Podcasts about Clifton Chenier

The Acadiana Center for the Arts' Sam Oliver, Executive director, and Taylor Davis, Board President, join Discover Lafayette to discuss the AcA's 50th anniversary approaching, the superb programming they offer our community, and discuss upcoming events. The Acadiana Arts Council, the organization that later evolved into the Acadiana Center for the Arts (AcA), was established in 1975. It began as a regional arts organization focused on promoting and supporting the arts throughout Acadiana. Over the years, the Council expanded its vision and programming, eventually leading to the creation of the AcA as its permanent home on November 1, 2010. The AcA, at its core, is the Arts Council for the region, that offers Lafayette and the Acadiana region something you would expect in a larger metropolitan area: incredible performances from all over the world, high production quality shows, and the promotion of local and regional artists. It is a space for visual arts, performing arts, music, dance, and theatre. It is also a gathering place for social events, debates and forums for political occasions, and civic presentations that benefit the entire community. Sam has served as Executive Director for six years. You can hear our original interview with Sam here where we discussed his educational background and what led him to serve the AcA. Taylor has served on the board the past ten years and was first exposed to the AcA at its first show ever which brought Lyle Lovett to Lafayette. Taylor says his service is "a labor of love," and he and his wife, Yvette regularly go out to see and enjoy live music. The James Devin Moncus Theater offers a superb sound system that was upgraded this year, with a seating capacity of 304 seats, "and there is really not a bad seat in the house!"  It's a great time to join or renew your AcA membership as you receive early bird access to tickets for 2025's in-demand performances before they open for sale to the general public. Yearly memberships begin at $35 a year with higher levels for those who want to support the organization at a higher level. The AcA's 2025's Louisiana Crossroads series will showcase performers such as Steve Khan, Louis Michot, and C.J. Chenier celebrating the 100th birthday of Clifton Chenier. Scott Mulvahill, a Nashville based singer, songwriter and bass player, will be leading a full album length playthrough of Paul Simon's Graceland album, which featured Acadiana artists with Zydeco and accordion music. George Porter Jr. will round out the year. January 2025 will be kicked off with a two-night concert “The Roots of Fire Live,” bringing local Cajun and Creole together live on stage to perform, Other big name acts will include Lucinda Williams, Andrew Duhon, Ruthie Foster, and Kat Higgins, Several perks are being offered to enhance your AcA experience. Parking is always a challenge downtown, so the AcA is introducing free parking with a ticket at the parking lot across from Chase Tower on Jefferson Street. If you're planning dinner and drinks after a show, the AcA has partnered with downtown restaurants such as Vestal and Pop's Poboys who are doing pre-show discounts on meals. The Aca has also partnered with restaurants such as Pamplona and Ton's Downtown who will stay open later on show nights to offer post-show cocktails, In order to ensure a lineup of performances which pleases its patrons, the AcA put out a survey asking for the types of acts desired by the community.  Putting together a 50th anniversary season “had to be not just good, but something that our audience and our supporters really resonate with. We actually put out a survey where we said to members of ACA, tell us what you want to see”, Sam Oliver said. In honor of the upcoming 50th anniversary of AcA, on December 7, 2024, the Pelican Ball will honor five people who have made an impact over the course of its existence. One of the founders of the Acadiana Center for the Arts,

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:1 point: get the year correct within 10 years (e.g., you guess 1975 and it is between 1965-1985)4 points: get the year correct within 5 years (e.g., you guess 2004 and it is between 1999-2009)7 points: get the year correct within 2 years (e.g., you guess 1993 and it is between 1991-1995)10 points: get the year dead on!Guesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes (please leave your name).I will read your scores out before the next episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Evolve by Phish (2024)Song 1: My Soul by Clifton Chenier (1959)Song 2: Heaven by Los Lonely Boys (2004)Song 3: Frankenstein by Edgar Winter Group (1972)Song 4: Brokenhearted by Karmin (2012)Song 5: Old Home Place by The Dillards (1963)Song 6: Love Me Dead by Ludo (2007)Song 7: Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley by Lee Dorsey (1970)Song 8: Boombastic by Shaggy (1995)Song 9: When the Circus Comes by Los Lobos (1992)Song 10: Paper Doll by The Mills Brothers (1948)

Yesterday was the birthday of the late, great zydeco hero Clifton Chenier, so it lent itself to the occasion of an hour of accordion music, such as we air every Wednesday night on CFRO Co-Op Radio! Chenier only provides zydeco bookends to a set that wanders all over the place, musically, but it definitely informed […]

Today's show features music performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Clifton Chenier

Down Home Cajun Music- Les Blues Douglas Bellard & Kirby Riley- "La Valse De La Prison"Amede Ardoin & Dennis McGee- "Two Step De Maman"Amede Ardoin & Dennis McGee- "Madame Atchen"Jimmy Peters- "J'ai fait tout le tour de pays"Freeman Fontenot- "Le Two Step A Jules"Freemon Fontenot- "Contredanse"Boozoo Chavis- "Bye Bye Catin"Clifton Chenier- "Rockin Accordion"Canray Fontenot & Bois Sec Ardoin- "Les Blues du Voyageur"Canray Fontenot & Bois Sec Ardoin- "Tit Monde"The Carriere Brothers- "La La d' Un Pas"The Lawtell Playboys- "Colinda"George Alberts- "You Havin A Good Time"Bebe & Eraste Carriere- "Blue Runner"Milton- "Mama Do Right"Canray Fontenot- "Canray One Step"

Louisiana! A little French History of Acadia, Bayou Fiddle Music, Zydeco Accordion, Meet Lafyette's Finest Honky Tonk with Deano and Jo, Go To New Orleans For King Cake, Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Doug Kershaw, Irma Thomas, Doctor John, Neville Brothers, Clifton Chenier, Paul Prudhomme's Food Philosophy, Chris Makes Red Beans and Rice, and Fun on the Big River with Jim and Chris. “Laissez les bons temps rouler” https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086513555749https://www.patreon.com/user?u=81625843

Immerse yourself in the soul-stirring world of blues with the latest edition of "Blues is the Truth," hosted by the passionate Ian McHugh. Recently nominated on the long list for the 2024 UK Blues Awards, this edition promises an electrifying journey through the blues landscape. Joining Ian McHugh is the dynamic Paul Michael, who introduces the Blues Driver segment, adding a unique flavor to the show. The lineup is a stellar ensemble of blues legends and rising talents, featuring unforgettable tunes from The Cinnelli Brothers, The Paul Michael Band, Diego Morgue Band, Ian Siegal, Dave Kelly, Paul Lamb and the Kingsnakes, Walter Trout, The Texas Horns, Freddie King, The City Boys All Stars, Clifton Chenier, Brad Guitar Wilson, Seth James, Paul Cook Blues Band feat. Katie Bradley, Robert Hokum, Bumble Bee Slim, Jimmie Vaughan, John Lee Hooker, Joe Bonamassa, Peter Frampton, Dion, Tomislav Goluban, Robert Johnson, Deep Six Blues, Dexter Shaw and the Wolftones, John Angus, Steady Rolling Revue, and the timeless sounds of Honeyboy Edwards and James Cotton. Tune in to "Blues is the Truth" for an unforgettable experience of raw, authentic blues that transcends generations and captivates the spirit.

In this special episode, we look at ten more songs that were recorded in studios across Texas. From Blue October to Johnny Ace, Lydia Mendoza, Sublime, Explosions in the Sky, Willie Nelson, Kirk Franklin, Roy Head, Clifton Chenier, and more we examine some of the most interesting songs to come out of the Lone Star State. 

Houston is home to the most successful musical talent in the world. But decades ago, the city was once the epicenter for the blues genre. Why has the city's blues history been neglected for so long? Stay tuned as host Eddie Robinson chats unguarded with acclaimed filmmaker, Drew Barnett-Hamilton. Her new documentary, When Houston Had The Blues, is currently touring the festival circuit with an astonishing goal of putting the city of Houston on the map as a major music city. The film explores the blues scene and culture from back in the day – from Texas bluesman and guitarist Sam “Lightnin'” Hopkins; superstar singer Bobby “Blue” Bland; to renowned blues saxophonist Grady Gaines and influential songstress ‘Big Mama' Thornton – even rock pioneer Little Richard signed a recording contract with a label based out of Houston. Barnett-Hamilton takes I SEE U on a vintage musical journey that showcases the artists, the performance venues, and the Bayou City's unique role in defining this remarkable genre.

Millions of people listen to music on the radio. Over a half million people listen to radio each week to hear Nick Spitzer talk about music. Spitzer's pioneering broadcast American Routes is way more than a D.J. spinning songs but a weekly two-hour public radio program that presents the breadth and depth of the American music scene and cultural landscape. Syndicated by 225 radio stations American Routes is the most widely heard regular presence for tradition-derived and community-based music on public radio today. Spitzer joins Louisiana Life Executive Editor Errol Laborde, along with podcast producer Kelly Massicot, to tell stories about the origins and characters of the nation's many music forms. He also has interview clips including Jerry Lee Lewis; Willie Nelson and the late zydeco artist Clifton Chenier. The podcast presents a fun side trip into American routes.

Chris was a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder called him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimenez… the list is long and mighty. Chris Strachwitz was a keeper. His vault is jam-packed with 78s, 33s, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes, videos, photographs — an archive of all manner of recordings. And an avalanche of lifetime achievement awards — from the Grammy's, The Blues Hall of Fame, The National Endowment for the Arts – for some 60 years of recording and preserving the musical cultural heritage of this nation through his label, Arhoolie Records. In honor of Chris Strachwitz The Kitchen Sisters reprise The Passion of Chris Strachwitz, produced for The Goethe Institute's Big Pond series. With interviews with Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. Also featuring selected interviews done by Chris Strachwitz with Howlin' Wolf and The Maddox Brothers and Rose. Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, mixed by Jim McKee. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia network from PRX.

