Podcasts about Furry Lewis

  • 39PODCASTS
  • 80EPISODES
  • 59mAVG DURATION
  • ?INFREQUENT EPISODES
  • Dec 25, 2024LATEST
Furry Lewis

POPULARITY

20172018201920202021202220232024


Best podcasts about Furry Lewis

Latest podcast episodes about Furry Lewis

Andrew's Daily Five
Anthology of American Folk Music: Episode 2

Andrew's Daily Five

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2024 20:06


Send us a textIntro song: Bandit Cole Younger by Edward L. Crain (The Texas Cowboy) (1931)Song 1: John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man by The Carter Family (1928)Song 2: Stackalee by Frank Hutchison (1927)Song 3: White House Blues by Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers (1926)Song 4: Kassie Jones, Parts 1 & 2 by Furry Lewis (1928)Song 5: Mississippi Boweavil Blues by The Masked Marvel (1929)Outro song: Got the Farm Land Blues by Carolina Tar Heels (1930)

Songcraft: Spotlight on Songwriters
Ep. 242 - LARKIN POE ("Bluephoria")

Songcraft: Spotlight on Songwriters

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2024 68:24


Grammy-winning Southern roots rock duo Larkin Poe (sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell) join us to chat about their creative process and their exciting forthcoming album, Bloom. PART ONE:'Tis the season! Scott and Paul chat about the classic Halloween songs. Is it time for a modern day resurgence of spooky music?PART TWO:Our in-depth conversation with sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell, known to the world as duo Larkin PoeABOUT LARKIN POE:Blues-based rock duo Larkin Poe is comprised of multi-instrumentalist sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell. The Georgia natives began their career as an acoustic trio with their sister Jessica in 2004. That year they appeared on A Prairie Home Companion and won the Prairie Home National Teen Talent Competition. In 2008, the Lovell Sisters' song “Distance” won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest grand prize in the country genre. That same year, their song “Time to Grow” received honorable mention in the International Songwriting Competition. After an impressive indie career that included two albums, as well as appearances at Bonaroo and the Grand Ole Opry, the Lovell Sisters disbanded. Rebecca and Megan reemerged as a duo pursuing a new sound that was steeped in the electric blues rather than acoustic and bluegrass music. Between 2010 and 2013 they released five indie EPs, two collaborative albums, and a live DVD. They released their debut album as a duo in 2014 and gained attention with the standout track “Don't.” In 2016 they reissued their debut studio album under the title Reskinned, which included new tracks such as “Trouble in Mind.” With the 2017 album Peach, Megan and Rebecca took the production reigns and continued to build a following. The next year's Venom & Faith reached #1 on Billboard's Blues Album chart and earned the sisters their first Grammy nomination. Their sixth studio album, Blood Harmony, garnered another Grammy nomination, which resulted in their first Grammy win in 2024. Larkin Poe's latest album is called Bloom and is set for release in January of 2025.

Jack Dappa Blues Podcast
The Blues Society - Memphis Country Blues Festival

Jack Dappa Blues Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2024 91:04


THE BLUES SOCIETY is a re-evaluation of the 1960s seen through the lens of the Memphis Country Blues Festival (1966-1969). It's the story of Blues masters like Furry Lewis and Robert Wilkins, who had attained fame in the 1920s but were living in obscurity by the 1960s. It's also the story of a group of white artists from the North and the South who created a celebration of African American music in a highly segregated city. THE BLUES SOCIETY follows the festival from its start in 1966 as an impromptu happening, through a period of cross-pollinization with New York's East Village scene, and up to the 1969 Festival, which mushroomed into a 3-day event and garnered substantial print and television coverage including an appearance on Steve Allen's national PBS show, Sounds of Summer. Festival co-founder and legendary music Executive Nancy Jeffries says, “Everyone remembers the 60s as a party, but there was a seriousness of purpose to what we were doing.” Furry Lewis worked for decades sweeping the city streets, so the efforts to recognize his musical accomplishments echo the 1968 Sanitation Strike, where each worker's sign proclaimed “I AM A MAN,” underlining theracist refusal to honor African Americans' basic humanity. Reaching into the present, the film ends in a 2017 concert where Rev. John Wilkins returns to the stage he last shared with his father 48 years earlier. What is the legacy of the Memphis Country Blues Festival, and who do the blues belong to in 2020?   On this episode, I will speak to Filmmaker and Scholar Augusta Palmer, daughter of Robert Palmer, one of the founding members of the Memphis Country Blues Society, who, with her team, worked relentlessly to get this film to the public. Joining Augusta in this episode will be The American Songster Don Flemons, who is featured in the film.

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 600: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #584, APRIL 17, 2024

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2024 59:00


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |   | Lightnin' Hopkins  | The Trouble Blues  | Ligntnin' Hopkins In New York  | Candid  |   |   | Sonny Boy Williamson  | I'm Trying To Make London My Home  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD4  | Ida Cox  | Death Letter Blues  | Ida Cox Vol. 2 1924-1925  |   | Joe Bonamassa  | High Water Everywhere  | Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House  | Tampa Red  | Stormy Sea Blues  | Tampa Red Vol. 7 1935-1936  |   | John James  | One Long Happy Night  | Cafe Vienna  |   |   | Furry Lewis  | Old Dog Blue  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968  | Merle Travis  | Cannonball-Rag  | Merle-Travis: Ash Grove 12-9-66  | Josh White  | Ball and Chain Blues  | The Elektra Years  |   |   | Scott Low  | Roll On  | Appalachian Blues  |   |   | Charles -Cow Cow- Davenport  | State Street Jive [Take A]  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1  | Raphael Callaghan  | Can't Afford To Live  | Said And Done  |   |   | Scott Low  | Winter Spring  | Appalachian Blues  |   |   | Rev Gary Davis  | Improvisation Slow Blues In E  | The Sun Of Our Life - Solos Songs and Sermons 1955-57  | R.L. Burnside  | Shake 'em On Down  |   |   |   | Jo Ann Kelly  | I Looked Down the Line (And I Wondered)  | Blues And Gospel: Rare and Unreleased Recordings

cityCURRENT Radio Show
Radio Show: Overton Park Shell - Mobile Outreach with Shell on Wheels

cityCURRENT Radio Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2024 16:28


Host Jeremy C. Park talks with Natalie Wilson, Executive Director of the Overton Park Shell, who highlights some of the rich history for the nonprofit organization focused on the mission of "building community through music and education, finding common ground in a diverse audience." Established in 1936, the historic Overton Park Shell presents a signature series of free concerts for Memphis and the surrounding communities every year.During the interview, Natalie discusses some of the important updates and newer programs, including their Backstage Experience Tour where you can experience the spaces where Elvis Presley forever changed the world of live rock and roll, where The Allman Brothers Band relaxed with Sweet Connie & Friends, and where Furry Lewis egged on newcomers ZZ Top to rock The Shell all night long. Natalie also highlights their community outreach efforts and mobile "Shell on Wheels" where the organization can bring the unique staging and immersive musical experience anywhere across the region. She also talks about how the community can support their efforts and work with them to continue opening access and building community through music and education.Visit www.overtonparkshell.org to learn more.

Making a Scene Presents
Smoky Greenwell is Making a Scene

Making a Scene Presents

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2024 70:53


Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Smoky GreenwellSmoky Greenwell was born in Michigan on the 4th of July 1951, reared in Delaware, and schooled in Spain and Tennessee. Smoky learned harmonica in earnest in the mid-1970's and began sitting in with the venerable blues masters Furry Lewis, Piano Red and Mose Vincent. His career as a first-call sessions player began at Sam Phillips' Sun Studios. This led him to take up residence in Nashville, and playing saxophone, in the mid-1980's. Smoky came to national attention in the band Blues Co-Op (with Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes). It was in Nashville that Smoky began a long association with Allman Brothers keyboardist, singer and producer Johnny Neel, a partnership that continues to this day. http://www.makingascene.org

Into the Soul of the Blues
17. Revival of the Country Blues in the twenties (deel 3): Ralph Peer - Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie McTell, Frank Stokes, Furry Lewis

Into the Soul of the Blues

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2023 87:24


Field recorder Ralph Peer was een belangrijke schakel in de heropleving van de Blues op het platteland aan het eind van de jaren twintig. Ralph Peer had een neus voor talent: met de opnames van de Carter Family en Jimmie Rodgers had hij de lont aangestoken voor de "Big Bang of Country Music", en ook na 1924 bleef hij samen met heel wat artiesten bluesgeschiedenis schrijven. In deze aflevering blijven we nog even het pad van Ralph Peer volgen. Ik stel je graag voor aan Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie McTell, Frank Stokes en Furry Lewis! Nieuwsgierig naar meer? Volg me op Facebook, Instagram of Twitter. Of bezoek ⁠www.souloftheblues.be --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bart-massaer/message

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 548: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #556 OCTOBER 04, 2023

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2023 58:59


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Josh White  | St. James Infirmary  | The Elektra Years  |  | Jake Leg Jug Band  | I Can'T Dance  | Break A leg  |  | Furry Lewis  | When I Lay My Burden Down  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968 | Adam Franklin  | Hellhound On My Trail  | Til I Hear You Talkin' (Extra} | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Black Cadillac  | In The Key Of Lightnin | John Hammond  | Sweet Home Chicago  | Bluesman - 2002 | Steve Howell & The Mighty Men  | I Believe To My Soul  | Steve Howell & The Mighty Men | Rev. Edward W. Clayborn  | Jesus Went On Man`s Bond  | Rev. Edward W. Clayborn – Complete Recorded Works 1926-1928 | Cedric Burnside  | The World Can Be So Cold  | I Be Trying  |  | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Going to Chattanooga  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Leadbelly  | Good Morning Blues  | Eagle Rock Rag  |  | Mark Searcy  | The Thrill Is Gone  | Ground Zero  |  | Auld Mans Baccie  | Cant Be Satisfied  | Auld Mans Baccie Live at Reivers | Half Deaf Clatch  | Too Poor To Die  | Every Path Leads Here | Big Joe Williams  | Keep A Knockin' | A Man Sings The Blues | BJW EPs  |   |  | Michot's Melody Makers  | La Lune Est Croche  | Michot's Melody Makers Blood Moon

