-Magic Bus. The Who 7-Five to one. The Doors 8-I hung my head. Johnny Cash 9-We will Rock you. Queen 10-Vaya ejemplar de primavera. Rosendo 11-Sabbath bloody Sabbath. Black Sabbath 12-I´m so glad. Cream 13-Antichrist Superstar. Marilyn Manson Volvemos con el nuevo año, no olvidéis honrar las hipócritas fiestas y la vacuidad de la vida con un largo y profundo trago de Rock, de paso, invitad al mendigo que duerme en vuestros rellanos, entre cartones y viejas mantas, a una cerveza bien fría…os garantizo que la eternidad está en sus ojos…. …menos mal que Dios es Suave. Gervi Navío.

Kelvin Davies & Gary Jones at the Invisible Folk Club - Part 2

Invisible Folk Club Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 28, 2018 43:27

It's heartening to come across younger people playing country blues and we were alerted to the talents of singer/guitarist Kelvin Davies. He works in a guitar shop which can be a blessing and curse! Consider the quandary, your working life is spent selling the thing you love but you can't stop buying them yourself. In may be a strain on Kelvin's bank balance but ultimately we feel the benefit, he is a great blues and ragtime picker. At his gigs Kelvin is frequently accompanied by veteran harmonica player Gary Jones. On this set Gary's skilful and sympathetic playing enhances the atmosphere of the songs. All but one of the songs performed were originally recorded between 1927-29 by Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton, Frank Stokes or Blind Blake. Kelvin and Gary create their own world of 1920s country blues in the 21st Century, and it feels good. In addition to the older material watch out for a great ragtime version of John Martyn's 'Over The Hill' showing that a good song is a good song no matter the style in which it is played. Songs played by Kelvin & Gary on this episode: Over The Hill (John Martyn) Frankie (Mississippi John Hurt) Police Dog Blues (Blind Blake) I'm Goin' Home (Charley Patton) If you like this you can find more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lowD_J6sR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwL2FGdOvpY Kelvin's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/KelvinDaviesMusic

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Kelvin Davies & Gary Jones at the Invisible Folk Club - Part 1

Invisible Folk Club Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 28, 2018 53:21

It's heartening to come across younger people playing country blues and we were alerted to the talents of singer/guitarist Kelvin Davies. He works in a guitar shop which can be a blessing and curse! Consider the quandary, your working life is spent selling the thing you love but you can't stop buying them yourself. In may be a strain on Kelvin's bank balance but ultimately we feel the benefit, he is a great blues and ragtime picker. At his gigs Kelvin is frequently accompanied by veteran harmonica player Gary Jones. On this set Gary's skilful and sympathetic playing enhances the atmosphere of the songs. All but one of the songs performed were originally recorded between 1927-29 by Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton, Frank Stokes or Blind Blake. Kelvin and Gary create their own world of 1920s country blues in the 21st Century, and it feels good. In addition to the older material watch out for a great ragtime version of John Martyn's 'Over The Hill' showing that a good song is a good song no matter the style in which it is played. Songs played by Kelvin & Gary in this episode: Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor (Mississippi John Hurt) Shake It And Break It (Charley Patton) Downtown Blues (Frank Stokes) If you like this you can find more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lowD_J6sR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwL2FGdOvpY Kelvin's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/KelvinDaviesMusic

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55. Jorma Kaukonen

Music Makers and Soul Shakers Podcast with Steve Dawson

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2018 92:40

My guest this month is guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jorma Kaukonen. Jorma grew up in Washington, D.C., where he first turned to the guitar. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early '60s, playing backup to Janis Joplin in local clubs. In 1965, he became a founding member of Jefferson Airplane which soared to fame in 1967, and his distinctive guitar-playing was crucial to its sound with signature solos and parts in classics like "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love". With bassist Jack Casady, Jorma formed a spinoff duo from the group in 1970 called Hot Tuna, and this became his primary musical vehicle after the Airplane broke up in 1973. Jorma's fingerstyle guitar playing was a big part of my musical education, and introduced me to the music of Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake and many more. His acoustic playing in the Airplane was a real eye opener for me too, with pieces like "Embryonic Journey". He has just released a great auto-biography called "Been So Long", but I thought it would be fun to hear some of his stories coming from his own mouth, so here we go! Enjoy my conversation with Jorma Kaukonen, and please subscribe to the podcast for free on iTunes!