Gordon Lightfoot "Mother of a Miner's Child"Big Mama Thornton "Ball and Chain"Lucinda Williams "Malted Milk Blues"Sonic Youth "Shadow of a Doubt"Eilen Jewell "Outsiders"Sonny Boy Williamson I "Sloppy Drunk Blues"The Replacements "Unsatisfied"Lucero "Sixteen"Harry Belafonte "Midnight Special"Ray Price "Heartaches By the Number"Kid Sheik's Storyville Ramblers "Sheik Of Araby"Aretha Franklin "Good to Me As I Am to You"Langhorne Slim & The Law "The Way We Move"Sam Doores + Riley Downing & the Tumbleweeds "Reuben's Train"Memphis Minnie "New Dirty Dozen"Jimmie Lunceford "Blues In the Night"The Allen Brothers "Chattanooga Mama"Ted Taylor "(Love Is Like a) Ramblin' Rose"Clifton Chenier "Black Snake Blues"Lightnin' Hopkins "Wine Drinking Woman"Steve Earle "Meet Me In The Alleyway"Duke Ellington "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo"Mance Lipscomb "Going Down Slow"Kiki Cavazos "Cold Love"Jake Xerxes Fussell "Pork and Beans"Shannon Wright "St. Pete"Billie Holiday "Billie's Blues"Johnny Cash "If You Could Read My Mind"John Moreland "Nobody Gives a Damn About Songs Anymore"Mississippi Fred McDowell "You Got To Move"Last Wolf In The Woods "Stay Close"The White Stripes "Rag and Bone"Enon "Daughter in the House of Fools"Lula Reed "Watch Dog"Tom Waits "Barber Shop"Sonny Boy Williamson "Eyesight to the Blind"The Lonesome Doves "When We Were Wild"Drag the River "Fleeting Porch of Tide"Loretta Lynn "Van Lear Rose"Louis Jordan "That Chick's Too Young To Fry"Napoleon Strickland "Shimmy She Wobble"Songs: Ohia "Steve Albini's Blues"Minutemen "Corona"Hank Williams "Why Don't You Love Me"Amos Milburn "Just One More Drink"John Coltrane "Everytime We Say Goodbye"

Dave Bartholomew "That's How You Got Killed Before"Aimee Mann "Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath"Slobberbone "Barrel Chested"Centro-Matic "Salty Disciple"Widespread Panic "Christmas Katie"R.E.M. "Losing My Religion"Betty Harris "There's A Break In The Road"Nicole Atkins "Brokedown Luck"Billy Joe Shaver "Georgia On a Fast Train"Professor Longhair "Mardi Gras In New Orleans"The Band "Rag Mama Rag"Gillian Welch "Hard Times"Hank Williams "Jambalaya (On The Bayou)"Tommy Ridgley "Looped"Chisel "Citizen Of Venus"Lightnin' Hopkins "Breakfast Time"The Dixie Cups "Iko Iko"The Deslondes "Muddy Water"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "New Memory Box"Wilco "Falling Apart (Right Now)"Amanda Shires "Box Cutters"Willy Tea Taylor "Lost in a Song"Vic Chesnutt "Society Sue"Dolly Parton "Jolene"Iron &  Wine "Southern Anthem"Big Thief "Simulation Swarm"Drive-By Truckers "Mercy Buckets"Jelly Roll Morton "Mamie's Blues"Bob Dylan "Blind Willie McTell"MC5 "The American Ruse"Blind Willie McTell, Curley Weaver "Wee Midnight Hours"Cory Branan & Jon Snodgrass "The Corner"Memphis Minnie "Night Watchman Blues (Take 2)"Sugar Pie DeSanto "I Want To Know"Irvin Mayfield "New Second Line"Blue Lu Barker "Don't You Feel My Leg"Oscar "Papa" Celestin "Marie Laveau"Clifton Chenier "Black Snake Blues"Lucinda Williams "Crescent City"79rs Gang "Indian Red"Danny Barker & His Creole Cats "My Indian Red"Cousin Joe "A.B.C.'s Part 1"Cousin Joe "A.B.C.'s Part 2"James Booker "Junco Partner"Louis Armstrong "Back O' Town Blues"Dr. John "Big Chief"

Solveig Lára Guðmundsdóttir, fyrrverandi Hólabiskup, sagði frá trúarföstum og hvernig þær hafa breyst í áranna rás. Eins frá karnivölum sem haldin eru víða um heim á sprengidag, daginn áður en fastan hefst. Vera Illugadóttir rakti sögu tveggja broddsúla, annars vegar í New York og Londin hins vegar. Á þessum degi árið 1881 fylgdust þúsundir íbúa New York með þegar gríðarstór, ævaforn egypsk broddsúla var reist á hól í almenningsgarðinum Central Park. Þórdís Kolbrún R. Gylfadóttir utanríkisráðherra fór yfir mál tengd innrás Rússa inn í Úkraínu en á því tæpa ári sem liðið er frá innrásinni hefur stærsti hluti starfs Þórdísar snúist um verkefni tengdum stríðinu í Úkraínu enda snertir það alla heimsbyggðina. Þórdís fór meðal annars til Kænugarðs í nóvember og hitti forseta Úkraínu að máli. Tónlist: Venice - Bill Evans og Cannonball Adderley, I was doing alright - Oscar Peterson, Mardi gras boogie - Clifton Chenier and his Red Hot Louisiana Band in New Orleans, Mardi gras mambo - The Hawketts. Umsjón: Björn Þór Sigbjörnsson og Guðrún Hálfdánardóttir.

Solveig Lára Guðmundsdóttir, fyrrverandi Hólabiskup, sagði frá trúarföstum og hvernig þær hafa breyst í áranna rás. Eins frá karnivölum sem haldin eru víða um heim á sprengidag, daginn áður en fastan hefst. Vera Illugadóttir rakti sögu tveggja broddsúla, annars vegar í New York og Londin hins vegar. Á þessum degi árið 1881 fylgdust þúsundir íbúa New York með þegar gríðarstór, ævaforn egypsk broddsúla var reist á hól í almenningsgarðinum Central Park. Þórdís Kolbrún R. Gylfadóttir utanríkisráðherra fór yfir mál tengd innrás Rússa inn í Úkraínu en á því tæpa ári sem liðið er frá innrásinni hefur stærsti hluti starfs Þórdísar snúist um verkefni tengdum stríðinu í Úkraínu enda snertir það alla heimsbyggðina. Þórdís fór meðal annars til Kænugarðs í nóvember og hitti forseta Úkraínu að máli. Tónlist: Venice - Bill Evans og Cannonball Adderley, I was doing alright - Oscar Peterson, Mardi gras boogie - Clifton Chenier and his Red Hot Louisiana Band in New Orleans, Mardi gras mambo - The Hawketts. Umsjón: Björn Þór Sigbjörnsson og Guðrún Hálfdánardóttir.

Esta semana nos inspiramos en dos nuevos y muy interesantes libros sobre el blues y las músicas negras: "Blues – La Novela Gráfica," de Manuel López Poy y Pau Marfà y editado por Ma Non Troppo, y "Al compás del vudú (religión, represión y música)," de Héctor Martínez González, editado por Allanamiento de Mirada, y que incluye dos CDs con 48 temas comentados en el libro. Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It – Junior Wells; Why Don't You Do Right – Carolina Chocolate Drops; Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground – Blind Willie Johnson; Congo Square – Tom Principato; St. James Infirmary – Allen Toussaint; Heebie Jeebies – Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five; Junker Blues – Champion Jack Dupree; Cajun – Roy Buchanan; Calinda – Clifton Chenier; I Just Want To Make Love To You – Muddy Waters, Spoonful – Howlin' Wolf; Big Boss Man – Koko Taylor; Juke – Little Walter; Messin' With the Kid – Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band; Low Down Ways – Jontavious Willis.   Escuchar audio

Singles Going Around- Old Matches, Milkcows and Rowboats.Myles & Dupont- "Loud Mouth Annie"Elvis Presley- "Milkcow Boogie"The Muffs- "You And Your Parrot"The Beach Boys- "Back Home"Rod Bernard & Clifton Chenier- "Rockin' Pneumonia & Boogie Woogie Flu"Ramones- "Today Your Love, Tommorow The World"Leadbelly- "Matchbox Blues"Nirvina- "Molly's Lips"Jimi Hendrix- "Jam 292"Shelton Dunaway - "Mary Lou Doin The Pop Eye"Rolling Stones- "2000 Light Years From Home"Dale Hawkins- "Suzie Q"Fats Domino- "Before I Grow Too Old"Beastie Boys- "Shadrock"Jack White- "A Tip From You To Me"Johnny Cash- "Rowboat"Blind Willie Johnson- "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"Staple Singers- "Let Me Ride"Sister Roseta Tharpe- "Up Above My Head"White Stripes- "Ball and Biscuit"*All selections taken vinyl.

Show 209 - Clifton Chenier. Broadcast on Otago Access Radio www.oar.org.nz

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Tinsley Ellis And The Heartfixers  | Walkin' Thru The Park  | Landslide Records 40th Anniversary  CD 1 | Tommy Emanuel  | The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roa  | Tommy Emmanuel  |  | Charlie Musselwhite  | Silent Night  | Alligator Christmas  | Alligator Christmas | Little G Weevil  | Going Back South  | Live Acoustic Session | Tom Rodwell  | Keep on Knockin'  | Wood & Waste  |  | Erja Lyytinen  | Silent Night  | Additions December 2021 | Scott Joplin  | Pine Apple Rag  | Piano Rags  |  | Robert Hokum  | For Absent Friends  | Songs of Isolation  |  | Marvin Sease  | Funky Christmas  | Christmas Stuff  |  | Sterling Koch  | Merry Christmas Baby  | A Steel Guitar Christmas (2013) | Little Richard  | Shake A Hand  | Little Richard Goes Gospel | Mahalia Jackson  | Mary's Little Boy Child  | Complete Mahalia Jackson: Vol 7 1956 | Keb' Mo'  | Santa Claus Blues  | Moonlight Mistletoe and You | Charlie Musselwhite  | Silent Night  | Alligator Christmas  | Alligator Christmas | SuBourbon Blues Project  | When Was The Last Time  | Where Concrete Meets The Grass | Billy Price  | Christmas Comes But Once A Year  | A Gulf Coast Christmas | Dion  | If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll feat. Eric Clapton  | Stomping Ground  |  | Alan Freed  | Easy Rock  | The Great Pretender | Muddy Waters  | The Blues Had a Baby   | Hard Again (1977)  | Sony (1977) | Art Gunn  | Boogie Woogie Blues  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 4 1948 | Memphis Slim  | Midnight Jump  | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 4 1948 | Clifton Chenier  | It's Christmas Time -  | Arhoolie Records Christmas Time Blues | Kat Riggins  | It Ain't Christmas  | A Gulf Coast Christmas | Bad Bob Bates  | Come Home For Christmas  | Come Home For Christmas | Austin Blues Revue  | Silent Night  | An Austin Blue Christmas | Michele D'Amour & The Love Dealers & Christmas In Blue  | Naughty List  | 2020 Blind Raccoon Holiday Sampler MP3 | Robert Nighthawk  | Merry Christmas  | Blues Southside Chicago | Keb' Mo'  | Santa Claus Blues  | Moonlight Mistletoe and You | Lawrence Lebo  | I'm Your Christmas Present Baby (Vol 2) [THE BEST OF DON'T CALL  | The Best Of Don't Call Her Larry: Blues Mix

Down Home Cajun Music- Clifton Chenier: Bayou RecordsThe rare Bayou 45 label was the idea of Arhoolie founder Chris Strachwitz. He wanted 45's of Clifton's recordings on Arhoolie to be put out on jukeboxes throughout Louisiana and Texas. He contacted Floyd at Swallow Records to press the 45's and to distribute them. Here is episode one of those recordings with a bonus live recording from Clifton from the time.Lafayette Waltz (Bayou 703)Bon Ton Roulet (Bayou 703)Jolie Blonde (Bayou 706)Sweet Little Doll (Bayou 706)Black Snake (Bayou 708)Wrap It Up (Bayou 708)I'm A Hog For You (Bayou 717)Josephine Par Se Ma Feme (Bayou 717)* Bonus trackTu M'as Promis L'Armour (Live from Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969) (TMR 239)

Today's show features music performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Clifton Chenier

Down Home Cajun Music- Early Clifton ChenierIn honor of June 25th being Clifton's birthday and Louisiana honoring him with Clifton Chenier day, this episode is a mix of Clifton's early recordings. Clifton began his recording career in the 1954, recording for Post ,Elko, Specialty Records and Chess Records. This episode focuses on his early years with those labels and ends with his recordings on the Crowley label Zynn Records in the early 1960's.Rockin' The Bop (Post 2010) Country Bred (Post 2010) Tell Me (Post 2016) Rockin' Hop (Post 2016) Clifton Blues (Elko 920)Boppin the Rock (Specialty 552)Ay-Tete Fee (Specialty 552)The Things I Did For You (Specialty 556)Squeeze Box Boogie (Specialty 568)The Big Wheel (Argo 5262)Bayou Drive (Checker 939)My Soul (Checker 939)It Happened So Fast (Zynn 503)Goodbye Baby (Zynn 503)Rockin Accordion (Zynn 1011)Night and Day My Love (Zynn 1011)Everybody Calls Me Crazy (Flyite 539)If I Ever Get Lucky (Flyrite 539)Hey Ma Ma (Flyrite 539)Things Have Changed Now (Flyrite 539)*All selections from the original 78 and 45 rpm records.*Thanks to Jared M for use of  his  Post 2010 & 2016, Argo 5262.