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 547: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #555 SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2023 59:00


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | John Hammond  | Drop Down Mama  | Timeless (2014)  |  | Martin Wood  | Mean Old Frisco(Crudup)  | Candy Apple Shoes  |  | Adam Franklin  | 05 Biscuit Honeymoon  | England's Newest Hit Maker - The Best Of Adam Franklin | Martin Wood  | Lonely Avenue (Pomus)  | Candy Apple Shoes  |  | Mean Mary  | Bridge Out  | Portrait of a Woman Part 1 | Corey Harris & Henry Butler  | If You Let A Man Kick You Once  | Vu-Du Menz  |  | Skip James  | Devil Got My Woman  | Hard Time Killing Floor Blues | Martin Wood  | Turn It Around (Wood)  | Candy Apple Shoes  |  | Andres Roots  | All In The Cards  | Winter  |   |  | Big Bill Broonzy  | Partnership Woman  | Big Bill Broonzy Vol 12 (1945-1947) | Corey Harris & Henry Butler*  | L'Espirit de James  | Vu-Du Menz  |  | Stomping Dave Allen and Earl Jackson  | Fishing Blues  | Stompin' The Blues  |  | Dik Banovich  |  Omie Wise  | In Transit  |   |  | Furry Lewis  | Cannonball Blues  | In His Prime 1927-1928

Ajax Diner Book Club
Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 251

Ajax Diner Book Club

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2023 175:38


Ten Years After "I May Be Wrong, But I Won't Be Wrong Always"The Pogues "White City"Ruth Brown "It's All In Your Mind"Eilen Jewell "Silver Wheels and Wings"Tommy Tucker "Hi-Heel Sneakers"Adam Faucett "Day Drinker"Country Jim "Sad And Lonely"Buddy Emmons "Witchcraft"Twain And The Deslondes "Run Wild"Nappy Brown "The Right Time"Loretta Lynn "The Darkest Day"Furry Lewis "Casey Jones"She & Him "I Could've Been Your Girl"Bing Crosby "Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)"Otis Redding "Try a Little Tenderness"Bob Dylan "Floater (Too Much to Ask)"Oscar 'Papa' Celestin And His New Orleans Band "Didn't He Ramble"Valerie June "Shakedown"Jimmy "Duck" Holmes "It Had to Be the Devil"The Breeders "Saints"Tom Waits "Get Behind the Mule"Ella Fitzgerald "In the Still of the Night"John Prine "Often Is a Word I Seldom Use"Annisteen Allen "Fujiyama Mama"Fastbacks "In the Summer"The Replacements "Left Of The Dial"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Milk Cow Blues"Gordon Lightfoot "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"Clifford Brown & Max Roach "I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Every Day I Write the Book"ZZ Top "Waitin' for the Bus"ZZ Top "Jesus Just Left Chicago"George Lewis "Burgundy Street Blues"Webb Pierce "Slowly"Gang of Four "Armalite Rifle"J Mascis + The Fog "Ammaring"Gillian Welch "Tennessee"Lucero "Nothing's Alright"Drag the River "Tobacco Fields"Pretenders "Mystery Achievement"John Coltrane "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 519: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #538 MAY 31, 2023

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2023 58:58


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |  | Skip James  | Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues  | The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James - 1930 | James Cotton  | River's Invitation  | 22 Special Blues Tracks  |  | Tina Turner-  | Let's Stay Together [acoustic]  |   |  | John Lee Hooker  | Let's Make It Baby  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD1 | Half Deaf Clatch  | Mind Over  Matter  | Short Songs for the Barely Conscious | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Once There Was No Sun (II)  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | John James  | Remembering The Blossoms  | Cafe Vienna  |   |  | Blind Willie Johnson  | God Don't Never Change  | The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (1 of 2) | Hans Theessink and Big Daddy Wilson  | Virus Blues  | Pay Day  |   |   |  | Mean Mary  | Merry Eyes  | Portrait of a Woman Part 1  |  | Andres Roots  | Winter Blues  | Winter  |   |   |  | Bukka White  | Hambone Blues  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968 | Big Bill Broonzy  | The Banker's Blues  | Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order Vol. 1 | Stompin' Dave's Blues3  | My Heart Belongs To You  | The Mayfair Studio  |   |  | Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton  | Groundhog (Blind Lemon's Version)  | Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton  | Smithsonian Folkways | Furry Lewis With Bukka White And Gus Cannon  | Why Don't You Come Home Blues  | On The Road Again  |   |  | J.B. Lenoir  | If I Get Lucky  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD5

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 165: “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2023


Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

united states america god tv love ceo music american new york new year california death history canada black world president friends children europe google babies ai uk apple mental health internet man freedom las vegas france england space hell law mexico magic film british americans young san francisco sound west friend club colorado european writing fire italy philadelphia brand elon musk devil playing moon european union mind tools army north america pennsylvania writer alabama nashville south night habits angels south africa north new orleans dead ptsd world war ii band fame heroes wall empire massachusetts va sun stone touch web silicon valley republicans pittsburgh apologies mothers beatles roots eagles dancing greece stanford cd cat columbia studio cia dvd rolling stones mtv bones west coast beats independence adams elvis doors wales air force streets pacific campbell wheel coca cola twenty rock and roll bay area villains cutting east coast ibm papa stanford university garcia roses wyoming eleven berkeley steve jobs mountains hart billionaires frankenstein david bowie stones intel buddhist daughters eyes turtles nest bob dylan individuals esp riot wired big brother djs routines golden age airplanes cocaine spectrum anthem musicians impressions cds vault declaration americana invention john lennon cornell university frank sinatra last days warner paul mccartney range lsd sides woodstock number one matthews nobel prize elvis presley generally communists bill murray dino californians defence guinness tina turner skull good morning johnny cash pound boomers neil young backstage brew holy grail tim ferriss wreck jimi hendrix james brown alligators motown warner brothers scientology lenny beach boys national guard us government bitches love songs cradle icons mondo all stars stevenson grateful dead dresden american revolution peanuts francis ford coppola jack nicholson kinks eric clapton eliot john mayer sixty peace corps palo alto miles davis carnegie hall reprise trout avalon mk ultra mute hound wasteland lovin george harrison lone starship hubbard rod stewart carousel howl bluegrass ike crusade paul simon ray charles midi sirens monterey lou reed collectors desi frank zappa happenings omni gee yoko ono healy janis joplin viper little richard barlow chuck berry world wide web zz top bakersfield tangent estimates xerox old west weir scully stills carlos santana velvet underground van morrison tubes rock music cutler kurt vonnegut booker t john coltrane brian wilson caltech chipmunks dennis hopper dick cheney aldous huxley kevin kelly east west buddy holly hangman dean martin ram dass randy newman cyberspace hunter s thompson galapagos hard days scott adams steve wozniak sturgeon american beauty david crosby good vibrations jack kerouac byrds boris karloff charlatans dilbert ginsberg gunter hells angels lyndon johnson spoonful john cage astounding jerry garcia les h great migration bozo eric schmidt charlie parker helms fillmore merle haggard go crazy easy rider mcnally chords jefferson airplane chick corea pete seeger glen campbell stax dark star timothy leary greatest story ever told bahamian allen ginsberg todd rundgren power brokers on the road cantos joe smith george jones rothman dusseldorf scientologists jackson pollock mgs scruggs truckin' buddy guy midnight special coltrane trist true fans deadheads warlocks new hollywood muscle shoals count basie yardbirds technocracy john campbell coasters valium midnight hour lenny bruce harry nilsson electronic frontier foundation allman brothers band diggers bo diddley skeleton keys casey jones marshall mcluhan watkins glen everly brothers prepositions frenchy benny goodman bowery working man kqed sgt pepper do you believe kerouac steve reich cell block southern comfort money money vonnegut tom wolfe graham nash on new year baskervilles rifkin hornsby stoller bruce hornsby boulders decca great society harts beatniks slaughterhouse five altamont varese beat generation ken kesey inc. jefferson starship robert a heinlein hedrick bob weir beverly hillbillies holding company stephen stills uncle john pigpen goldwater zodiacs telecasters outlaw country acid tests bill monroe suspicious minds buck owens sly stone robert moses chet atkins johnny b goode international order people get ready flatt arpanet robert anton wilson senatorial mccoy tyner bill graham haight ashbury phil lesh stockhausen bolos all along basil rathbone pranksters warners folsom prison robert caro north beach steve cropper gordon moore family dog leiber john w campbell macauley bozos cassady odd fellows fare thee well dianetics louis jordan dire wolf karlheinz stockhausen gibsons phil ochs terry riley basie mountain high charles ives stewart brand rhino records robert hunter winterland peter tork kingston trio vint cerf green onions morning dew fillmore east mickey hart jimmie rodgers eric dolphy golden road roy wood cecil taylor van dyke parks monterey pop festival ink spots i walk giants stadium blue suede shoes jerome kern merry pranksters live dead not fade away information superhighway turing award one flew over the cuckoo new riders johnny johnson brand new bag other one warner brothers records oscar hammerstein purple sage steve silberman stagger lee ramrod prufrock luciano berio port chester theodore sturgeon joel selvin world class performers berio billy pilgrim merle travis discordianism lee adams owsley damascene buckaroos scotty moore esther dyson incredible string band have you seen fillmore west general electric company blue cheer monterey jazz festival james jamerson john dawson la monte young ashbury alembic john perry barlow standells bill kreutzmann david browne wplj jug band bobby bland neal cassady mixolydian kesey junior walker slim harpo bakersfield sound astounding science fiction blue grass boys mitch kapor travelling wilburys gary foster torbert donna jean furthur surrealistic pillow reverend gary davis more than human haight street david gans john oswald dennis mcnally ratdog furry lewis harold jones alec nevala lee sam cutler pacific bell floyd cramer bob matthews firesign theater sugar magnolia brierly owsley stanley hassinger uncle martin don rich geoff muldaur in room plunderphonics death don smiley smile langmuir brent mydland jim kweskin kilgore trout jesse belvin david shenk have no mercy so many roads one more saturday night turn on your lovelight aoxomoxoa gus cannon vince welnick noah lewis tralfamadore dana morgan garcia garcia dan healey edgard varese cream puff war viola lee blues 'the love song
Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 509: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #534 MAY 03, 2023