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The Burying Ground

Guilt & Company Live | Vancouver's live music venue in Gastown.

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2018 16:57

The Burying Ground is an upbeat blues string band that brings the fire of punk to the technical prowess and distinct sound of such early blues, country and jazz masters as Blind Blake, Bessie Smith, Gary Davis, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy, and Jimmie Rodgers. The core duo of Devora Laye (washboard, vocal and saw) and Woody Forster (guitar and vocals) are known for songwriting that illuminates the human experience, and reflects the modern day by touching on mental health, the trauma of war, social justice and good old-fashioned lost and found love. It is today’s commentary on a framework of vintage music. All three albums have hit the radio charts - Big City Blues (2015); Country Blues & Rags (2017); and The Burying Ground (2017). A rotating cast of masterful backing musicians accompanies Woody and Devora. As always, recorded LIVE at Guilt & Company Visit Guilt & Company online via www.guiltandcompany.com - or in person at 1 Alexander Street in Historic Gastown, Vancouver, BC. Follow Us on Social Media: Facebook: www.facebook.com/guiltandcompany Twitter: www.twitter.com/guiltandcompany Youtube: www.youtube.com/guiltandcompany Instagram: www.instagram.com/guiltandco Presented By: Paul Clark Edited By: Aaron Johnson

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Sunday Feature - Blind, Black and Blue

The Radio 3 Documentary

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2018 43:20

There were many real blind, black bluesman, scraping a living in the Deep South a hundred years ago. From Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson on opposite street corners in Dallas to Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller in Georgia and the Carolinas, the early 20th century saw blind bluesmen playing everything from the lewd, raw blues of the juke joint to the God-fearing spirituals beloved of the new wave of Southern churches and with a musical legacy that's lasted through the decades. How did this group of blind musicians, faced with all the disadvantages of race, segregation, disability and poverty, manage to achieve celebrity in their own day and leave such a lasting mark on the history of American music? Gary O'Donoghue, who is blind himself, explores the elements of race and culture that made this phenomenon possible. Presenter, Gary O'Donoghue Producer, Lee Kumutat Sound Engineer, Peter Bosher Every member of the production team who made this programme is blind. Editor, Andrew Smith

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Totally Guitars Weekly Wrap Up September 1st, 2017

Totally Guitars

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2017 19:09

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Guy Davis

The String

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2017 50:31

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.

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1920s Ragtime

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2016 40:33

The development of ragtime during the 1920s. Featuring: Zez Confrey, Vincent Lopez, Jelly Roll Morton, Benny Moten, Blind Blake and Bessie Smith. Songs include: Alexander's Ragtime Band, Kitten On the Keys, Dizzy Fingers, The Pearls, Nola, Twelfth Street Rag and Southern Rag.

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More Piedmont Blues

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Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2013 42:03

Performers include: Blind Blake, Buddy Moss, Scrapper Blackwell, Peg Leg Howell, Josh White and Reverend Gary Davis. Songs include: Lord, I Want to Die Easy, Ain't No Tellin, Peg Leg Stomp, He's In the Jailhouse, If I Call You Mama and The Great Change In Me.

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Roadhouse 408

The Roadhouse

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2012 60:05

We close out the 2012 holiday season in this edition of The Roadhouse. But it's even a much bigger show than that. The hour is also filled with nominees for the 2013 Blues Music Awards. Phantom Blues Band, Blind Blake, Milton Hopkins & Jewel Brown, Robert Cray Band, and Mary Bridget Davies Group stand tall with their peer nominees in another hour of the finest blues you've never heard, the 408th Roadhouse.

Guitar Lessons Blind Blake, Eagles, Student Reviews, Weekly Wrap Up and more...

Totally Guitars

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2012 12:15

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Blind Blues Musicians

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2012 39:08

Blind blues singers of the 1920s and 1030s, including: Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell, Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Teddy Darb and Blind Boy Fuller. Songs include: Log Cabin Blues, Southern Rag, Bad Luck Blues, Southern Can Is Mine and Have a Little More Faith In Jesus.