The newly arrived American ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, hits the ground sprinting as she assumes the presidency of the Security Council in March. On today's episode, we speak with retired Ambassador Ruth A. Davis, one of the ambassador's longtime mentors; Peter Yeo, President of the Better World Campaign and Senior Vice President at the United Nations Foundation; and Mark Ballard, reporter for the Louisiana newspaper The Advocate, who has written an extensive profile of the ambassador. MUSIC CREDIT: 'Zodico Stomp' by Clifton Chenier, the Grammy-award winning 'King of Zydeco' (1955). Zydeco is a music genre that blends blues, R&B, French accordion music, and music indigenous to the Louisiana Creoles and the Native American people of Louisiana. Links: PassBlue's website: www.passblue.com Twitter: @pass_blue Facebook: @PassBlueUN Instagram: @passblue ----- Are you searching for a meaningful way to further your career in international development? As you set new goals for 2021 and beyond, consider Seton Hall University’s executive graduate program in international affairs. Attending a webinar is the perfect way to learn how you can customize your studies by specializing your research in areas such as global health security, conflict management, and more. As a graduate candidate, you would receive access to 1-on-1 faculty mentorship, career workshops, international seminars, and discussions with global leaders on campus, at the U.N. headquarters in New York, and in Washington, D.C. And the program is flexible: you can study full-time or part-time, and online or on campus in New Jersey, just 14 miles from New York City. To learn more or sign up for a webinar, visit shu.edu/passblue. ----- Are you looking for a talk show featuring leading global voices? Do you want to learn more about how international issues directly affect people locally? Global Connections Television presents the insights of global influencers at-no-cost to viewers and programmers. GCTV is independently produced, and reaches more than 70 million potential viewers worldwide each week. The show covers everything from human rights to climate change, from peace and security to empowering women and girls. It features guests such Dr. Jane Goodall, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, and Peter Yarrow of “Peter, Paul and Mary.” The show also hosts expert voices from the private sector, academia, and labor and environmental movements. GCTV is available to public television media outlets, universities, and service clubs for distribution. To watch the show, visit www.globalconnectionstelevision.com. For more information, contact Bill Miller, the show’s host, at millerkyun@aol.com.

In this episode, Michael Tisserand shares from his book The Kingdom of Zydeco, the uniqueness of Zydeco music.  His detailed narrative of the music and the musical culture will no doubt make you want to add a few Zydeco artist to your playlist. Contextualized playlisthttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH_EIRKmIkHx1a0D_wA7TOw/playlists

Recopilación antológica del gran acordeonista criollo realizada por Klaus Faber, a partir de los siguientes álbumes: "Black Snake Blues" (Arhoolie Records, 1967); "Bon Ton Roulet!" (& More) (Arhoolie Records, 1967) (Ampliación del álbum original de 1967, con bonus tracks de las primeras grabaciones de Chenier de 1964, que no habían sido anteriormente editadas). También las recopilaciones "Sings The Blues" (1992) y "Zodico Blues and Boogie" (1992) Escuchar audio

It's already the end of January 2021 and we are getting ready to move into February, Black History Month.  Learn a little something about the Creole culture and the uniqueness of Zydeco music with Mrs. Lena Charles.  Be sure to visit Zydeco.org.Contextualized playlisthttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH_EIRKmIkHx1a0D_wA7TOw/playlists

The Grammy-nominated Zydeco accordion player and singer comes from a distinguished family of Creole musicians who played with everyone from Clifton Chenier and Rockin’ Dopsie to Louis Armstrong and Bunk Johnson. Corey celebrates the release of his 14th album on Lost Bayou Rambler Louis Michot’s Nouveau Electric Records. He pays tribute to his Black Creole roots with several songs sung in the Kouri-Vini dialect his family has spoken for generations. His ancestors would be proud of his commitment to preserving the language and folkways of their unique culture. One can only imagine how they’d feel about the Troubled Men Podcast. Topics include the Person of the Year, Festivus, a diaper boy plea, an Anne Frank monument, a horse lover, a D.A. initiative, a positive test result, Parks, La., the first Zydeco drummer, Lafayette Big Bands, a family history, live streaming, Dockside Studio, a party school, a one-man band, a new seasoning, local parades, Creole Mardi Gras, parenting techniques, vinyl LPs, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or almost any podcast aggregator. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break and Outro music: “Buchanan Ledet Special” and “This Is All I Want” from “Corey Ledet Zydeco”

The Grammy-nominated Zydeco accordion player and singer comes from a distinguished family of Creole musicians who played with everyone from Clifton Chenier and Rockin' Dopsie to Louis Armstrong and Bunk Johnson. Corey celebrates the release of his 14th album on Lost Bayou Rambler Louis Michot's Nouveau Electric Records. He pays tribute to his Black Creole roots with several songs sung in the Kouri-Vini dialect his family has spoken for generations. His ancestors would be proud of his commitment to preserving the language and folkways of their unique culture. One can only imagine how they'd feel about the Troubled Men Podcast. Topics include the Person of the Year, Festivus, a diaper boy plea, an Anne Frank monument, a horse lover, a D.A. initiative, a positive test result, Parks, La., the first Zydeco drummer, Lafayette Big Bands, a family history, live streaming, Dockside Studio, a party school, a one-man band, a new seasoning, local parades, Creole Mardi Gras, parenting techniques, vinyl LPs, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or almost any podcast aggregator. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break and Outro music: “Buchanan Ledet Special” and “This Is All I Want” from “Corey Ledet Zydeco”

"Pop, Popcorn Children" - Eldridge Holmes; "Let The Groove Move You" - Gus The Groove Lewis; "The Monkey" - Dave Bartholomew; "Live it Up" - James K-Nine; "Frisco Here I Come" - Lou Johnson; "No Competition" - Norma Jean; "Junco Partner (Worthless Man)" - James Waynes; "I'm a Carpenter" (Part 1) - David Robinson; "Making It Better" - The Barons LTD; "You Make a New Man Out Of Me" - Johnny Adams; "Party Down" - Clifton Chenier and his Red Hot Louisiana Band; "Can You Handle It" - Eddie Bo; "Yer Comes The Funky Man" - Bob French's Storyville Jazz Band; "Play Me a Cornbread Song" - Joe Haywood; "I'm Gonna Git Ya - Betty Harris; "Stay" - Chuck Colbert & Viewpoint. Escuchar audio

Includes Al Rapone, Taj Mahal, Rockin Dopsie, Elmore James, The Subdudes, Joe Bonamassa, Clifton Chenier, Doyle Bramhall II, Al Rapone, Han Theessnick and Terry Evans, Geno Delofose, Freddie King, Saffire and The Uppity Blues Women, Beau Jouque and The Zydeco Hi-Rollers.

He's written books on New Orleans icon Ernie K-Doe and the Zydeco culture of south Louisiana. He spearheaded the career revival of the Hackberry Ramblers, producing and playing drums with the Cajun band for eighteen years culminating in their Grammy nomination after 70 years together. Ben is attracted to offbeat characters and cultural ephemera, so of course he winds up in the Ring Room with the Troubled Men. Topics include the Super Bowl, Tom Flores' Hall of Fame snub, corrupt institutions, a Bible reading, a cyberattack, a book plug, a Christmas commercial, Rico Watts, “White Boy, Black Boy,” Clifton Chenier, “Jole Blon,” string bands, MTV Live, a neighborhood threat, disaster tourism, the Grand Ole Opry, a last road trip, a Beach Boys protest, liner notes, Chicago blues time, Sunnyland Slim, Jazz Fest interviews, losing peers, a false memory, publishing deals, false documents, a missing finger, and much more. Support the podcast by contributing to the Cocktail Fund in the show links. Subscribe, review, and rate (*****) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or most podcast aggregators. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Outro music: “Bill's Boogie Woogie” by Boogie Bill Webb and “Poor Hobo” by the Hackberry Ramblers from the album “Deep Water”

He’s written books on New Orleans icon Ernie K-Doe and the Zydeco culture of south Louisiana. He spearheaded the career revival of the Hackberry Ramblers, producing and playing drums with the Cajun band for eighteen years culminating in their Grammy nomination after 70 years together. Ben is attracted to offbeat characters and cultural ephemera, so of course he winds up in the Ring Room with the Troubled Men. Topics include the Super Bowl, Tom Flores’ Hall of Fame snub, corrupt institutions, a Bible reading, a cyberattack, a book plug, a Christmas commercial, Rico Watts, “White Boy, Black Boy,” Clifton Chenier, “Jole Blon,” string bands, MTV Live, a neighborhood threat, disaster tourism, the Grand Ole Opry, a last road trip, a Beach Boys protest, liner notes, Chicago blues time, Sunnyland Slim, Jazz Fest interviews, losing peers, a false memory, publishing deals, false documents, a missing finger, and much more. Support the podcast by contributing to the Cocktail Fund in the show links. Subscribe, review, and rate (*****) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or most podcast aggregators. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Outro music: “Bill’s Boogie Woogie” by Boogie Bill Webb and “Poor Hobo” by the Hackberry Ramblers from the album “Deep Water”

One of the things we're proudest of in Acadiana is our culture. And our family. We even talk about the family relationships between our cultures as being first cousins: Cajun and Zydeco. There are similarities and notable differences between Cajun music and dance, and Zydeco music and dance. Leaving aside for the moment the intertwined Acadian and African influences, one major musical difference, obvious even to people from outside, is an instrument you hear in Zydeco only. And that's the frottoir, or rubboard. The rubboard didn't start out as a musical instrument. It started out as, well, a rubboard. You used it to wash clothes. And then if you put thimbles on your fingers you could make a scratching sound by strumming it. It was Clifton Chenier and his brother Cleveland who came up with the idea of making a metal or stainless steel rubboard. The guy they turned to to make it was their friend and fellow worker at the Texaco Refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. He was a master welder, metal fabricator, and fellow Louisiana native by the name of Willie Landry. Willie's son, Tee Don Landry, has spent a lifetime making rubboards under the name Key of Z. He's made around 3,000 of them. They're in the hands of regular folks and famous musicians – like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top and Rihanna. There's even a Tee Don Landry rubboard in the Smithsonian.     The intertwined Acadian and African cultures that have given us Cajun and Zydeco music and dance have led to the relationship between the styles of music and the people who play them and dance to them being referred to as “first cousins.” “First Cousins” is the name of a film about this very subject. The film was written, produced and directed by two sisters, Moriah and Elista Istre. Both Istre sisters have a Ph.D and are professional cultural historians. Moriah is a folklorist and festival programmer as well as being the Director of the movie, First Cousins. One of the funny things about families is, everybody else's family seems a lot more normal than your own. Till you get to know them! But the more you get to know your Cajun and Zydeco first cousins the more you get to love them.  You can see photos by Gwen Aucoin and more from this show, recorded live over lunch at  Cafe Vermilionville at our website https://link.chtbl.com/Vj_kXlwb  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chris Strachwitz is a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder calls him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimenez… the list is long and mighty. Chris Strachwitz is a keeper. His vault is jam-packed with 78s, 33s, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes, videos, photographs — an archive of all manner of recordings. And an avalanche of lifetime achievement awards — from the Grammy’s, The Blues Hall of Fame, The National Endowment for the Arts – for some 60 years of recording and preserving the musical cultural heritage of this nation through his label, Arhoolie Records. Featuring interviews with Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. “The Passion of Chris Strachwitz” was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, mixed by Jim McKee. For The Goethe Institute’s Big Pond series.