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2023 59:00


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Raphael Callaghan's Blue Cee  | Call Your Name  | Long Tall Sally  |  | Catfish Keith  | Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning  | A True Friend Is Hard To Find | Guy Davis  | The Lynching  | The Adventures Of Fishy Waters In Bed With The Blues (2012)  -  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | You're Too Fast  | Morning Blues - Charley Blues Masterworks Vol. 8 | Furry Lewis  | Judge Harsh Blues (alt tak)  | In His Prime 1927-1928 | Stompin Dave Allen and Sam Kelly  | Did You  | Live At The Bulfrog Blues Club | John Hammond  | Let's Go Home  | Source Point - 1970 - 256 - FC | Reverend Gary Davis  | Sally Please Come Back to Me (Worried Blues)  | Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964 | Big Bill Broonzy  | Roll Them Bones  | Big Bill Broonzy Vol 12 (1945-1947) | Gary Grainger  | All Round Man - First Time Played  | Mistakes and Out-takes | Pink Anderson  | John Henry  | Blues Legend  |  | Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton  | Reuben's Train  | Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton  | Smithsonian Folkways | Mary Flower  | Hula Hoedown  | Instrumental Breakdown | Corey Harris  | High Fever Blues (solo version)  | Fish Ain't Bitin'  |  | Doc Watson & Rec Live Newport Folk Fest 1963/4  | Shady Grove  | The Essential Doc Watson | Jo Ann Kelly  | Black Rat Swing  | Do It and More  | 

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 507: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #534 APRIL 26, 2023

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2023 59:00


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Catfish Keith [Fishtail Records]  | It Can't Be Undone  | Put On A Buzz  |  | Mississippi Fred McDowell & Annie Mae McDowell  | Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed  | My Home Is In The Delta | Blind Willie McTell  | Atlanta Strut  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1927-1931) | Duwayne Burnside  | Stay All Night.mp3  | Acoustic Burnside  |  | John Hammond  | Shake For Me  | You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover - 1993 - Vbr - FC | Jake Leg Jugband  | I Never Knew I Had A Wonderful Wife (Until The Town Went Dry)  | Goodbye Booze  |  | Charles -Cow Cow- Davenport  | Alabama Mistreater  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 | Furry Lewis  | Mistreatin' Mama  | In His Prime 1927-1928 | Jimmy 'Duck' Holmes  | Leave In the Morning  | Get Old Someday  |  | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee  | Kansas City Blues  | American Folk Blues Festival Live In Manchester 1962 | Papa Charlie Jackson  | Hot Papa Blues No. 2  | Classic Blues Artwork From  the 1920's | Amos Milburn  | Bow-Wow!  | Complete Aladdin Recordings 1994 CD3 | Stompin' Dave  | Still Some Wonder  | Acoustic Blues  |  | Pink Anderson  | Try Some Of That  | Blues Legend  |  | The Curse of K.K. Hammond  | 10 Memento Mori  | Death Roll Blues  |  | Jimmy Yancey  | P. L. K. Special (Remastered)  | Yancey's Getaway  | 

Music From 100 Years Ago
Forgotten Delta Blues Singers

Music From 100 Years Ago

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2023 35:00


Performers include: Furry Lewis, Bo Weavil Jackson, Louise Johnson, Kid Bailey, King Soloman Hill, Peatie Wheatstraw and Robert Petway. 

Current Affairs
STAY WOKE: Vital Lessons From Black Musical History (w/ Samuel James)

Current Affairs

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2023 67:13


“There's an old adage ‘He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.' But what's missing in that phrase is that there are the people who are in charge of keeping your history. And they can make you forget it. They can keep it from you. And then you're doomed to repeat something that they want you to repeat.” — Samuel JamesSamuel James is a musician and storyteller from Portland, Maine, who specializes in blues and roots music. Samuel has a deep knowledge of American musical history and recently wrote a column in the Mainer magazine about the origins of the phrase “stay woke,” first heard on a Lead Belly record about the Scottsboro Boys. He shows that when we see attacks on “wokeness” like Ron DeSantis' “Stop WOKE Act,” we should remember that it's “an old, Black phrase being weaponized against the very people who created it.”Today, Samuel joins to explain how listening to the words of early 20th century Black songs provides critical context for understanding America today. From commentary on the prison system in the words of “Midnight Special” to Mississippi John Hurt's unique twist on the “John Henry” legend, Samuel James offers a course in how to listen closely to appreciate both the rich diversity of the music lumped together as folk blues, and how to hear the warnings that the early singers passed down to Black Americans today. It's a very special hour featuring some of the greatest music ever written, played live by one of its most talented contemporary interpreters.Nathan's article on Charles Murray is here, and one on Joe Rogan is here. A Current Affairs article about John Henry songs is here. Beyond Mississippi John Hurt and Lead Belly, artists mentioned by Samuel James include Gus Cannon, the Mississippi Sheiks, Charley Patton, Skip James, and Furry Lewis. More information about the St. Louis chemical spraying is here. Follow Samuel James on Twitter here. His 99 Years podcast is here. Nathan mentions the “Voyager Golden Record” that went into space, which did in fact include a classic blues song.“This is the hammer that killed John HenryBut it won't kill me, but it won't kill me, but it won't kill me”— Mississippi John HurtNOTE: The n-word is heard several times in this episode, spoken by Samuel James, and in recordings by Lead Belly and Ice Cube.Subscribe to Current Affairs on Patreon to unlock all of our bonus episodes and get early access to new releases.

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Flood fan Orville Picklesimer had a kind comment on a recent podcast. “Well done!” he wrote after listening to the Feb. 17 broadcast of our take on “I Am a Pilgrim,” adding, “ I was fortunate to see Doc (Watson) do this one, and The Flood's cover pays homage to Doc and adds its own personal flavor.”“It doesn't need more cowbell,” he said, “but I'd like to hear more resonator on future projects.”Well, you don't have to ask us twice! But FirstIf you're not up on your grand guitar history, you might not know that the resonator guitar — that is, an acoustic guitar that produces sound by conducting string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones (“resonators”) — was invented about a century ago. It all started in the mid-1920s, in the days before electric instruments. The idea was to create a new kind of guitar that would be louder than its regular acoustic cousins, which were being overwhelmed by the horns and drums in the dance orchestras of the day.But developers like the legendary John Dopyera and his brothers Rudy and Emil did much more than that. The resonator that the Dopyera brothers and others created had such a distinctive tone that it found lifelong fans among blues and folk aficionados, and that love affair has continued long after the arrival of roaring electric guitars.Floodifying It Of course, “blues” and “folk” are a combination that has “Flood” written all over it. That's why about a month ago, Charlie brought a resonator into The Flood's mix in the form of a wood-framed “boxcar” style resonator from Gretsch. Slowly but surely this new guitar — which Charlie has christened “Chessie” (get it? Boxcar? Chessie? … Never mind…) — has started working its way into the band's repertoire, beginning with that “I Am a Pilgrim” rendition that Orville liked a few weeks ago.Now, answering his request for a bit more resonator action, we've incorporated Chessie into our latest take on the old Carter Family tune, “Solid Gone.” Orville, this one's for you, old friend!Our Take on the TuneAs we noted in earlier article in the newsletter, “Solid Gone” has a long, LONG history in The Flood's story. It was, in fact, the first song that Dave Peyton suggested to Charlie when the two of them first started picking together at that New Year's Eve party in 1973. Since then, the tune has come back in every iteration of The Flood, and it has never sounded better than in this latest version, with Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair double-dipping on the solos and Randy Hamilton singing all that rock-solid harmony. Click here for the the long, curious history on this song, as it weaves its way through the Carter Family and Charlie Poole, by way of Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt, right up to folksinger Tom Rush. What a yarn! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Ajax Diner Book Club
Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 239