Dangerous R&R Show 14....Games, Dames, & Diddy Wah Diddies

Dangerous R&R Show Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2010 58:00

The working title for this weeks show is Games, Dames & Diddy Wah Diddies but I've got a short attention span and usually stray way off the path so why should this be any different? Blind Blake recorded "Diddie Wah Diddie" around 1928 I'd 'recon....it's a masterful ragtime guitar tune where not too many answers for just what the fuck it is....intercourse, sex, penis are all candidates claiming the prize....but whether any of them get the gold is in the ears of the listener.....Starting off the Podcast with some upgrade 45's to the DRR Show...first is Roky Erickson & Arthur Lee's bastard child...Nova Local with their first slab of 7" wax "Games"..so at least we start the show off staying on course....focus, Mickster, focus......Don Gardner's ultra hip floor filler "My baby likes to boogaloo" hits the turntable running followed by an original first pressing of The Shondells' "Thunderbolt" on Snap. Thunderbolt is the b-side of the original recording of Tommy James & the Shondells frat hit "Hanky Panky" that was waxed in 1964 and just credited to The Shondells...by the time the song became a huge hit the band had broken up and James assembled a new lineup to go out on tour...you can read all about it in the terrific book by TJ tittled: Me, the Mob and the Music..Fabienne Delsol closes out the first set singin' to her mystery man "Mr. Mystery".The second set of music features soundbites by Samuel L. Jackson. SLJ is one of my favorite actors and if not only for Pulp Fiction should have glommed an Oscar...he was fantastic! And speaking of fantastic Captain Beefheart opens up the awards show with his first 45 rpm "Diddy Wah Diddy" on A&M records produced by David Gates of Bread fame....yikes! Samuel L follows up with some witty repartee before the Boonerasss!! from Germany give Dave Davies' "One Fine Day" a ride....SLJ with the immortal "Shup Up" soundbite before one of my favs Cub Koda offa his CUB DIGS BO hooky lau with "Mumblin' Guitar"...yeowza!! SLJ brings us back to earth with "Ezekiel" and the Golden Gate Quartet take the bait with a fire & brimstone 78 rpm "Jezebel" from 1941 on the Okeh record label. .... now sit down while your reading this....Rush opens the card at the podium and declares the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things" as the winner...it's off of their really great 8 song EP that only came out on vinyl called FEEDBACK.....We still got some way to go, brothers & sisters, so don't leave the room because Georgio Morodor serves up a pretty cool synthesizer-less song off his LP from 1972 simply called "Son of My Father". It's from waaaayyyyy back when Morodor was just calling himself Georgio which for my money is the best crap he's ever done! In the words of Al Gore....."debate over, debate over...." Hey...speaking of Al Gore....do you think Tipper got tired of hearing how Bush stole the election from him or do you think that she got tired of listening to AG talking about Global Warming OR do you think she was doing the Diddy Wah Diddy with one of the farm hands on their palatial estate down thar in 'V'ginny? Gore's electric bill tipped $20,000 smackeroos per month...now THAT'S a carbon footprint. But on to less boring things than Al & Tipper....one more thing....how ahead of her time was The Tip on the Parential Advisory Warnings? 'eh?Link Wray doesn't give a flying diddy wah diddy so he keeps his mouth shut and plays his guitar like Tipper's nemesis Frank Zappa...a short moment of silence for FZ......ok.....now Link deserves a R.I.P. shoutout but my ears are still ringing from when I saw him at Asbury Lanes a couple of years ago....holy shit .....I didn't have to clean the wax out for a friggin year!! focus....focus....Link blows away the competion with "The Wild One" off of ACE Records 2007 release THE PATHWAY SESSIONS...a must have for all you headbanging metal morons....let Link show ya how it's done.Switiching gears The West Coast Pop Art & Experimental Band read "A Childs Guide To Good & Evil" .....somehow it m

Nothing But The Blues #62

Nothing But The Blues

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2009 60:14

B.B. King (Better Not Look Down); Paul deLay Band (Who Will Be Next?); Sugar Blue (Shed No Tears); Willie Reed (Dreaming Blues); Oscar Woods (Lone Wolf Blues); Chris Smither (Don't Call Me Stranger); Tom Doughty (Hound Dog Blues); Bukka White (Bukka's Jitterbug Swing); Samuel James (Miss Noreen); Otis Taylor (Little Liza Jane); Blind Blake and Leola B. Wilson (Black Biting Bee Blues); Big Mama Thornton (Bumble Bee); Harmonica Red (A Room With A View); Tommy Johnson (Cool Drink Of Water Blues); Peetie Wheatstraw (Drinking Man Blues); Cry Baby and The Hoochie Coochie Boys (Gimme One More Shot).