Bob and Mike play tracks from Louisiana legend Clifton Chenier, indie rockers Game Theory, Th' Faith Healers, Phantom Tollbooth, and The dBs, plus powerhouse soul from The Exciters, and two tracks from NYC hobo legend Moondog. Diversions include the legacy of Arhoolie Records and the influence of REM as tastemakers who exposed a whole generation to unheard music.

[audio mp3="https://jazzjoyandroy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/The-Once-A-Quarter-Toast-To-Politics-And-You-With-Destinys-Child-Carole-Ginger-Gray-Pink-Floyd-Clifton-Chenier-And-More.mp3"][/audio] ...

“The Amazing Secret History of Elmore James” is STILL the #1 New Release at the Amazon Kindle Store for Blues Books. On sale now at https://tinyurl.com/yy6vlsv3 (Amazon) and at https://tinyurl.com/y4ql53s2 (Apple Books) The Imperial Record label, founded in 1948 in Los Angeles, is well known as the home of Fats Domino and other great New Orleans artists, as well as Texas guitar hero T-Bone Walker. On this episode of Blues Unlimited, however, we focus on some of the fantastic Country and Down Home Blues that Imperial held in their catalog over the years, from Lightnin' Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, Papa Lightfoot, Lil' Son Jackson, BooZoo Chavis, Snooks Eaglin, and many more. Partly inspired by a series of three LPs that came out more than 50 years ago, simply entitled "Rural Blues," we'll hear lots of rarities and classic sides from Imperial, as well as associated labels (such as Aladdin, which Imperial bought in 1961) and a few other operations that were on Imperial's radar as well. The three LPs -- the material for which was notably selected by Bob "The Bear" Hite and Henry Vestine of Canned Heat fame -- were originally subtitled "Goin' Up The Country" (Volume 1); "Saturday Night Function" (Volume 2); and "Down Home Stomp," and have long been considered to be classics of the genre. Pictured: The distinctive cover art for "Rural Blues, Vol. 1." 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

“The Amazing Secret History of Elmore James” is STILL the #1 New Release at the Amazon Kindle Store for Blues Books. On sale now at https://tinyurl.com/yy6vlsv3 (Amazon) and at https://tinyurl.com/y4ql53s2 (Apple Books) The Imperial Record label, founded in 1948 in Los Angeles, is well known as the home of Fats Domino and other great New Orleans artists, as well as Texas guitar hero T-Bone Walker. On this episode of Blues Unlimited, however, we focus on some of the fantastic Country and Down Home Blues that Imperial held in their catalog over the years, from Lightnin' Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, Papa Lightfoot, and many more. Pictured: The distinctive cover art for "Rural Blues, Vol. 1." 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

Vandaag in The Originals veel soul van o.a. William Bell,Don Bryant en Ann Peebles, een aantal Percy Mayfield classics en Zydeco klanken van Boozoo Chavis en Clifton Chenier.

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- First, a brief apology -- this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode.   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott's is generally considered the best. Williams' recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value. And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I'm talking about. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche -- which we've already established as being very wrong -- is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. While that's very far from being the actual truth, we've also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we've only looked at one country and western star -- Bob Wills, back in episode three.  Now, this is probably the correct balance -- early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records -- but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. If you haven't heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It's music that combined country music instruments -- guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily -- with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something. But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith: [excerpt: "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith] You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we've already seen in the Western Swing genre -- that's still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: [excerpt: "Shotgun Boogie" by Tennessee Ernie Ford] So today, we're going to talk about a song that was -- as far as we can tell -- a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s country musician, a man who could perform in many country and western subgenres; and Moon Mullican, who was a far less versatile musician, one who pretty much only played hillbilly boogie, but who managed to be a massive influence on early rock and roll as a result. You've probably heard of Hank Williams, but you've probably *not* heard of Moon Mullican, yet Mullican was massively important to the development of both country and rock music. He was a hillbilly boogie piano player who could play faster than almost anyone around, and who could keep a pounding left hand going while playing lightning-fast trills with his right. If you listen to his piano playing, you can see in particular exactly where the other great Louisiana piano player Jerry Lee Lewis takes his style from. Mullican was, like many of the hillbilly boogie players, equally influenced both by country and blues music. You can hear the influence of people like Bob Wills very clearly in his music, but you can also hear people like Bessie Smith or, especially, Big Joe Turner, in his style. Most of his early influences were blues singers, although he didn't sound very blues: [excerpt: Moon Mullican "What's the Matter with the Mill?"] That's a cover of an old Memphis Minnie blues song, but it's absolutely country and western in Mullican's performance. We're again looking at one of those musicians who would take influences from everywhere, but transmute them into his own style. And this is something we need to talk about more when we talk about influence. There are, roughly, three things you can do when you hear something you like from outside your genre. One is to completely ignore it and continue ploughing your own field. Another is to switch over completely and copy it totally, either for one song (like the white people who would record knock-offs of black hits) or for the rest of your career -- we'll later be looking at the way that young white English men were so impressed by the blues that they set out to sound as much as possible like older black American men. But the third thing you can do -- the one that tends to lead to the most interesting music, and to the best art in any medium and genre, is to take what appeals to you about the other work, see what about it you can get to work with your own style, and incorporate it. Cover your inspiration's song, but do it in your own style and arrangement. Borrow that rhythm, but put your own melody line and lyrics over it. That's the way most truly interesting creative artists work, and it's what Mullican did. You hear any of his records, and you can hear a whole host of different influences in there, but he's not directly copying any of them. People like that are the most important vectors for different musical ideas and the creation of new genres, and the most important influence that Mullican brought into country music, and which through him became a major influence on rock and roll, was Cajun music. Cajun music is music made by the Cajun people in Louisiana. There's a whole lot of stuff around Cajun people that involves social class and racial stuff that, frankly, I'm not the best person to talk about -- I'm likely to say something that is very offensive while trying to be well-meaning, because I simply don't know enough to talk sensibly. But the main thing you need to know here is that Cajun people are -- or certainly were at this point -- looked down upon by other residents of Louisiana, and by other Americans, and they have their own culture -- they have their own cooking, largely involving things that many other cultures would discard as inedible, very heavily spiced; and they have their own language, Cajun French, rather than speaking English as so many other people in the US do. It's Cajun and Creole culture which makes New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, such a unique place, and which makes its music so different from the rest of the US. That's not the only factor, of course, but it's a big one. We've talked a little bit already about New Orleans music, and Cajun music definitely plays a part in that style. But Cajun music has its own unique traditions, which we can only briefly touch upon here. If you're interested in hearing more about Cajun music as it applies to *country* music, as opposed to its influence on rock and roll, I'd recommend the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones on Doug & Rusty Kershaw. I'll link that in the show notes, and it's definitely worth checking out. But this is, of course, a podcast about rock and roll music, and so I'm going to talk about the influence that Cajun music had on rock and roll, and that mostly came through the style of zydeco, which is a genre that mostly grew up among Creole people – black people in Louisiana who speak the same Cajun French as the white Cajuns. The name "zydeco" itself, tells you quite a bit about Cajun and Creole culture generally. There are a few plausible explanations for the word's origins, but the one I prefer is that it's a mispronunciation of the phrase "les haricots" -- French for "the beans" -- as used in the Cajun French phrase "Les haricots ne sont pas salés" -- "the beans aren't salty", a phrase which idiomatically meant "things are difficult" or "I'm tired". “Zydeco ne sont pas salés" was the title of a song recorded by the great zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, among others: [excerpt "Zydeco ne sont pas sales": Clifton Chenier] Zydeco is very closely related to another genre -- fais dos dos music. This is music that's mostly played by white Cajun people, and it features the accordion and fiddle as the main instruments. Fais dos dos music has a strong Western Swing influence too, as you can hear for example in "Bosco Stomp" by Lawrence Walker: [excerpt "Bosco Stomp", Lawrence Walker] And Moon Mullican brought that fais dos dos music right into the mainstream of country music. You can hear it best on his hit "New Jole Blon" which went to number two on the country charts in 1951: [excerpt "New Jole Blon" by Moon Mullican] That's a really strange mixture of fais dos dos music and Western Swing. You've got that high "ahh" sound that Bob Wills would make, and traditional country instrumentation, without the prominent accordion, but you've also got a thoroughly Louisiana melody, and you've got lyrics in an odd mixture of Cajun French and English, with lots of mentions of typical Cajun foods. It's a really *odd* track, frankly, not least because of the way he'll sometimes just depart totally from any conventional idea of melody and start singing random notes, trying to get as much lyric as he can into a space. There were other Cajun musicians who played country music, of course, and vice versa, but if