Ajax Diner Book Club

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2023 170:14


Johnny Cash "Get Rhythm"The Replacements "I Hate Music"Lil Hardin Armstrong "Harlem On Saturday Night"Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses) "After Mardi Gras"Jake Xerxes Fussell "Jump for Joy"The Two Poor Boys - Joe Evans & Arthur McClain "Sitting On Top of the World"S.G. Goodman "Patron Saint Of The Dollar Store"Joseph Spence "We Shall Be Happy"Jimmie Lunceford "I'm Nuts About Screwy Music"Shovels & Rope "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain (feat. John Moreland)"Bessie Jones "Titanic"Etta Baker "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"Freakwater "Bolshevik and Bollweevil"The Breeders "Do You Love Me Now?"Billie and De De Pierce "Lonesome Road"Joan Shelley "Pull Me Up One More Time"Amos Milburn "After Midnight"The Both "Volunteers of America"Aretha Franklin "Never Grow Old"Slim Cessna's Auto Club "Port Authority Band"Butterbeans & Susie "Been Some Changes Made"Nina Nastasia "Just Stay in Bed"Bo Diddley "Cops and Robbers"McKinney's Cotton Pickers "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams - Take 1"Andrew Bird "Underlands"Superchunk "My Gap Feels Weird"John Fahey "St Louis Blues"Gillian Welch "I Made a Lovers Prayer"Huey "Piano" Smith "Don't You Just Know It"Billie Holiday "Sugar"Songs: Ohia "Blue Chicago Moon"Mississippi Fred McDowell "Poor Boy, Long Way From Home"Joel Paterson "Callin' the Cat"Chicago Stone Lightning Band "Do Yourself a Favor"Johnny Cash "You Win Again"Emile Barnes & Peter Bocage "When I Grow Too Old to Dream"The Yardbirds "Evil Hearted You"Muddy Waters "Hey, Hey"Bonnie "Prince" Billy "I Have Made a Place"Bessie Smith "After You've Gone"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Colour of the Blues"Ruth Brown "Teardrops from My Eyes"Furry Lewis "Judge Boushay Blues"Sons of the Pioneers "One More River to Cross"Marty Stuart "Hey Porter"Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash "Girl from the North Country"Johnny Cash "I See a Darkness"Chisel "The Last Good Time"

Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers
Music of the Freedom Movement.

Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2023 48:17


Here's the latest in our Hitting Left Music series, Sounds From the Freedom Movements. We start off with a song from early hip-hop poets, Digable Planets called Femme Fetal. Recorded two decades ago, it anticipated the Supreme Court's ruling outlawing abortion rights.   Thar will be followed by music from the anti-fascist Lula movement in Brazil. Buffy Sainte Marie, Pete Seeger, Stevie Wonder. Steve Earle, and much more.   Playlist:     1. La Femme Fetal by Digable Planets    2. Now that the Buffalo's Gone by Buffy Sainte Marie    3. Never Had Your Back by Arrested Development    4. The Hammer Song by Pete Seeger    5. Steve's Hammer by Steve Earle    6. John Henry by Furry Lewis    7. Which Side Are You On? By Natalie Merchant    8. "It's Wrong (Apartheid)" by Stevie Wonder     9, “Tá na hora do Jair já ir embora” by Maderada and Tiago Doidão' which translates to “It's time for Jair to go away already.”    10. Here's to the State of Mississippi by Phil Ochs    11. 'Inner City Blues (Make Me Holler)' (1971 )by Marvin Gaye    12. All Around the World by Taj Mahal & Keb Mo 

Ajax Diner Book Club
Ajax Diner Book Club Episode 233

Ajax Diner Book Club

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 10, 2023 179:25


Drive-by Truckers "Dragon Pants"Fleetwood Mac "Like It This Way"Fats Domino "The Big Beat"Aerial M "Wedding Song No.2"Valerie June "You And I"Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers "Give Me Back My Wig (Live)"AC/DC "Let There Be Rock"John Fahey "Uncloudy Day"Adia Victoria "Stuck In The South"Andrew Bird "Underlands"Elizabeth Cotten "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"Craig Finn "God in Chicago"Ian Noe "Strip Job Blues 1984"Esther Phillips "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You"R.L. Burnside "Miss Maybelle"Hank Williams "I'm Sorry for You My Friend"Joan Shelley "Amberlit Morning (feat. Bill Callahan)"John R. Miller "Lookin' Over My Shoulder"Max Roach "Garvey's Ghost (feat. Carlos "Patato" Valdes & Carlos "Totico" Eugenio)"Ranie Burnette "Hungry Spell"Nina Nastasia "This Is Love"Thurston Harris "I Got Loaded (In Smokey Joe's Joint)"Folk Implosion "Sputnik's Down"Slim Harpo "I'm a King Bee"Wipers "Youth of America"The Scotty McKay Quintet "The Train Kept a-Rollin'"Mississippi John Hurt "Sliding Delta"Magnolia Electric Co. "Montgomery"Dr. John "Memories of Professor Longhair"Billie McKenzie "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water"Little Walter "Juke"Elvis Presley "Trying to Get to You"Billie Jo Spears "Get Behind Me Satan And Push"Ray Charles "Georgia On My Mind"Freddy King "Hide Away"Furry Lewis "Old Blue"Billie Holiday "What a Little Moonlight Can Do"Bob Dylan "One More Cup of Coffee"The Primitives "How  Do Yu Feel"Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop"Ruth Brown "Lucky Lips"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "A Minor Place"Pearl Bailey "Frankie and Johnnie"fIREHOSE "In Memory Of Elizabeth Cotton"James Booker "On The Sunny Side Of The Street"Ray Price "The Same Old Me"Mississippi Fred McDowell "My Babe"The Replacements "Here Comes a Regular"

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 448: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #509 NOVEMBER 02, 2022

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2022 58:59


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Big Joe Wiliams. Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry,  Brownie McGhee  | Wimmen From Coast To Coast  | Folk Blues Revival  |  | Robert Lockwood  | Black Spider Blues  | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A)  | 2007 JSP Records | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Sun Goin' Down  | The Swarthmore Concert (1964) | Michael Messer  | Living By The Water  | MOONbeat 1995  |  | Half Deaf Clatch  | My Babe (Live)  | Live In Shetland 2014 | Catfish Keith  | She Got Washed Away  | Honey Hole  |  | Lightnin' Hopkins With Sonny Terry  | Take A Trip With Me  | Last Night Blues  |  | Rory Block  | Pure Religion  | I Belong To The Band | Robert Pete Williams  | Sweep My Floor  | Robert Pete Williams | Julian Piper  | Who Got The Olds? (When Johnny Ace Died)  | Terlingua  |   |  | Blind Willie McTell  | Three Women Blues  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1927-1931) | Andy Cohen  | Miss The Mississippi And You  | Built Right On The Ground | Furry Lewis  | Furry Lewis  talking 3  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968 | Cora Mae Bryant  | Hambone  | Sisters Of The South (Cd2) | Jake Leg Jugband  | Just A Little Drink  | Prohibition Is A Failure

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 429: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #501 AUGUST 24. 2022

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 58:54


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Blind Lemon Jefferson  | Easy Rider Blues  | Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee  | Kansas City - [ASH GROVE 1-21-1967 1ST SHOW]  | Ash Grove 01-21-1967 1st Show | Bukka White  | Please, Ma'am  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968 | Jake Leg Jugband  | I'll See You In C-U-B-A  | Goodbye Booze  |  | John Hammond  | Key To The Highway  | The Best Of John Hammond - 1970 | Stompin Dave Allen and Sam Kelly  | Please Don't Shoot Me Down  | Live At The Bulfrog Blues Club | Big Joe Turner  | Rebecca  | Rocks In My Bed  |  | Memphis Minnie  | Hoodoo Lady  | Blues, Blues Hoodoo Halloween | Pete Johnson  | Some Day Blues - Original  | Pete Johnson Selected Hits Vol4 [Charley] | Seasick Steve  | Salem Blues  | Dog House Music  |  | Adam Franklin  | Terraplane Blues  | Outside Man  |  | Michael Messer  | 17 Moonbeat  | King Guitar 2001  |  | Pistol Pete Wearn  | Police High Sheriff  | Service Station Coffee | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Green Onion  | The Swarthmore Concert (1964)

Rock N Roll Pantheon
Rock's Backpages E131: Robert Gordon on Memphis + Stax + ZZ Top + Robert Johnson

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2022 78:57


In this episode we welcome the very engaging Robert Gordon "all the way from" his hometown of Memphis and ask him to talk about the music of his city from Sun and Stax to Alex Chilton and Big Star.Robert tells us about his childhood, along with the blues epiphany that was watching Furry Lewis support the Rolling Stones on the Memphis leg of their 1975 U.S. tour. Moving on to Stax, we look back at a great 1988 interview Robert did with the Memphis Horns' Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson — and then forward to the Wattstax festival, staged in L.A. 50 years ago this summer.Clips from the week's new audio interview — Tony Scherman asking Billy Gibbons about Robert Johnson — afford us the perfect excuse not just to discuss ZZ Top and their imminent new album but to revisit our guest's exhaustive 1991 essay on the "plundering" of Delta blues legend Johnson's estate.Mark talks us through a selection of newly-added library pieces about Frankie Lymon, Alma Cogan, San Francisco's Trips festival, Syreeta, Gang of Four and Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. In the absence of a vacationing Jasper, Barney wraps things up with quotes from articles about rock scribe R(ichard) Meltzer, the Specials and — circling back to Stax — Booker T. Jones recalling co-writing Albert King's brooding 'Born Under a Bad Sign' with William Bell...Many thanks to special guest Robert Gordon; the 25th anniversary edition of It Came From Memphis is published by Third Man Books and available now. Visit his website at therobertgordon.com.Pieces discussed: The Memphis Horns, The plundering of Robert Johnson, It Came From Memphis, Wattstax, Wattstax, Wattstax, Billy Gibbons audio, Frankie Lymon, Andrew Loog Oldham, Syreeta, Punk magazine, XTC, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, Alma Cogan, Trips Festival, Sly Stone, Gang of Four, Richard Meltzer, The Specials and Booker T. Jones.