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Episode 66 - Boo Bradley

MAD TOAST LIVE!

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2009 50:39

Boo Bradley is a hot blues stompin’, jelly roll jumpin’, rag jazz infusin’, two-man acoustic jug attack from Madtown, Wisconsin. These boys throw down a porch stomp boogie chock full of old time Delta moans from the likes of Son House and Charley Patton, the Piedmont shake of Blind Boy Fuller and the earliest Chicago Ragtime mastery of cats like Blind Blake and Big Bill Broonzy. Scott "Boo" Kiker on the resonator guitar and vocals, and Brad Selz on washboard. www.myspace.com/boobradleymusic

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Diddie Wa Diddie

TrueFire's Guitabulary

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2008 7:56

More than 60 years after its recording, Blind Blake’s rambunctious Diddie Wa Diddie, a double-entendre ragtime blues, still stands as a fingerpicking classic. Blake's musical vocabulary is prodigious, and his improvisational flair has seldom been matched. Each of the tune's stanzas features a distinctively different accompaniment, and each of the three instrumental breaks is a minor masterpiece in itself. Tab, notation and Power Tab files available at http://truefire.com/list.html?store=audio_lessons&item=1701 (log-in to access streaming audio and files).

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Episode 4: Hitchhike Poker

The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2008

Show Notes for Episode 4:“Poker Woman Blues” (1929) by Blind BlakeI love to gamble, gamblin's all I doI love to gamble, gamblin's all I doAnd when I lose, it never makes me blueI gambled away my money, I gambled away my shackI gambled away my money, I gambled away my shackSame way I lost it, same way I get it backI won a woman in a poker gameI won a woman in a poker gameI lost her too, win another just the sameSometime I'm rich, sometime I ain't got a cent Sometime I'm rich, sometime I ain't got a centBut I've had a good time, every way I wentI got a new mama, ain't gonna gamble her awayI got a new mama, ain't gonna gamble her awayGoin' to keep her with me each and every day“Tales from the Tables” by Bob Woolley(a.k.a. Rakewell, the Poker Grump)The “Poker Grump” returns with the continuation of his list of stupid things players say at the tables, including the ever-popular “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner.”For the first part of the list, check out Episode 2.An excerpt from The Gambler by Fyodor DostoevskyIn which Granny comes to Roulettenburg and wants to go to the casino.A couple of years back, I wrote a series of four posts about The Gambler titled “Dostoevsky Is Not Considered Summer Reading” in which I discussed how the novel might be of particular interest to poker players. Those posts begin here. “Hitchhike Poker,” Suspense (originally aired September 16, 1948)Starring Gregory Peck (Ray Fowler) and Ed Begley (Belden). Produced and directed by Anton M. Leader. Written by John and Gwen Bagney. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Suspense. Hundreds of episodes of Suspense remain available. Here is a page containing a sampling of some of the best. And here is a story about Utah's recent license plate poker contest. Download.

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Breakdowns

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2008 29:02

Songs with breakdown in the title. Songs include: Piano Breakdown, Birmington Breakdown, Redell Breakdown and Country Breakdown. Performers include: Charley Lincoln, The Skillet Lickers, Louis Armstrong, Blind Blake and J.B. Fuselier.

Shuffles

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2007 27:25

Songs with shuffle in the title. Songs include: Band Box Shuffle, Dry Bone Shuffle, Lennox Avenue Shuffle and Riverboat Shuffle. Artists include : Blind Blake, Bennie Moten, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson and Bix Biederbeck.

Piedmont Blues

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2007 29:35

Guitarists from the Piedmont school of the blues. Artists include: Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James. Songs include: Devil Got My Woman, Dry Bone Shuffle, Louis Collins and I Belong to the Band.

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One Year Anniversary Show