you listen to Mullican's records you get a real sense of someone who is equally at home with both kinds of music. Now let's talk some more about Hank Williams. I try to assume, when I make these podcasts, that the people listening to them have absolutely no idea about any of the music I'm talking about -- for everyone who knows far more details about the career of Benny Goodman or Bob Wills than I could ever fit into a half-hour podcast episode, there's someone who has literally never heard of those people, and I try to make these shows equally listenable to both. I'm going to try that with Hank Williams as well, but that means I'll possibly be sounding patronising to some of you. Hank Williams is, by far, the most famous person I've dealt with so far in this series, and so you might think that I could just skip over the basics. But rest assured, there is someone listening to this who has never heard of Hank Williams and will appreciate the background. So, Hank Williams was, as you may have guessed from that preamble, the most important single figure in country music, possibly ever and certainly after the death of Jimmie Rodgers. He had thirty-five hits in the country top ten, of which eleven went to number one in the country chart, and he wrote dozens upon dozens of country and gospel classics -- "I Saw the Light", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Lovesick Blues", "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Cold Cold Heart", "Hey Good Lookin'" and far more than I could name here. He was, in short, the most important songwriter alive during his very short career. And it *was* a very short career. His career as a recording artist started in 1946 -- though he'd been a live performer for quite a few years already by then -- and ended in 1952. In that six-year period, he basically redefined country and western music. Unlike Moon Mullican, who basically did his one thing very, very well, but didn't do anything else, Hank Williams varied his style enormously. Where Mullican would pull different genres into his own style and incorporate them, Williams would somehow make the definitive records in a whole slew of different subgenres, while still always sounding like himself. He started out, as so many musicians in the 1940s did, basically as a Jimmie Rodgers tribute act. Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman -- not to be confused with the similarly-named blues musician -- was one of those people who, if this series was going just a little further back in time, we would definitely be covering. His yodelling country blues was the most popular country music of his time, and massively influential on everyone. One of the things I've talked about a lot in this series is the way that black and white musicians would collaborate and bounce ideas between each other far more than most modern people believe. While I would never for one second want to downplay the massive amounts of racism in the early twentieth century (or even the levels at the moment, which are lesser but not as much less as many of us would like) there was not as much segregation by genre as modern listeners will assume. Jimmie Rodgers, as an obvious example, is considered the founder of country music, but listen to this: [excerpt: "Blue Yodel Number 9"] That's Jimmie Rodgers on vocals, singing in his normal style, backed by Louis Armstrong and Lilian Hardin Armstrong. That's the father of country music playing with two of the greatest black musicians of their time, singing a song which is far closer to the blues of W.C. Handy than to what most people now think of as country music. And this was the most influential country singer of the thirties. Every country and western performer in the late thirties and forties was working in the margins of what Jimmie Rodgers did, but by the time Hank Williams finally got a record contract, he was very much his own man. His first big hit, "Move it on Over" in 1947, is a fun example of hillbilly boogie. Indeed, if you listen to it, you might see the resemblance to a very famous rock and roll song we'll be looking at in a few weeks: [Excerpt: "Move it on Over" by Hank Williams] But that wasn't the only style that Williams could do -- he made gospel records, heartbreaking ballads, and uptempo dance music, and he was good at all of it. He wrote a catalogue of songs that still gets covered -- a lot -- to this day, and he was popular enough that his name has given his son and grandson successful careers in the country music world, though neither of them has one millionth his talent. And like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams' appeal crossed racial boundaries. Johnny Otis used to tell a story about his tour bus stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of the US, and getting out and seeing Williams there. Otis was a fan of Williams, and struck up a conversation, introducing him to Little Esther -- and it turned out that Hank was a Johnny Otis fan. They all chatted and got back on the bus, and it drove off. Little Esther's mother asked Esther who she'd been speaking to, and she said "Just some cowboy", but when Otis said it was Hank Williams, Esther's mother screamed "you turn this bus round right now!" -- she was a fan and she desperately wanted to meet him. Fats Domino, too, was a fan of Hank Williams, and so were many other rhythm and blues musicians. Williams was listening to rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues musicians were listening to him. Don't let the cowboy hat fool you. EVERYONE was listening to Hank Williams, except for the pop audience -- and even they were listening to WIlliams' songs when, for example, Tony Bennett recorded them: [excerpt: Tony Bennett "Cold Cold Heart"] At the time we're talking about his career was on the way down. He was twenty-eight years old, but he was often in agony with back pain, and he was drinking too much and taking too many pills to numb the pain. He was getting divorced from his first wife, who was also his manager, and he was missing so many shows due to alcoholism that he was about to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country radio show which was responsible more than anything else for making him a star. His life was, frankly, in a mess. But he was still the most popular singer in country and western music, and he was still making great records -- and one of the records he made, in June 1952, was a song he probably co-wrote with Moon Mullican, called "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" I say "probably", because no-one knows for sure, but it seems likely that Mullican co-wrote it, but wasn't given songwriting credit because he was contracted to a different publisher than Williams. Mullican recorded his own version of the song the same month, and Mullican's version had slightly different lyrics. Let's take a listen to Mullican's version -- the less successful of the two -- first. [excerpt "Jambalaya" by Moon Mullican] Now let's hear an extract from Hank Williams' version: [excerpt: "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams] As you can see, the two versions have a lot of basic similarities, but they both bear the unmistakeable stamp of their creators' sound on them. Mullican's has a far more hilbilly boogie or Cajun sound to it, while Williams has far more of a straight-ahead honkytonk country sound. But both tracks still have the same basic attraction to them -- this is a celebration of Cajun culture, and in particular a celebration of the way Cajun people celebrated -- their food, their music, and their dancing. "Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filet gumbo", "pick guitar, fill fruit jar, we're gonna be gay-o". And this is at a time when Cajun people were, as far as the wider audience was concerned, about the lowest of the low if they were thought of at all. There's a defiance to the song that may not be audible to modern listeners, but is definitely there. The guitar player on Williams' record, incidentally, is the great Chet Atkins. Like Hank, he was far more influential in country music than in rock and roll -- though he always denied that he was a country guitarist, saying rather that he was "a guitarist, period" -- but he was one of the great guitarists of all time, and also produced a handful of early rock and roll classics. But again, for now, just note that the session guitar player there is probably the most influential country guitarist ever. But what we can see from both versions of "Jambalaya" is that there was an appetite in country music for a kind of music that was rather broader than the styles that the major labels were interested in. If you just looked at the history of Nashville pop-country, you'd think that country music was as bland and whitebread as the crooners who were dominating popular music at the time, but country music was a stranger, and more eclectic, music than the media impression of it would have you think. It was a music that had as much to do with the blues as rhythm and blues did, and which had an audience that was far happier with experiment and new ideas than you might think. In the 1950s, this tendency in country music would lead to a number of subgenres of its own, many of which would be major influences on rock and roll. There was bluegrass, which started in the late forties and which we'll be talking about a lot later, and there was rockabilly, as well as country music sounds which never had much influence on rock and roll but which had much of the same energy, like the Bakersfield sound. But "Jambalaya" is a record which had the same kind of crossover appeal as "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" had in the opposite direction. Like the stew from which it takes its name, it takes elements from a variety of different areas and throws them together, creating something that had a much greater appeal than you might imagine. “Jambalaya" would go on to be a staple of early rock and roll music -- it was especially loved by musicians from Louisiana, like Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom made great piano-driven records of the song. Williams is remembered now as a country musician, but that's largely because he died before the rock and roll craze -- had he lived, it's entirely possible we'd now be thinking of him as a rockabilly star. [excerpts: "Jambalaya" by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis -- short excerpts back to back] Sadly, Hank Williams would not live to see the immense influence he was having on a generation of young musicians who would go on to revolutionise not only country music, but also rock and roll. Barely six months after recording "Jambalaya" he was dead. His back pain had led him to drink even more heavily, he'd developed even more of a dependency on pills, he'd developed a reputation for unreliability and missing shows -- he was a mess. And on New Year's Eve, 1952, while he was being driven from Tennessee to Ohio, for a show he had to play on New Year's Day, he fell asleep in the back of the car and never woke up. When his death was announced at the show he'd been driving to, the audience laughed at first – they thought it was just another excuse for him not turning up. His last single, released a month earlier, was titled "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive". He was twenty-nine years old.  