Rock's Backpages
E131: Robert Gordon on Memphis + Stax + ZZ Top + Robert Johnson

Rock's Backpages

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 11, 2022 78:57


In this episode we welcome the very engaging Robert Gordon "all the way from" his hometown of Memphis and ask him to talk about the music of his city from Sun and Stax to Alex Chilton and Big Star.Robert tells us about his childhood, along with the blues epiphany that was watching Furry Lewis support the Rolling Stones on the Memphis leg of their 1975 U.S. tour. Moving on to Stax, we look back at a great 1988 interview Robert did with the Memphis Horns' Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson — and then forward to the Wattstax festival, staged in L.A. 50 years ago this summer.Clips from the week's new audio interview — Tony Scherman asking Billy Gibbons about Robert Johnson — afford us the perfect excuse not just to discuss ZZ Top and their imminent new album but to revisit our guest's exhaustive 1991 essay on the "plundering" of Delta blues legend Johnson's estate.Mark talks us through a selection of newly-added library pieces about Frankie Lymon, Alma Cogan, San Francisco's Trips festival, Syreeta, Gang of Four and Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. In the absence of a vacationing Jasper, Barney wraps things up with quotes from articles about rock scribe R(ichard) Meltzer, the Specials and — circling back to Stax — Booker T. Jones recalling co-writing Albert King's brooding 'Born Under a Bad Sign' with William Bell...Many thanks to special guest Robert Gordon; the 25th anniversary edition of It Came From Memphis is published by Third Man Books and available now. Visit his website at therobertgordon.com.Pieces discussed: The Memphis Horns, The plundering of Robert Johnson, It Came From Memphis, Wattstax, Wattstax, Wattstax, Billy Gibbons audio, Frankie Lymon, Andrew Loog Oldham, Syreeta, Punk magazine, XTC, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, Alma Cogan, Trips Festival, Sly Stone, Gang of Four, Richard Meltzer, The Specials and Booker T. Jones.

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 559: WEDNESDAY'S EVEN WORSE #559, JUNE 22, 2022

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2022 58:59


 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Graná Louise  | Stagger Lee  | Gettin' Kinda Rough | The Ragged Roses  | Crying over you  | Do Me Right | Kat Riggins  | In My Blood.wav  | Kat Riggins -Progeny | Stacy Jones  | Think  | World On Fire | Mudlow  | Sundown  | Bad Turn  |  | Mary Stokes Band Featuring Shobsy  | Help Me  | Mary Stokes Band featuring Sarah Michelle- Comin' Home | Jason Lee McKinney Band  | Make No Mistake  | One Last Thing | The Lucky Ones  | Bones  | Slow Dance, Square Dance, Barn Dance | Joanne Shaw Taylor  | Dyin' To Know  | Blues From The Heart Live | The Reverend Shawn Amos  | Everybody Wants To Be My Friend  | Songs And Stories From The Family Tree (1997-2022) | Sister Rosetta Tharpe  | Down By The Riverside (Recorded Live At The Free Trade Hall, Ma  | Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series Volu | The Rock House All Stars  | Love In Vain feat. Emil Justian _ The Rock House All Stars  | An Ovation from Nashville | The Cadillac Kings  | Flatfoot Sam  | Cadillac Kings | Bob Margolin And Bob Corritore  | Blessings and Blues  | So Far  |  | Furry Lewis  | Farewell to Thee  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts
Episode 473: ACOUSTIC BLUES CLUB #473 FEBRUARY 09 , 2022

Ian McKenzie's Blues Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2022 58:59


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

Tennessee Underground
Robert Gordon: Talk Writing, South, Southern Music, Stones and Furry Lewis

Tennessee Underground

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2021 10:20


Blues Disciples
Show 137

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2021 61:12


Show 137 – Recorded 7-3-21 – This podcast features 12 outstanding blues artist groups and 12 excellent performances to enjoy. And, Mr Ted Reed tells us about his and a friend's trip to discover, meet, film and record a group of early blues legends in 1970. Our talented featured artists are: Furry Lewis, Scott Dunbar, […]

Blues Disciples
Show 137

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2021 61:12


Show 137 – Recorded 7-3-21 – This podcast features 12 outstanding blues artist groups and 12 excellent performances to enjoy. And, Mr Ted Reed tells us about his and a friend's trip to discover, meet, film and record a group of early blues legends in 1970. Our talented featured artists are: Furry Lewis, Scott Dunbar, Robert Pete Williams, Big Joe Williams, James Cotton and Elvin Bishop, Dr Ross, Reverend Robert Wilkins, Sunnyland Slim, Memphis Minnie, Mud Morganfield, Ms Silvia Travis, Diunna Greenleaf. 

Blues Disciples
Show 130

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2021 57:48


Show 130 – Recorded 5-15-21 – This podcast features 10 outstanding blues artists and 12 great performances to enjoy. Plus Mr George Mitchell tells us how he met and field recorded blues legends Robert Nighthawk, Houston Stackhouse and James Peck Curtis. These songs were recorded in 1967. Our featured artists are: Napoleon Strickland, William Do Boy Diamond, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods, Walter Miller, Tom Turner, Furry Lewis, Robert Diggs, Dewey Corley and Walter Miller, Teddy Williams, Houston Stackhouse, Robert Nighthawk and James Peck Curtis – The Blues Rhythm Boys. We want to recognize and thank again Mr George Mitchell for his time and the beautiful music he helped create.

Blues Disciples
Show 125

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2021 65:45


Show 125 – Recorded 4-10-21 – This podcast features 13 outstanding blues artists and 13 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from 1962-2005. Our featured artists are: RL Burnside, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Furry Lewis, John Lee Zeigler, Jack Owens, Jesse Mar Hemphill, Mose Vinson, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, John Dee Holeman, Algia Mae Hinton, Drink Small, Guitar Gabriel, Precious Bryant

Blues Disciples
Show 125

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2021 65:45


Show 125 – Recorded 4-10-21 – This podcast features 13 outstanding blues artists and 13 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from 1962-2005. Our featured artists are: RL Burnside, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Furry Lewis, John Lee Zeigler, Jack Owens, Jesse Mar Hemphill, Mose Vinson, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, John Dee Holeman, Algia Mae Hinton, Drink Small, Guitar Gabriel, Precious Bryant

Beyond Beale
Everybody Has a Place at the Shell

Beyond Beale

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2021 25:57


This podcast features interviews from, in order of appearance, Natalie Wilson, Henry Nelson, Augusta Palmer, Chris Wimmer, Ric Whitney, Robert Gordon, and Earl “the Pearl” Banks. Jimmy Crosthwait and "Daddy" Mack Orr have  been featured in previous episodes of Beyond Beale. "Everybody Has a Place at the Shell" explores the impact and future of the Memphis Country Blues Festival, drawing on the historical context in "Diabolical and Revolutionary" and "Pretty Much Pure Gospel."

Beyond Beale
Pretty Much Pure Gospel

Beyond Beale

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2021 29:24


This podcast features interviews from, in order of appearance, Chris Wimmer, Jimmy Crosthwait, Augusta Palmer, Henry Nelson, and Robert Gordon. "Pretty Much Pure Gospel" explores the history of the Memphis Country Blues Festival, drawing on the historical context of "Diabolical and Revolutionary" to give a full picture of the festival itself.

The Radical with Nick Terzo
22. Robert Gordon

The Radical with Nick Terzo

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2021 42:19


Robert Gordon has carved out an impressive career as both a writer and director. His creative endeavors are fueled by his passion for the culture, politics, and people of the American South, especially the city he calls home, Memphis. In this installment, Nick engages Robert in a wide-ranging discussion of his life and how his interests provided the impetus for his documentaries and books. From the music of almost-forgotten blues legends, to the Emmy-winning political documentary "Best Of Enemies", to the 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking book "It Came From Memphis",  Robert and Nick immerse themselves in the intertwined history of Memphis and the clash of cultures that formed the backdrop for the rise of rock 'n roll in the 1950s.   Key Takeaways: [03:21]  The three points of cultural collision that form the "plane" of "It Came From Memphis" [06:15]  The various additions to the new 25th anniversary edition [10:39]  How blues legend "Furry" Lewis kick-started Robert's love of music history [13:35]  The TV hosts and African-American DJs in Memphis who put rock 'n roll on the map [19:48]  The origins of the "holy trinity" of Memphis record labels: Sun, Stax, and American Sound [27:49]  How geography played a part in Memphis' place in rock 'n roll history [29:44]  The documentary "Best Of Enemies" and how it applies to politics today [37:33]  Robert discusses his process as a writer and filmmaker   Thanks for listening! Tune in next week and don't forget to take a minute to review the podcast. In this incredibly competitive podcasting world, every piece of feedback helps. Follow our social media channels for last-minute announcements and guest reveals @theradicalpod on Instagram and Facebook. Find out more about today's guests, Robert Gordon.  Find out more about your host, Nick Terzo   MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Third Man Books @thirdmanbooks  The Rolling Stones @RollingStones  Big Star @BigStarBand Ardent Recording Studios @ardentstudios WDIA @wdia Sun Records @sunrecords Stax Records @staxrecords Memphis, TN @CityOfMemphis

Book Musik Podcast
Book Musik 038 - IT CAME FROM MEMPHIS - discussion with author Robert Gordon

Book Musik Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2021 76:21


Tosh and Kimley are joined by author Robert Gordon to discuss his classic book IT CAME FROM MEMPHIS newly revised for its 25th anniversary release. Many have made the convincing case that Memphis is the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll. It is without a doubt a cultural hub on par with New York, Paris, and San Francisco and yet remains somewhat under the radar. Alex Chilton, Jim Dickinson, photographer William Eggleston and bluesman Furry Lewis are just a few of the prominent characters who make the scene in this riveting book. Gordon has a passionate attachment to his city’s history and culture and celebrates those on the edge and those creating the chaos that make life interesting. Theme music: "Behind Our Efforts, Let There Be Found Our Efforts" by LG17

Blues Disciples
Show 111

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2021 60:57


Show 111 – Recorded 1-2-21 This podcast features an interview with Ms Patty Aden, the new CEO of The Blues Foundation along with 12 outstanding blues artists and 12 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from the late 1927 – 1999. Our featured artists are: Albert Macon and Robert Thomas, Big Mama Thornton, Blind Boy Fuller, Cecil Barfield, Frank Stokes, Alga Mae Hinton, Big Bill Broonzy, Furry Lewis, Blind Willie Johnson, Joe Callicott, Memphis Minnie, Ma Rainey. We also want to recognize and thank the following individuals who worked with, coached, documented, and recorded some of these artists to produce the music we all love: George Mitchell and Tim Duffy.

Blues Disciples
Show 111

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2021 60:57


Show 111 – Recorded 1-2-21 This podcast features an interview with Ms Patty Aden, the new CEO of The Blues Foundation along with 12 outstanding blues artists and 12 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from the late 1927 – 1999. Our featured artists are: Albert Macon and Robert Thomas, Big Mama Thornton, Blind Boy Fuller, Cecil Barfield, Frank Stokes, Alga Mae Hinton, Big Bill Broonzy, Furry Lewis, Blind Willie Johnson, Joe Callicott, Memphis Minnie, Ma Rainey. We also want to recognize and thank the following individuals who worked with, coached, documented, and recorded some of these artists to produce the music we all love: George Mitchell and Tim Duffy.

Troubled Men Podcast
TMP 133 Robert Gordon: A Writer on the Edge

Troubled Men Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2020 73:36


The Grammy-winning author and filmmaker’s landmark book, “It Came from Memphis,” has just been reissued in a 25th anniversary revised edition. The cultural collisions between bluesman Furry Lewis, producer Jim Dickinson, Alex Chilton, pro wrestling, photographer Bill Eggleston, fife & drum bands, the Panther Burns, integration, and other disparate elements form a compelling narrative of outsiders, misfits, and rock ’n’ roll in this classic chronicle of the subterranean Memphis music scene. Robert believes that if you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much space. He should feel right at home with the Troubled Men. Topics include a virtual gala, a swingers convention recap, a new campaign platform, the Hard Rock demo, the Ring Room reopening, a new monolith, the flaw in the grain, a teenage quest, Mudboy and the Neutrons, Randall Lyons, a childhood memory, the N.O.-Memphis-Baltimore axis, Barbarian Records, a rule of thumb, Jack White’s Third Man Books, a letter of complaint, the ladies, sage advice, a film career, “The Best of Enemies,” the end of civility, an alternative strategy, “Stranded in Canton,” the Quaalude ‘70s, TeleVista, Pat Rainer, Tav Falco, Lee Baker, ghosts, lessons to learn, 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 music: “Frank, This Is It” by Cliff Jackson and Jillian Delk with the Naturals; Outro music: “Memphis Tennessee” by Jerry Lawler; both from the companion compilation to “It Came from Memphis,” produced by Robert Gordon

Troubled Men Podcast
TMP 133 Robert Gordon: A Writer on the Edge

Troubled Men Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2020 73:36


The Grammy-winning author and filmmaker's landmark book, “It Came from Memphis,” has just been reissued in a 25th anniversary revised edition. The cultural collisions between bluesman Furry Lewis, producer Jim Dickinson, Alex Chilton, pro wrestling, photographer Bill Eggleston, fife & drum bands, the Panther Burns, integration, and other disparate elements form a compelling narrative of outsiders, misfits, and rock 'n' roll in this classic chronicle of the subterranean Memphis music scene. Robert believes that if you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much space. He should feel right at home with the Troubled Men. Topics include a virtual gala, a swingers convention recap, a new campaign platform, the Hard Rock demo, the Ring Room reopening, a new monolith, the flaw in the grain, a teenage quest, Mudboy and the Neutrons, Randall Lyons, a childhood memory, the N.O.-Memphis-Baltimore axis, Barbarian Records, a rule of thumb, Jack White's Third Man Books, a letter of complaint, the ladies, sage advice, a film career, “The Best of Enemies,” the end of civility, an alternative strategy, “Stranded in Canton,” the Quaalude ‘70s, TeleVista, Pat Rainer, Tav Falco, Lee Baker, ghosts, lessons to learn, 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 music: “Frank, This Is It” by Cliff Jackson and Jillian Delk with the Naturals; Outro music: “Memphis Tennessee” by Jerry Lawler; both from the companion compilation to “It Came from Memphis,” produced by Robert Gordon Audio Triage: Casey McAllister

Blues Disciples
Show 98

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2020 68:09


  Show 98 – Recorded 9-26-20 This podcast features 13 outstanding blues artists and 13 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from 1927 – 2019. Our featured artists are: Etta James, Furry Lewis, Willie Brown, Muddy Waters, James “Son” Thomas, Precious Bryant, Jimmy Hall, Memphis Minnie, Joe Callicott, Howlin’ Wolf, Janis Joplin, Watermelon Slim, Washington Phillips.

Blues Disciples
Show 98

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2020 68:09


  Show 98 – Recorded 9-26-20 This podcast features 13 outstanding blues artists and 13 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded from 1927 – 2019. Our featured artists are: Etta James, Furry Lewis, Willie Brown, Muddy Waters, James “Son” Thomas, Precious Bryant, Jimmy Hall, Memphis Minnie, Joe Callicott, Howlin’ Wolf, Janis Joplin, Watermelon Slim, Washington Phillips.

חיים של אחרים עם ערן סבאג
39 שנים למותו של פורי לואיס • Furry Lewis

חיים של אחרים עם ערן סבאג

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2020 3:53


haimaherim Mon, 14 Sep 2020 19:00:00 GMT no 233

פגישה אישית
39 שנים למותו של פורי לואיס • Furry Lewis

פגישה אישית

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2020 3:53


haimaherim Mon, 14 Sep 2020 19:00:00 GMT no 233

Blues Disciples
Show 83

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2020 58:35


  Show 83 – Recorded 6-7-20 This podcast features and interview with Blues Historian, Mr Roger Brown regarding his and Blues historian, discoverer and talent genius Mr George Mitchell’s field recordings in and around Memphis, Tennessee in June of 1962. There they found and recorded Blues Legends Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, Gus Cannon, Charlie Burse and Will’s wife Jennie Mae Clayton Shade. Throughout the interview, we play 14 brilliant recordings of these great early blues artists.

Blues Disciples
Show 83

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2020 58:35


  Show 83 – Recorded 6-7-20 This podcast features and interview with Blues Historian, Mr Roger Brown regarding his and Blues historian, discoverer and talent genius Mr George Mitchell’s field recordings in and around Memphis, Tennessee in June of 1962. There they found and recorded Blues Legends Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, Gus Cannon, Charlie Burse and Will’s wife Jennie Mae Clayton Shade. Throughout the interview, we play 14 brilliant recordings of these great early blues artists.

Blues Disciples
Show 82

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2020 62:08


  Show 82 – Recorded 5-30-20 This podcast features 20 blues performances by 8 great artists. The excellent blues artists we showcase here are Piano Red, Jimmy Reed, Will Shade, Furry Lewis, Abe McNeil, Sleepy John Estes, Buddy Moss and Jesse Mae Hemphill.

Blues Disciples
Show 82

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2020 62:08


  Show 82 – Recorded 5-30-20 This podcast features 20 blues performances by 8 great artists. The excellent blues artists we showcase here are Piano Red, Jimmy Reed, Will Shade, Furry Lewis, Abe McNeil, Sleepy John Estes, Buddy Moss and Jesse Mae Hemphill.

Blues Disciples
Show 80

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2020 66:02


  Show 80 – Recorded 5-16-20 This podcast features Great blues artists discovered and or recorded by the legendary music historian, discoverer, promoter and producer, Mr George Mitchell with excerpts from prior podcasts 64, 65 and 66. The musical artists we showcase here are Jesse Mae Hemphill & James Shorter, Robert Nighthawk, Jimmy Lee Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell & Johnny Woods, Libby Rae Watson, The Other Robert Johnson, RL Burnside, Houston & Sara Mae Stovall, John Lee Zeigler, Furry Lewis, Precious Bryant, Dewey Corley & Walter Miller, Cecil Barfield.

Blues Disciples
Show 80

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2020 66:02


  Show 80 – Recorded 5-16-20 This podcast features Great blues artists discovered and or recorded by the legendary music historian, discoverer, promoter and producer, Mr George Mitchell with excerpts from prior podcasts 64, 65 and 66. The musical artists we showcase here are Jesse Mae Hemphill & James Shorter, Robert Nighthawk, Jimmy Lee Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell & Johnny Woods, Libby Rae Watson, The Other Robert Johnson, RL Burnside, Houston & Sara Mae Stovall, John Lee Zeigler, Furry Lewis, Precious Bryant, Dewey Corley & Walter Miller, Cecil Barfield.

Blues Disciples
Show 78

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2020 62:43


  Show 78 – Recorded 5-2-20 This podcast features an interview with the excellent blues lady Ms Libby Rae Watson with stories about her mentors and blues legends Sam Chatmon, Furry Lewis, Son Thomas and Big Joe Williams. You’ll hear classic blues songs from those four legends and eight of Libby Rae’s great recordings plus an amazing recording from Mississippi Fred McDowell and blues harp extraordinaire Johnny Woods.

Blues Disciples
Show 78

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2020 62:43


  Show 78 – Recorded 5-2-20 This podcast features an interview with the excellent blues lady Ms Libby Rae Watson with stories about her mentors and blues legends Sam Chatmon, Furry Lewis, Son Thomas and Big Joe Williams. You’ll hear classic blues songs from those four legends and eight of Libby Rae’s great recordings plus an amazing recording from Mississippi Fred McDowell and blues harp extraordinaire Johnny Woods.