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- First, a brief apology — this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott’s is generally considered the best. Williams’ recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value. And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I’m talking about. The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche — which we’ve already established as being very wrong — is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music. While that’s very far from being the actual truth, we’ve also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we’ve only looked at one country and western star — Bob Wills, back in episode three.  Now, this is probably the correct balance — early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records — but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well. If you haven’t heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It’s music that combined country music instruments — guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily — with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something. But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around. The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith: [excerpt: “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith] You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we’ve already seen in the Western Swing genre — that’s still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter: [excerpt: “Shotgun Boogie” by Tennessee Ernie Ford] So today, we’re going to talk about a song that was — as far as we can tell — a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s country musician, a man who could perform in many country and western subgenres; and Moon Mullican, who was a far less versatile musician, one who pretty much only played hillbilly boogie, but who managed to be a massive influence on early rock and roll as a result. You’ve probably heard of Hank Williams, but you’ve probably *not* heard of Moon Mullican, yet Mullican was massively important to the development of both country and rock music. He was a hillbilly boogie piano player who could play faster than almost anyone around, and who could keep a pounding left hand going while playing lightning-fast trills with his right. If you listen to his piano playing, you can see in particular exactly where the other great Louisiana piano player Jerry Lee Lewis takes his style from. Mullican was, like many of the hillbilly boogie players, equally influenced both by country and blues music. You can hear the influence of people like Bob Wills very clearly in his music, but you can also hear people like Bessie Smith or, especially, Big Joe Turner, in his style. Most of his early influences were blues singers, although he didn’t sound very blues: [excerpt: Moon Mullican “What’s the Matter with the Mill?”] That’s a cover of an old Memphis Minnie blues song, but it’s absolutely country and western in Mullican’s performance. We’re again looking at one of those musicians who would take influences from everywhere, but transmute them into his own style. And this is something we need to talk about more when we talk about influence. There are, roughly, three things you can do when you hear something you like from outside your genre. One is to completely ignore it and continue ploughing your own field. Another is to switch over completely and copy it totally, either for one song (like the white people who would record knock-offs of black hits) or for the rest of your career — we’ll later be looking at the way that young white English men were so impressed by the blues that they set out to sound as much as possible like older black American men. But the third thing you can do — the one that tends to lead to the most interesting music, and to the best art in any medium and genre, is to take what appeals to you about the other work, see what about it you can get to work with your own style, and incorporate it. Cover your inspiration’s song, but do it in your own style and arrangement. Borrow that rhythm, but put your own melody line and lyrics over it. That’s the way most truly interesting creative artists work, and it’s what Mullican did. You hear any of his records, and you can hear a whole host of different influences in there, but he’s not directly copying any of them. People like that are the most important vectors for different musical ideas and the creation of new genres, and the most important influence that Mullican brought into country music, and which through him became a major influence on rock and roll, was Cajun music. Cajun music is music made by the Cajun people in Louisiana. There’s a whole lot of stuff around Cajun people that involves social class and racial stuff that, frankly, I’m not the best person to talk about — I’m likely to say something that is very offensive while trying to be well-meaning, because I simply don’t know enough to talk sensibly. But the main thing you need to know here is that Cajun people are — or certainly were at this point — looked down upon by other residents of Louisiana, and by other Americans, and they have their own culture — they have their own cooking, largely involving things that many other cultures would discard as inedible, very heavily spiced; and they have their own language, Cajun French, rather than speaking English as so many other people in the US do. It’s Cajun and Creole culture which makes New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, such a unique place, and which makes its music so different from the rest of the US. That’s not the only factor, of course, but it’s a big one. We’ve talked a little bit already about New Orleans music, and Cajun music definitely plays a part in that style. But Cajun music has its own unique traditions, which we can only briefly touch upon here. If you’re interested in hearing more about Cajun music as it applies to *country* music, as opposed to its influence on rock and roll, I’d recommend the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones on Doug & Rusty Kershaw. I’ll link that in the show notes, and it’s definitely worth checking out. But this is, of course, a podcast about rock and roll music, and so I’m going to talk about the influence that Cajun music had on rock and roll, and that mostly came through the style of zydeco, which is a genre that mostly grew up among Creole people – black people in Louisiana who speak the same Cajun French as the white Cajuns. The name “zydeco” itself, tells you quite a bit about Cajun and Creole culture generally. There are a few plausible explanations for the word’s origins, but the one I prefer is that it’s a mispronunciation of the phrase “les haricots” — French for “the beans” — as used in the Cajun French phrase “Les haricots ne sont pas salés” — “the beans aren’t salty”, a phrase which idiomatically meant “things are difficult” or “I’m tired”. “Zydeco ne sont pas salés” was the title of a song recorded by the great zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, among others: [excerpt “Zydeco ne sont pas sales”: Clifton Chenier] Zydeco is very closely related to another genre — fais dos dos music. This is music that’s mostly played by white Cajun people, and it features the accordion and fiddle as the main instruments. Fais dos dos music has a strong Western Swing influence too, as you can hear for example in “Bosco Stomp” by Lawrence Walker: [excerpt “Bosco Stomp”, Lawrence Walker] And Moon Mullican brought that fais dos dos music right into the mainstream of country music. You can hear it best on his hit “New Jole Blon” which went to number two on the country charts in 1951: [excerpt “New Jole Blon” by Moon Mullican] That’s a really strange mixture of fais dos dos music and Western Swing. You’ve got that high “ahh” sound that Bob Wills would make, and traditional country instrumentation, without the prominent accordion, but you’ve also got a thoroughly Louisiana melody, and you’ve got lyrics in an odd mixture of Cajun French and English, with lots of mentions of typical Cajun foods. It’s a really *odd* track, frankly, not least because of the way he’ll sometimes just depart totally from any conventional idea of melody and start singing random notes, trying to get as much lyric as he can into a space. There were other Cajun musicians who played country music, of course, and vice versa, but if you listen to Mullican’s records you get a real sense of someone who is equally at home with both kinds of music. Now let’s talk some more about Hank Williams. I try to assume, when I make these podcasts, that the people listening to them have absolutely no idea about any of the music I’m talking about — for everyone who knows far more details about the career of Benny Goodman or Bob Wills than I could ever fit into a half-hour podcast episode, there’s someone who has literally never heard of those people, and I try to make these shows equally listenable to both. I’m going to try that with Hank Williams as well, but that means I’ll possibly be sounding patronising to some of you. Hank Williams is, by far, the most famous person I’ve dealt with so far in this series, and so you might think that I could just skip over the basics. But rest assured, there is someone listening to this who has never heard of Hank Williams and will appreciate the background. So, Hank Williams was, as you may have guessed from that preamble, the most important single figure in country music, possibly ever and certainly after the death of Jimmie Rodgers. He had thirty-five hits in the country top ten, of which eleven went to number one in the country chart, and he wrote dozens upon dozens of country and gospel classics — “I Saw the Light”, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Lovesick Blues”, “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, “Cold Cold Heart”, “Hey Good Lookin'” and far more than I could name here. He was, in short, the most important songwriter alive during his very short career. And it *was* a very short career. His career as a recording artist started in 1946 — though he’d been a live performer for quite a few years already by then — and ended in 1952. In that six-year period, he basically redefined country and western music. Unlike Moon Mullican, who basically did his one thing very, very well, but didn’t do anything else, Hank Williams varied his style enormously. Where Mullican would pull different genres into his own style and incorporate them, Williams would somehow make the definitive records in a whole slew of different subgenres, while still always sounding like himself. He started out, as so many musicians in the 1940s did, basically as a Jimmie Rodgers tribute act. Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman — not to be confused with the similarly-named blues musician — was one of those people who, if this series was going just a little further back in time, we would definitely be covering. His yodelling country blues was the most popular country music of his time, and massively influential on everyone. One of the things I’ve talked about a lot in this series is the way that black and white musicians would collaborate and bounce ideas between each other far more than most modern people believe. While I would never for one second want to downplay the massive amounts of racism in the early twentieth century (or even the levels at the moment, which are lesser but not as much less as many of us would like) there was not as much segregation by genre as modern listeners will assume. Jimmie Rodgers, as an obvious example, is considered the founder of country music, but listen to this: [excerpt: “Blue Yodel Number 9”] That’s Jimmie Rodgers on vocals, singing in his normal style, backed by Louis Armstrong and Lilian Hardin Armstrong. That’s the father of country music playing with two of the greatest black musicians of their time, singing a song which is far closer to the blues of W.C. Handy than to what most people now think of as country music. And this was the most influential country singer of the thirties. Every country and western performer in the late thirties and forties was working in the margins of what Jimmie Rodgers did, but by the time Hank Williams finally got a record contract, he was very much his own man. His first big hit, “Move it on Over” in 1947, is a fun example of hillbilly boogie. Indeed, if you listen to it, you might see the resemblance to a very famous rock and roll song we’ll be looking at in a few weeks: [Excerpt: “Move it on Over” by Hank Williams] But that wasn’t the only style that Williams could do — he made gospel records, heartbreaking ballads, and uptempo dance music, and he was good at all of it. He wrote a catalogue of songs that still gets covered — a lot — to this day, and he was popular enough that his name has given his son and grandson successful careers in the country music world, though neither of them has one millionth his talent. And like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams’ appeal crossed racial boundaries. Johnny Otis used to tell a story about his tour bus stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of the US, and getting out and seeing Williams there. Otis was a fan of Williams, and struck up a conversation, introducing him to Little Esther — and it turned out that Hank was a Johnny Otis fan. They all chatted and got back on the bus, and it drove off. Little Esther’s mother asked Esther who she’d been speaking to, and she said “Just some cowboy”, but when Otis said it was Hank Williams, Esther’s mother screamed “you turn this bus round right now!” — she was a fan and she desperately wanted to meet him. Fats Domino, too, was a fan of Hank Williams, and so were many other rhythm and blues musicians. Williams was listening to rhythm and blues, and rhythm and blues musicians were listening to him. Don’t let the cowboy hat fool you. EVERYONE was listening to Hank Williams, except for the pop audience — and even they were listening to WIlliams’ songs when, for example, Tony Bennett recorded them: [excerpt: Tony Bennett “Cold Cold Heart”] At the time we’re talking about his career was on the way down. He was twenty-eight years old, but he was often in agony with back pain, and he was drinking too much and taking too many pills to numb the pain. He was getting divorced from his first wife, who was also his manager, and he was missing so many shows due to alcoholism that he was about to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country radio show which was responsible more than anything else for making him a star. His life was, frankly, in a mess. But he was still the most popular singer in country and western music, and he was still making great records — and one of the records he made, in June 1952, was a song he probably co-wrote with Moon Mullican, called “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” I say “probably”, because no-one knows for sure, but it seems likely that Mullican co-wrote it, but wasn’t given songwriting credit because he was contracted to a different publisher than Williams. Mullican recorded his own version of the song the same month, and Mullican’s version had slightly different lyrics. Let’s take a listen to Mullican’s version — the less successful of the two — first. [excerpt “Jambalaya” by Moon Mullican] Now let’s hear an extract from Hank Williams’ version: [excerpt: “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams] As you can see, the two versions have a lot of basic similarities, but they both bear the unmistakeable stamp of their creators’ sound on them. Mullican’s has a far more hilbilly boogie or Cajun sound to it, while Williams has far more of a straight-ahead honkytonk country sound. But both tracks still have the same basic attraction to them — this is a celebration of Cajun culture, and in particular a celebration of the way Cajun people celebrated — their food, their music, and their dancing. “Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filet gumbo”, “pick guitar, fill fruit jar, we’re gonna be gay-o”. And this is at a time when Cajun people were, as far as the wider audience was concerned, about the lowest of the low if they were thought of at all. There’s a defiance to the song that may not be audible to modern listeners, but is definitely there. The guitar player on Williams’ record, incidentally, is the great Chet Atkins. Like Hank, he was far more influential in country music than in rock and roll — though he always denied that he was a country guitarist, saying rather that he was “a guitarist, period” — but he was one of the great guitarists of all time, and also produced a handful of early rock and roll classics. But again, for now, just note that the session guitar player there is probably the most influential country guitarist ever. But what we can see from both versions of “Jambalaya” is that there was an appetite in country music for a kind of music that was rather broader than the styles that the major labels were interested in. If you just looked at the history of Nashville pop-country, you’d think that country music was as bland and whitebread as the crooners who were dominating popular music at the time, but country music was a stranger, and more eclectic, music than the media impression of it would have you think. It was a music that had as much to do with the blues as rhythm and blues did, and which had an audience that was far happier with experiment and new ideas than you might think. In the 1950s, this tendency in country music would lead to a number of subgenres of its own, many of which would be major influences on rock and roll. There was bluegrass, which started in the late forties and which we’ll be talking about a lot later, and there was rockabilly, as well as country music sounds which never had much influence on rock and roll but which had much of the same energy, like the Bakersfield sound. But “Jambalaya” is a record which had the same kind of crossover appeal as “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” had in the opposite direction. Like the stew from which it takes its name, it takes elements from a variety of different areas and throws them together, creating something that had a much greater appeal than you might imagine. “Jambalaya” would go on to be a staple of early rock and roll music — it was especially loved by musicians from Louisiana, like Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom made great piano-driven records of the song. Williams is remembered now as a country musician, but that’s largely because he died before the rock and roll craze — had he lived, it’s entirely possible we’d now be thinking of him as a rockabilly star. [excerpts: “Jambalaya” by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis — short excerpts back to back] Sadly, Hank Williams would not live to see the immense influence he was having on a generation of young musicians who would go on to revolutionise not only country music, but also rock and roll. Barely six months after recording “Jambalaya” he was dead. His back pain had led him to drink even more heavily, he’d developed even more of a dependency on pills, he’d developed a reputation for unreliability and missing shows — he was a mess. And on New Year’s Eve, 1952, while he was being driven from Tennessee to Ohio, for a show he had to play on New Year’s Day, he fell asleep in the back of the car and never woke up. When his death was announced at the show he’d been driving to, the audience laughed at first – they thought it was just another excuse for him not turning up. His last single, released a month earlier, was titled “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”. He was twenty-nine years old.  