Blues Disciples
Show 76

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2020 60:33


  Show 76 – Recorded 4-18-20 This podcast provides 12 performances of blues songs performed by 12 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1942 to 2012. The blues artists featured are: Alabama Shakes, Albert Macon & Robert Thomas, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Cora Fluker, Big Bill Broonzy, Algia Mae Hinton, Booker T Laury, Cedell Davis, Etta Baker, Albert Collins, Big Head Todd and The Monsters with John Lee Hooker, Furry Lewis.

Blues Disciples
Show 76

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2020 60:33


  Show 76 – Recorded 4-18-20 This podcast provides 12 performances of blues songs performed by 12 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1942 to 2012. The blues artists featured are: Alabama Shakes, Albert Macon & Robert Thomas, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Cora Fluker, Big Bill Broonzy, Algia Mae Hinton, Booker T Laury, Cedell Davis, Etta Baker, Albert Collins, Big Head Todd and The Monsters with John Lee Hooker, Furry Lewis.

Blues Disciples
Show 63

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 13, 2020 60:33


Show 63 – Recorded 1-11-20. This podcast provides 15 performances of blues songs performed by 15 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1959 to 2018. These blues artists are: Houston & Sara Mae Stovall, Susan Tedeschi, RL Burnside, Bud Grant, The Staple Singers, Furry Lewis, Ry Cooder, Bettye LaVette, Willie Foster, Cora Fluker, Country Joe Callicot, Lucinda Williams, Junior Wells, Albert Macon & Robert Thomas, Sue Foley & Billy Gibbons.  

Blues Disciples
Show 63

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 13, 2020 60:33


Show 63 – Recorded 1-11-20. This podcast provides 15 performances of blues songs performed by 15 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1959 to 2018. These blues artists are: Houston & Sara Mae Stovall, Susan Tedeschi, RL Burnside, Bud Grant, The Staple Singers, Furry Lewis, Ry Cooder, Bettye LaVette, Willie Foster, Cora Fluker, Country Joe Callicot, Lucinda Williams, Junior Wells, Albert Macon & Robert Thomas, Sue Foley & Billy Gibbons.  

Ruta 61
Ruta 61 - Recetas para comer y cantar - 13/01/20

Ruta 61

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2020 59:41


Héctor Martínez, músico, ingeniero, historiador en ciernes, y presidente de la Sociedad de Blues de Madrid, es el autor del premiado libro de recetas "Comer y Cantar. Soul Food & Blues" (2019. Ediciones Lenoir). Es también nuestro invitado en la presente edición de Ruta 61. Con arreglo al desarrollo de su libro, Héctor nos presenta algunas de las recetas tradicionales de la cocina sureña recogidas en el recetario, todas ellas probadas por él mismo, intercalándose con temas de blues relacionados con estos platos, algunos de los cuales son muy conocidos gracias precisamente a estas canciones. Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It – Junior Wells; Jambalaya (On the Bayou) – Johnny Copeland; Jambalaya – Big Mama Montse & 30s Band; Jambalaya (On the Bayou) – Hank Williams; Get ‘Em From the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts) - Lil Johnson; Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer) – Bessie Smith; Beans and Cornbread - Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five; They’re Red Hot – Robert Johnson; Gumbo Blues – Smiley Lewis; Red Beans and Rice – Kokomo Arnold; Catfish Blues – Robert Petway; Jellyroll – Furry Lewis; Jambalaya (On the Bayou) – Professor Longhair. Escuchar audio

Memphis Machine
Season 4, Ep. 5: Steve Selvidge

Memphis Machine

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2019 66:04


Steve Selvidge was born into Memphis music. His earliest musical influence was his father, Sid Selvidge, a folk blues musician and gifted singer who was known for his solo performances, for playing with Furry Lewis, and for his longtime association with Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait in the supergroup Mudboy and the Neutrons. To this day, Steve continues the tradition, keeping their repertoire alive with the group Sons of Mudboy, alongside Jimmy Crosthwait, Luther and Cody Dickinson, Ben Baker, and extended Mudboy family members.Co-founder of 1990’s era psychedelic funk group Big Ass Truck, Steve is known for his virtuosity on the guitar, his voice, and his ability to fully engage an audience, whether he’s playing blistering rock guitar solos at sold out concerts on big stages or singing folk blues favorites in a tiny, packed bar in Memphis. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, and on late night shows with David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Jools Holland. As a touring musician for the past 25 years, he’s played across the United States, Europe, and Australia. As a session musician, he’s played guitar on more than 60 albums. He is currently a member of the Brooklyn based group The Hold Steady

Blues Disciples
Show 46

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2019 63:09


  Show 46 – Recorded 8-24-19 We start out with an interview with Jontavious Willis and this podcast provides 12 performances of blues songs performed by 10 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1929 to 2019. These blues artists are: Jontavious Willis, Memphis Minnie, Chris Thomas King, Freddie King, Blind Willie McTell, James Booker, Furry Lewis, Al Green, Frank Stokes, Ernest Little Son Joe Lawlers      

Blues Disciples
Show 46

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2019 63:09


  Show 46 – Recorded 8-24-19 We start out with an interview with Jontavious Willis and this podcast provides 12 performances of blues songs performed by 10 blues artists or groups whose tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from 1929 to 2019. These blues artists are: Jontavious Willis, Memphis Minnie, Chris Thomas King, Freddie King, Blind Willie McTell, James Booker, Furry Lewis, Al Green, Frank Stokes, Ernest Little Son Joe Lawlers      

Blues Unlimited - The Radio Show
R. Crumb's "Heroes of the Blues" (Part 2) (Hour 2)

Blues Unlimited - The Radio Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2019 60:17


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

Blues Unlimited - The Radio Show
R. Crumb's "Heroes of the Blues" (Part 2) (Hour 1)

Blues Unlimited - The Radio Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2019 59:51


The eBook version of “The Amazing Secret History of Elmore James” will officially be released July 1st, 2019. Available from the Amazon Kindle Store at https://tinyurl.com/yy6vlsv3 and from Apple Books at https://tinyurl.com/y4ql53s2 In 1980, the good folks at Yazoo Records issued a box set of 36 trading cards called "The Heroes of the Blues," with drawings by legendary illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb, and text by noted researcher and author Stephen Calt. They've long been favorites with Blues fans, and on this program (the second of three) we continue our exploration of "The Heroes of the Blues." Among the featured artists on this program are Furry Lewis, Big Bill Broonzy, The Rev. Gary Davis, Cannon's Jug Stompers, the Memphis Jug Band, Skip James, and many more. Pictured: One of the "Heroes of the Blues" featured on this episode. Illustration by R. Crumb. Are you looking for ways to promote your band’s latest release, product, business, or service? Advertise on the podcast that’s been downloaded over one million times, and reach a global audience of blues lovers! Contact us at bluesunlimited at gmail dot com for more details! This episode is available commercial free and in its original full-fidelity high quality audio exclusively to our subscribers at Bandcamp. Your annual subscription of $27 a year will go directly to support this radio show, and you’ll gain INSTANT DOWNLOAD ACCESS to this and more than 170 other episodes from our extensive archive as well. More info is at http://bluesunlimited.bandcamp.com/subscribe

Blues Syndicate
Especial furry lewis 679

Blues Syndicate

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2019 64:52


ESPECIAL FURRY LEWIS Walter E. "Furry" Lewis nacio en Greenwood, Mississippi el 6 de de 1893, esta fecha no esta totamente clara y falleció el 14 de septiembre de 1981, fue un guitarrista de blues de Memphis, Tennessee y fue uno de los primeros de los antiguos músicos de blues la década de 1920 en tener una recompensa en forma de grabación y conciertos cuando se reactivo el blues en el revaival del folk blues en la decada de 1960.

Blues Syndicate
Especial furry lewis 679

Blues Syndicate

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2019 64:52


ESPECIAL FURRY LEWIS Walter E. "Furry" Lewis nacio en Greenwood, Mississippi el 6 de de 1893, esta fecha no esta totamente clara y falleció el 14 de septiembre de 1981, fue un guitarrista de blues de Memphis, Tennessee y fue uno de los primeros de los antiguos músicos de blues la década de 1920 en tener una recompensa en forma de grabación y conciertos cuando se reactivo el blues en el revaival del folk blues en la decada de 1960.

Memphis Musicology
S2E8: Furry & Sid

Memphis Musicology

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2018


On this episode of Memphis Musicology, we discuss the unique friendship that existed between blues legend Furry Lewis and folk singer Sid Selvidge, two musicians who navigated their vast differenced to forge one of the most storied partnerships in Memphis music history. We also head to The Crate to discuss Alex Chilton’s divisive solo album “Like Flies on Sherbert,” a messy, free-wheeling collection of songs whose merits are still debated to this day.SPONSOR:Subscribe to the FREE Choose 901 newsletter TODAY @ www.Choose901.com/OAM

furry crate oam alex chilton sherbert furry lewis choose901 free choose memphis musicology
Blues Disciples
Show 15

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2018 58:36


Show 15 – Recorded 9-16-18 This podcast provides 13 performances of blues songs performed by 13 musical artists who's tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from the 1930's up to the early 2002.  These artists are: Leonard Cohen, Lightnin Hopkins, Little Walter, Furry Lewis, Big George Brock, Howlin Wolf, Joe Cocker & Mad Dogs […]

Blues Disciples
Show 15

Blues Disciples

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2018 58:36


Show 15 – Recorded 9-16-18 This podcast provides 13 performances of blues songs performed by 13 musical artists who’s tremendous talent is highlighted here. Performances range from the 1930’s up to the early 2002.  These artists are: Leonard Cohen, Lightnin Hopkins, Little Walter, Furry Lewis, Big George Brock, Howlin Wolf, Joe Cocker & Mad Dogs & Englishmen, Dr John, Hubert Sumlin, Slim Harpo, Memphis Minnie, Taj Mahal, Jimmy Duck Holmes  

Martin Bandyke Under Covers | Ann Arbor District Library
Martin Bandyke Under Covers for August 2018: Martin Bandyke interviews Robert Gordon, author of Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown.