Er zijn weer twee gezellige bellers en je hoort muziek van Clifton Chenier, Anouk, Jacques Brel, The Coasters en Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg.

    Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “The Fat Man”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I’ve had to edit it down rather ruthlessly — I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn’t affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who’s still alive — we’re now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine — and I hope he’ll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song — “Junko Partner” by Dr. John — that doesn’t appear in the finished podcast. But it’s a good song anyway. Fats Domino’s forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright — a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We’ll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there’s a reason for that — his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, “Danza”, I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk’s piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk’s “Danza” and “Night in the Tropics” on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who’s interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it’s dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word “Negro” thoughout — at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it’s very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a very good book, though I don’t totally buy Coleman’s argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) — it’s labelled “New Orleans Joys” there, but it’s clearly the same song as “New Orleans Blues”, which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the “Spanish tinge”. The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll.   The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll — people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock — the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues — Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls “vocal group rock and roll” but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I’d add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands — people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York.   So far, we’ve talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven’t yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let’s take a trip down the Mississippi.   We can trace New Orleans’ importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.   Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic — Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer — he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this:   [Excerpt of “Danza”]   That’s a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s.   And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form.   We don’t know — we can’t know — how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both — we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk’s work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans.   And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans’ status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music — all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap.   Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic — he wrote pieces called things like “the Dying Poet”, he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for “death”. He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose.   So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time.   But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used.   In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We’ll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey “Piano” Smith… it’s in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own.   And if there’s one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it’s “Junker’s Blues”. You’ve probably not heard that name before, but you’ve almost certainly heard the melody:   [section of “Junker’s Blues” as played by Champion Jack Dupree]   That’s Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That’s the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style.   “Junker’s Blues” itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which we’re going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair…   [section of “Tipitina”]   “Tee Nah Nah”   [“Tee Nah Nah” — Smiley Lewis]   And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie.   But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be “the first rock and roll record”.   Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do.   He grew up in a kind of poverty that’s hard to imagine now — his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them.   By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He’d played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show — Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him.   But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities — and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws’ house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn’t exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records.   Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino.   Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II — he’d already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging.   After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with “Country Boy”   [excerpt of “Country Boy” by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra]   Now, something you may notice about that song is that “dan, dah-dah” horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as “habanera” rhythms. That word means “from Havana”, and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music — Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece — coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century.   The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a “bam bam” [demonstrates]. That beat is one we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future.   These rhythms were the basis of the original tango — which didn’t have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that “dan, dah-dah” rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him — French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans — that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish tinge”. Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll’s “New Orleans Blues”:   [excerpt “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton]   Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It’s the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations.   But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that “dah dah dah” up against something else — on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it — and he seems to have been the first one to do this — that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour.   I’m going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I’m going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other.   You have the backbeat, which we’ve talked about before — “one TWO three FOUR” — emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that.   And you have the tresillo, which is “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and” — emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and”.   You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this:   [excerpt — recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other]   That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I’ve said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something).   The musicians on “Country Boy” were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time.   Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word “funky” to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There’s a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band “can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?”   Palmer would then pretend to “wind up” his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That’s the kind of story that’s hard to believe, but it’s been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true.   Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa’s studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music.   Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa’s case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We’ve actually already heard one record made by him, last week — Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn’t have that New Orleans sound to it — it’s of the type we’re referring to as coastal jump band music. It’s music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city.   Matassa’s studio was tiny — it was in the back room of his family’s appliance store, which also had a bookmaker’s upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production — he’d been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today’s standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn’t record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master.   To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master — the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master — it’s a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out — at which point, you create a new mother from the original master.   They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone’s job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor — by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax.   A wax master couldn’t be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn’t be used as a master, so you had two choices — you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you’d be able to play one of them — destroying it in the process — to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same.   To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians.   Truth be told, the J&M studio didn’t have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact.   But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino’s first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made.   Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was “Junker’s Blues”. Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren’t quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine.   But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. “The Fat Man” was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of “The Fat Man”, too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of “they call me a junker, because I’m loaded all the time”, Domino sang “they call me the fat man, ‘cos I weigh two hundred pounds”.   Now, “The Fat Man” actually doesn’t have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it’s *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that “Spanish tinge” that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It’s music that absolutely couldn’t come from anywhere else.   [Excerpt from “The Fat Man”]   Domino’s scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers — there’s a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I’ve not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there’d be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing — Domino’s later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record — but in this case it’s Domino’s own voice doing the job.   And while this recording doesn’t have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it’s definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You’d have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you’d lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you’d lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you’d lay Domino’s piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they’re not doing is playing the same thing — there’s an astonishing complexity there.   Bartholomew’s lyrics, to the extent they’re about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway — the same kind of thing as Howlin’ Wolf’s later “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” or “Built for Comfort” — but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino’s obvious *cheeriness*.   Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry — to the extent that it’s difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he’d lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005.   By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person — I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive — remember, this was the era of the blues shouter — Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he’s bragging sexually, he doesn’t actually sound like he means it.   “The Fat Man” went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino — and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we’ve seen who’s going to get more episodes about him. We’ve now reached the point where we’re seeing the very first rock star — and this is the point beyond which it’s indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who’d sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it’s Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as “The Fat Man”, it’s safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as “the first rock and roll record” to go, we’re now definitely in the rock and roll era.

    Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Fats Domino and "The Fat Man". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I've had to edit it down rather ruthlessly -- I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn't affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who's still alive -- we're now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine -- and I hope he'll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song -- "Junko Partner" by Dr. John -- that doesn't appear in the finished podcast. But it's a good song anyway. Fats Domino's forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright -- a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We'll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there's a reason for that -- his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, "Danza", I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk's piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk's "Danza" and "Night in the Tropics" on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who's interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it's dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word "Negro" thoughout -- at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it's very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. It's a very good book, though I don't totally buy Coleman's argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of "New Orleans Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) -- it's labelled "New Orleans Joys" there, but it's clearly the same song as "New Orleans Blues", which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the "Spanish tinge". The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll.   The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll -- people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock -- the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues -- Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls "vocal group rock and roll" but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I'd add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands -- people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York.   So far, we've talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven't yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let's take a trip down the Mississippi.   We can trace New Orleans' importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.   Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic -- Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer -- he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this:   [Excerpt of "Danza"]   That's a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s.   And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form.   We don't know -- we can't know -- how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both -- we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk's work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans.   And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans' status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music -- all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap.   Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic -- he wrote pieces called things like "the Dying Poet", he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for "death". He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose.   So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time.   But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used.   In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We'll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey "Piano" Smith... it's in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own.   And if there's one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it's "Junker's Blues". You've probably not heard that name before, but you've almost certainly heard the melody:   [section of "Junker's Blues" as played by Champion Jack Dupree]   That's Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That's the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style.   "Junker's Blues" itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", which we're going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also "Tipitina" by Professor Longhair...   [section of "Tipitina"]   "Tee Nah Nah"   ["Tee Nah Nah" -- Smiley Lewis]   And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie.   But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be "the first rock and roll record".   Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do.   He grew up in a kind of poverty that's hard to imagine now -- his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them.   By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He'd played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show -- Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him.   But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities -- and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws' house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn't exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records.   Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino.   Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II -- he'd already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging.   After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with "Country Boy"   [excerpt of "Country Boy" by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra]   Now, something you may notice about that song is that "dan, dah-dah" horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as "habanera" rhythms. That word means "from Havana", and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music -- Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece -- coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century.   The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a "bam bam" [demonstrates]. That beat is one we'll be seeing a lot of in the future.   These rhythms were the basis of the original tango -- which didn't have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that "dan, dah-dah" rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him -- French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans -- that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the "Spanish tinge". Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll's "New Orleans Blues":   [excerpt "New Orleans Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton]   Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It's the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations.   But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that "dah dah dah" up against something else -- on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it -- and he seems to have been the first one to do this -- that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour.   I'm going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I'm going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other.   You have the backbeat, which we've talked about before -- "one TWO three FOUR" -- emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that.   And you have the tresillo, which is "ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and" -- emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, "ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and".   You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this:   [excerpt -- recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other]   That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I've said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something).   The musicians on "Country Boy" were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time.   Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word "funky" to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There's a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band "can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?"   Palmer would then pretend to "wind up" his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That's the kind of story that's hard to believe, but it's been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true.   Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa's studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music.   Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa's case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We've actually already heard one record made by him, last week -- Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight", which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. "Good Rockin' Tonight" was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn't have that New Orleans sound to it -- it's of the type we're referring to as coastal jump band music. It's music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city.   Matassa's studio was tiny -- it was in the back room of his family's appliance store, which also had a bookmaker's upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production -- he'd been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today's standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn't record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master.   To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master -- the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master -- it's a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out -- at which point, you create a new mother from the original master.   They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone's job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor -- by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax.   A wax master couldn't be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn't be used as a master, so you had two choices -- you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you'd be able to play one of them -- destroying it in the process -- to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same.   To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians.   Truth be told, the J&M studio didn't have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact.   But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino's first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made.   Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was "Junker's Blues". Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren't quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine.   But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. "The Fat Man" was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of "The Fat Man", too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of "they call me a junker, because I'm loaded all the time", Domino sang "they call me the fat man, 'cos I weigh two hundred pounds".   Now, "The Fat Man" actually doesn't have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it's *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that "Spanish tinge" that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It's music that absolutely couldn't come from anywhere else.   [Excerpt from "The Fat Man"]   Domino's scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers -- there's a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I've not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there'd be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing -- Domino's later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record -- but in this case it's Domino's own voice doing the job.   And while this recording doesn't have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it's definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You'd have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you'd lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you'd lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you'd lay Domino's piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they're not doing is playing the same thing -- there's an astonishing complexity there.   Bartholomew's lyrics, to the extent they're about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway -- the same kind of thing as Howlin' Wolf's later "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy" or "Built for Comfort" -- but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino's obvious *cheeriness*.   Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry -- to the extent that it's difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he'd lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005.   By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person -- I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don't recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive -- remember, this was the era of the blues shouter -- Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he's bragging sexually, he doesn't actually sound like he means it.   "The Fat Man" went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino -- and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we've seen who's going to get more episodes about him. We've now reached the point where we're seeing the very first rock star -- and this is the point beyond which it's indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who'd sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it's Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as "The Fat Man", it's safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as "the first rock and roll record" to go, we're now definitely in the rock and roll era.

Going back to Zydeco roots!

There is no place like home... We have for your listening pleasure Episode 278 of "Troubadours and Raconteurs with E.W. Conundrum Demure." Episode 278 features a poignant, truly courageous conversation with Congolese patriot Bienvenue. Bienvenue is a young man who recently emigrated to the United States from the Democratic Republic of Congo. We discuss Growing Up in the Congo, Tribalism, Bad Government, Love of Country, Rebels, Notions of Home, Lost Children, International Exploitation, Emigrating to the United States... Episode 278 also includes an EW Essay titled "To Be A Buddha." We share installment one of Dr. Michael Pavese's Summertime Fantasia Series, titled "Mike Pence Goes West." We have a poem called "Maryland Journalists." Our music this go round is provided by these wonderful artists: Django Reinhardt, Stephan Grapelli, the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Franklin Boukaka, Bing Crosby & the Andrew Sisters, Clifton Chenier, Branford Marsalis and Terrence Blanchard. Commercial Free, Small Batch Radio Crafted In the Moosic Mountains of Pennsylvania... Heard All Over The World. Tell your Friends and Neighbors...

My guest today is Mr. Sonny Landreth. Sonny is a singer, songwriter and guitarist who is probably the most innovative slide guitar player ever. Just ask Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Robben Ford and his many legions of guitar fans. I first got hip to Sonny when I got a copy of his record called Outward Bound, which is still one of my favorite records of his. He's had a very long and successful career as a solo artist with many solo records to his name including the recent- “Recorded Live in Lafayette” which we talk about in this podcast.  I've known Sonny for a while but in this interview I learn many things about his early years and it was a lot of fun to ask him all this stuff. We talk about his meeting Hendrix, early influences, how he got his Dumble amp, Clifton Chenier, getting the gig with John Hiatt, so much more….oh and he shares a lot of slide secrets in this one. Also there is a lot of playing and equipment chat for you gear nerds.  I drove out to Lafayette, La about 2 hours west of New Orleans on a weekday and got stuck in traffic so I was a little late getting to the studio. I finally walk in to engineer Tony Daigle's studio where Sonny records most of his records (and where I recorded the overdubs for my tune Mr. Ed with Sonny from my record Dirty Power. I plug into one of Tony's Fender deluxes and Sonny is plugged into an old Fender Bassman and we let it rip.   How does someone from Breaux Bridge, LA by way of Mississipi become the most original slide guitar player on the planet? Stay tuned and find out.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-riff-raff-with-shane-theriot/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

One of the things we re proudest of in Acadiana is our culture. A big part of it is music and dance. Cajun and Zydeco. There are similarities and notable differences between Cajun music and dance, and Zydeco music and dance. Leaving aside for the moment the intertwined Acadian and African influences, one major musical difference, obvious even to people from outside, is an instrument you hear in Zydeco only. And that s the frottoir, or rubboard. The rubboard didn t start out as a musical instrument. It started out as, well, a rubboard. You used it to wash clothes. And then if you put thimbles on your fingers you could make a scratching sound by strumming it. It was Clifton Chenier and his brother Cleveland who came up with the idea of making a metal or stainless steel rubboard. The guy they turned to to make it was their friend and fellow worker at the Texaco Refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. He was a master welder, metal fabricator, and fellow Louisiana native by the name of Willie Landry. Willie s son, Tee Don Landry, has spent a lifetime making rubboards under the name Key of Z. He s made around 3,000 of them. They re in the hands of regular folks and famous musicians like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top and Rihanna. There s even a Tee Don Landry rubboard in the Smithsonian. The intertwined Acadian and African cultures that have given us Cajun and Zydeco music and dance have led to the relationship between the styles of music and the people who play them and dance to them being referred to as "first cousins." "First Cousins" is the name of a film about this very subject. The film was written, produced and directed by two sisters, Moriah and Elista Istre. Both Istre sisters have a Ph.D and are professional cultural historians. Moriah is a folklorist and festival programmer as well as being the Director of the movie First Cousins. Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

00:00 - Sintonía. 01:21 - Santos & Villasol presentan Plan B. 02:47 - Recordamos a Jaki Liebezeit, genial baterista de los alemanes CAN, recientemente fallecido, escuchando el tema "Spoon" (del álbum "Ege Bamyasi", de 1972). 06:13 - Hablamos sobre la igualdad en la infancia con Esther del Valle en la sección «Una mirada cultural a la infancia». 29:53 - Clifton Chenier and His Red Hot Louisiana Band: Party Down 34:28 - Descubrimos la excitante escena del nuevo jazz que se está haciendo en Londres de la mano de Guillermo Antón en «Cara B». 53:27 - Santos & Villasol se despiden.

Whether you say Laissez les bons temps rouler or Lig na hamanna maithe dul aghaigh, the good times really are rolling as Carnival comes to the Windy City Irish Radio​ studios. Tune in for a tuneful bacchanalia connecting the green fields of Ireland to the bayou swamps of the Crescent City. It's our annual extended 90 minute lagniappe celebrating the rich musical kinship between the Irish and the city of New Orleans proving once again that Guinness does indeed go well with Gumbo! You'll hear music from ANÚNA​ with Hozier​, a twofer from Cajun-Irish fiddle player Dennis McGee​ and More Power To Your Elbow​, the Godfather of Zydeco Music, Clifton Chenier​, Scythian​, Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet​ with Sharon Shannon​, Professor Longhair​, Irish rockers The Coronas​, County Down man Harry Connick, Jr.​, Acadian Canadians Ten Strings And A Goat Skin​, former NOLA chantuesse Tara O'Grady Music​, Kevin Flynn & The Avondale Ramblers​, Satchmo himself, Louis Armstrong​, Zydeco Party Band​, Derek Warfield & The Young Wolfe Tones​. Lost Bayou Ramblers​, Shawn Mullins​, Funky Meters​ and the late great Allen Toussaint​. Et tua!!! WHO DAT? Windy City Irish Radio, dat who! Join Mike and Tim each Wednesday night from 8pm to 9pm CST on Windy City Irish Radio 1240AM Chicago and you can find out more about Windy City Irish Radio at www.windycityirishradio.com.

Carnival comes to the Windy City Irish Radio studios as Mike and Tim "Laissez les bons temps rouler" in a tuneful bacchanalia connecting the green fields of Ireland to the bayou swamps of the Crescent City. Tune in for lagniappe and a 90 minute EXTENDED PODCAST celebrating the rich musical kinship between the Irish and the denizens of the city of New Orleans and proving that Guinness does indeed go well with Gumbo! Over 90 minutes, you'll hear from the Godfather of Zydeco Music, Clifton Chenier, Scythian, Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet, Flogging Molly, Eileen Ivers, Beth Patterson & Patrick O'Flaherty, Wayne Toups, Zachary Richard- Official Tara O'Grady Music Kevin Flynn & The Avondale Ramblers, Anders Osborne Hothouse Flowers, Pete Fountain, Satchmo himself, Louis Armstrong, The King, Creole in this case, ELVIS PRESLEY and more. Et tua!!! WHO DAT? Windy City Irish Radio, dat who! Join Mike and Tim each Wednesday night from 8pm to 9pm CST on Windy City Irish Radio 1240AM Chicago and 1470AM Chicago Heights and you can find more information at www.windycityirishradio.com. Contact Tim or Mike at tim.taylor@windycityirishradio.com or mike.shevlin@windycityirishradio.com.

C.J. Chenier is the son of Zydeco legend Clifton Chenier . "I didn't know to what magnitude my dad's popularity was, but I knew he played music and because he played music I wanted to play music," Chenier said. C.J. took a few piano lessons, messed around with guitar a little bit, and by the fourth grade was ready to try a horn. "The only instrument I knew about was a trombone because I saw this movie 76 Trombones ," he said. "So that's really the only instrument I knew about. And I told my mom, I said I want to play the trombone, and she's like, no, you've got to play saxophone because your daddy's got a saxophone in his band. And I didn't know what a saxophone was." It turned out to be a very good choice. "My mom must have had a foresight, because me and the saxophone became one real quick, you know, it was like I adapted to it real fast." C.J. wanted to play music full time, but couldn't make a living doing that in his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas. So, after finishing high school,

Welcome to the second leg of my Blues Heritage Tour. I'm on a road trip in a beautiful red 1966 Ford Mustang working my north from New Orleans up Highway 61 - the blues highway - to Chicago. I'm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana - home of the 'swamp blues'. Famous for harmonica stars Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester, and the guitarist Lightning Slim. It's also the home of 'zydeco', a strange mix blend of French Cajun music, blues, and rock n roll. Accordion player Clifton Chenier kick started this off in 1955. I'm not here for the zydeco though. I've come to Baton Rouge to meet Larry Garner, a blues singer and guitarist. He was the first blues artist I ever saw playing live. He played at Woodford Community Centre, Stockport, backed up by the Norman Beaker Band.

The Usual Suspects and some new arrivals in the 1st Set2nd installment of celebration of Black History Month in the 2nd Set of music...."After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music" - Aldous Huxley

923 miles straight south of Iowa City lies the biggest party in the country this week. We're heading to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for a celebration of all things zydeco, cajun, swamp, and boogie. Beau Jocque, Katie Webster, Clifton Chenier, Professor Longhair, and James Booker are part of the revelry of Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. Come on along for the king cake on Bourbon Street, the Krewe of Trucks parade on Canal Street, dubloons, beads, and total immersion in another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 155th Roadhouse Podcast.

923 miles straight south of Iowa City lies the biggest party in the country this week. We're heading to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for a celebration of all things zydeco, cajun, swamp, and boogie. Beau Jocque, Katie Webster, Clifton Chenier, Professor Longhair, and James Booker are part of the revelry of Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. Come on along for the king cake on Bourbon Street, the Krewe of Trucks parade on Canal Street, dubloons, beads, and total immersion in another hour of the finest blues you've never heard - the 155th Roadhouse Podcast.

In 1920s rural Louisiana, ten cents granted admission to hours of rollicking music at a "La La" house party. La La party music—characterized by the use of accordions, fiddles, triangles, and washboards or rub-boards called frottoirs—formed the basis of zydeco. The French-speaking Creoles of southwest Louisiana added elements of blues and jazz to the party mix. The result was zydeco, a musical style dominated by the accordion, frottoir, and heavy syncopation (a rhythmic technique of shifting accents to weak beats). Accordion player and singer Clifton Chenier was credited with naming this musical genre. After a long history of hits like "Zydeco Sont pas Sale," Chenier was dubbed the "King of Zydeco." Zydeco is often linked with Cajun music, but it has a harder, faster sound and employs more electric instruments. In dance halls today, elements of soul, disco, rap, and reggae can be heard among the rhythms of the frottoir.

In 1920s rural Louisiana, ten cents granted admission to hours of rollicking music at a "La La" house party. La La party music—characterized by the use of accordions, fiddles, triangles, and washboards or rub-boards called frottoirs—formed the basis of zydeco. The French-speaking Creoles of southwest Louisiana added elements of blues and jazz to the party mix. The result was zydeco, a musical style dominated by the accordion, frottoir, and heavy syncopation (a rhythmic technique of shifting accents to weak beats). Accordion player and singer Clifton Chenier was credited with naming this musical genre. After a long history of hits like "Zydeco Sont pas Sale," Chenier was dubbed the "King of Zydeco." Zydeco is often linked with Cajun music, but it has a harder, faster sound and employs more electric instruments. In dance halls today, elements of soul, disco, rap, and reggae can be heard among the rhythms of the frottoir.

New Jocelyn & Chris, Johnny Sansone, Adrian Quesada, Bonnie Raitt, Bound16, La Pompe Attack + Sam Cooke, Milt Jackson, Indigo Girls, Clifton Chenier, Jimmy Buffett, Marvin Gaye, Walt McKeon, Sharon Jones, Lenny Kravitz… Birthdays for Cyndi Lauper, Peter Asher, Todd Rundgren, Kris Kristofferson…

New Jacob Camara, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Son Vo & Halina Janusz, The Wild Feathers, Art Pepper + Leo Kotke & Mike Gordon, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings, Clifton Chenier, Cheech & Chong, Dr. John, Rosie Flores, Mavis Staples... Birthdays for Lemmy Kilmister

He's written books on New Orleans icon Ernie K-Doe and the Zydeco culture of south Louisiana. He spearheaded the career revival of the Hackberry Ramblers, producing and playing drums with the Cajun band for eighteen years culminating in their Grammy nomination after 70 years together. Ben is attracted to offbeat characters and cultural ephemera, so of course he winds up in the Ring Room with the Troubled Men. Topics include the Super Bowl, Tom Flores' Hall of Fame snub, corrupt institutions, a Bible reading, a cyberattack, a book plug, a Christmas commercial, Rico Watts, “White Boy, Black Boy,” Clifton Chenier, “Jole Blon,” string bands, MTV Live, a neighborhood threat, disaster tourism, the Grand Ole Opry, a last road trip, a Beach Boys protest, liner notes, Chicago blues time, Sunnyland Slim, Jazz Fest interviews, losing peers, a false memory, publishing deals, false documents, a missing finger, and much more. Support the podcast by contributing [here](https://www.paypal.me/troubledmenpodcast) Subscribe, review, and rate(5 stars) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or most podcast aggregators. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Outro music: “Bill's Boogie Woogie” by Boogie Bill Webb and “Poor Hobo” by the Hackberry Ramblers from the album “Deep Water”

The Grammy-nominated Zydeco accordion player and singer comes from a distinguished family of Creole musicians who played with everyone from Clifton Chenier and Rockin' Dopsie to Louis Armstrong and Bunk Johnson. Corey celebrates the release of his 14th album on Lost Bayou Rambler Louis Michot's Nouveau Electric Records. He pays tribute to his Black Creole roots with several songs sung in the Kouri-Vini dialect his family has spoken for generations. His ancestors would be proud of his commitment to preserving the language and folkways of their unique culture. One can only imagine how they'd feel about the Troubled Men Podcast. Topics include the Person of the Year, Festivus, a diaper boy plea, an Anne Frank monument, a horse lover, a D.A. initiative, a positive test result, Parks, La., the first Zydeco drummer, Lafayette Big Bands, a family history, live streaming, Dockside Studio, a party school, a one-man band, a new seasoning, local parades, Creole Mardi Gras, parenting techniques, vinyl LPs, and much more. Support the podcast [here.](https://www.paypal.me/troubledmenpodcast) Shop for Troubled Men's Wear [here.](https://www.bonfire.com/troubled-mens-wear/) Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or almost any podcast aggregator. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break and Outro music: “Buchanan Ledet Special” and “This Is All I Want” from “Corey Ledet Zydeco”