Martin Bandyke Under Covers | Ann Arbor District Library

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2018 27:00


From the publisher: The fabled city of Memphis has been essential to American music-home of the blues, the birthplace of rock and roll, a soul music capital. We know the greatest hits, but celebrated author Robert Gordon takes us to the people and places history has yet to record. A Memphis native, he whiles away time in a crumbling duplex with blues legend Furry Lewis, stays up late with barrelhouse piano player Mose Vinson, and sips homemade whiskey at Junior Kimbrough's churning house parties. A passionate listener, he hears modern times deep in the grooves of old records by Lead Belly and Robert Johnson. The interconnected profiles and stories in Memphis Rent Party convey more than a region. Like mint seeping into bourbon, Gordon gets into the wider world. He beholds the beauty of mistakes with producer Jim Dickinson (Replacements, Rolling Stones), charts the stars with Alex Chilton (Box Tops, Big Star), and mulls the tragedy of Jeff Buckley's fatal swim. Gordon's Memphis inspires Cat Power, attracts Townes Van Zandt, and finds James Carr always singing at the dark end of the street. A rent party is when friends come together to hear music, dance, and help a pal through hard times; it's a celebration in the face of looming tragedy, an optimism when the wolf is at the door. Robert Gordon finds mystery in the mundane, inspiration in the bleakness, and revels in the individualism that connects these diverse encounters. Martin’s interview with Robert Gordon was recorded on May 1, 2018.

Skylight Books Author Reading Series
Robert Gordon, "MEMPHIS RENT PARTY"

Skylight Books Author Reading Series

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2018 70:45


Memphis: the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll, soul music capital, and home of the blues, this fabled city has played a major role in American music history. In his new book Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown, celebrated writer and documentary filmmaker Robert Gordon taps into the lesser-known characters of Memphis who have inspired and influenced popular music, from the 1970s into the present. With interwoven stories and profiles, Memphis Rent Party begins where the greatest hits end. Gordon charts his own musical coming-of-age as he befriends blues legend Furry Lewis, Rolling Stones’ accompanist Jim Dickinson, and the high priest of indie rock, Alex Chilton. He mulls the tragedy of Jeff Buckley’s fatal swim, chronicles the power struggle to profit off singer-songwriter Robert Johnson’s legacy after his mysterious early death, and sips homemade whiskey at revolutionary blues guitarist Junior Kimbrough’s churning house parties. Gordon’s march through the city’s famed recording studios and juke joints captures the spirit of Memphis and illuminates its musical legacy that lives on today. As with the rent parties from which the book takes its name—people gathering to hear live music, dance, and chip in to help a friend in hard times—Memphis Rent Party offers moments of celebration in the face of tragedy, optimism when the wolf is at the door. Gordon finds inspiration in life’s bleakness, art in the shadows of society, and revels in the individualism of these music legends.

DittyTV
Robert Gordon

DittyTV

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2018 65:47


Visit our new Podcast/Audio portal at http://dittytvradio.com for 24/7 audio music entertainment and our complete catalog of on demand podcasts. Memphis author Robert Gordon sits down with Alex Greene to discuss his new book "Memphis Rent Party", digging into personal experiences with Furry Lewis and Alex Chilton, and partying in the Memphis in the 80s.

Maker's Mic Podcast
EPISODE 13: PATRICK SWEANY

Maker's Mic Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2018 55:05


Our guest this episode is Patrick Sweany. Patrick is keeping the blues alive and real by carrying on the styles of the musicians that came before him, like Hound Dog Taylor, Furry Lewis, and the like. He also spent some time jamming alongside a young Dan Auerbach. Patrick’s new album titled, “Ancient Noise” was produced and engineered by Matt Ross-Spang at legendary Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis, Tennessee.

30Aradio
30A Show with Kent DuChaine

30Aradio

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2017 11:22


What an honor to get this session at the 2017 30A Songwriter Festival main stage at Grand Boulevard. For fifty years, Kent DuChaine has traveled around the globe with "Leadbessie," his duct-taped 1934 National Steel Guitar. Over the decades, DuChaine has shared the stage with such music icons as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, Koko Taylor, B.B. King, Albert and Freddie King, Willie Dixon, Bukka White, Robert JR Lockwood, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Furry Lewis and Son House. In 1989, DuChaine teamed up with Johnny Shines, a man who spent more than three years on-the-road with the mythical Robert Johnson in the 1930s. Together, DuChaine and Shines recorded “Back to the Country,” which won the coveted WC Handy Award for "Best Country Blues Album." They were invited by the Smithsonian Institute to perform at the 25th Annual Festival of American Folklife, resulting in the Grammy-nominated, “Roots of Rhythm & Blues: A Tribute to the Robert Johnson Era.” www.kentduchaine.com

Beale Street Caravan
#2117 - Furry Lewis, Bukka White, & Sleepy John Estes

Beale Street Caravan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2017 58:31


This week we're featuring historical concert recordings from Bukka White, Furry Lewis, and Sleepy John Estes. These recordings are taken from the Memphis Blues Caravan tours of the early 1970's during the revival of each of these legendary musician's careers. Also this week we begin a new series from BSC contributor, Adam Hill. We are calling it Made in Memphis, and it's presented by Ardent Studios. Made in Memphis will be taking you behind the scenes to see how some of the most influential records in the world were made.

Making History
Jazz in the Trenches, Woad, Notting Hill Carnival

Making History

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2016 27:51


Tom Holland is joined by Dr Lucy Robinson from the University of Sussex to consider jazz in the trenches, woad and the women behind the Notting Hill Carnival. Helen Castor meets Dr Michael Hammond, Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, to hear about Blues in the Trenches. Dr Hammond argues that 'the blues' as a musical tradition was brought to the trenches of the Great War by African-American soldiers from all parts of the US and they shared different performance styles and traditions - creating cross-pollinations that foreshadow the country blues recordings of the 1920s and 30s by Charley Patton, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, Geechie Wiley, Ma Rainey, Elvey Thomas, Blind Willie Johnson and notable others. Closer to home, on the banks of the River Thames, Iszi Lawrence traces the origins of today's craze for tattoos and body art back to the Celts, when she learns to make woad. On the eve of the Notting Hill Carnival, comic Ava Vidal nominates the activist, feminist, socialist and founder of the Carnival Claudia Jones for the Making History plinth. Producer: Nick Patrick A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Las personas del verbo
Las Personas del Verbo. 2 de junio de 2013

Las personas del verbo

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2013 58:33


POETA EN NUEVA YORK, ¿una primera edición en 2013? Conversación con Andrew A. Anderson. Viñetas musicales: Louis Armstrong, Libertad Lamarque, Hank Williams, Lightnin' Hopkins, Bessie Smith y Furry Lewis.

Tapestry of the Times

Bedouin singing from the deserts of Sinai; Bottle-neck slide-guitar from Memphis blues man Furry Lewis; 1940’s vintage jazz from Mary Lou Williams; vocal harmonies from The Democratic Republic of Congo; a devotional song from Indo-Caribbean immigrants in Queens, New York.

Bluesblog
01 - Der Begriff Blues

Bluesblog

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2010


Erstmal hallo und herzlich willkommen zu meinem Blog zum Thema Blues. Ich habe schon etwas länger vor, meine Gedanken zu dieser Musikrichtung und allem was dazu gehört herauszulassen. Hier nun mein erster Beitrag. Zunächst soll es um den Begriff "Blues" selber gehen, denn ich war schon sehr oft auf Konzerten, wo die Kategorisierung "Blues" in einschlägigen Stadtmagazinen benutzt wurde, aber, wie sich dann herausstellte, hatte das Gehörte für mein Empfinden nichts mit Blues zu tun, wenn man davon absieht, dass letztlich fast alle populäre Musik im Blues verwurzelt ist. Sogar Blackmetal, jaja, denn Black Sabbath (die Band gilt gemeinhin als Urband des Heavy Metal) hat auch als Bluesband angefangen. Offensichtlich kursieren sehr unterschiedliche Auffassungen darüber, was Blues ist und was nicht. Ein erstes Missverständnis könnte man bei Teenagerparties provozieren, indem man, wenn "Blues" gefordert wird, in der Hoffnung dem anderen Geschlecht körperlich näherzukommen, eine B.B. King-Platte auflegt. "Wieso, ist doch Blues, weiß gar nicht was ihr habt." Ist schon klar, dass mit "Blues" hier "Blues tanzen" gemeint ist, außerdem erntet man bei solcher vorsätzlichen Frohsinnminderung mit Sicherheit Unmut, ist mir schon passiert. War aber nur Spaß. Nun aber mal im Ernst: ursprünglich entstanden ist das Wort "Blues" aus der Attribuierung "blue" in Bezug auf die persönliche Gemütslage. "Feeling blue" beschreibt eine melancholische, schwermütige oder gar traurige Stimmung, die, um das gängigste Klischee zu bedienen, meist durch Liebeskummer hervorgerufen wird. Selbstverständlich sind auch andere Auslöser dieser Stimmung zu benennen, auch wenn Son House einst formulierte: "The Blues is always about male and female." Geldnot, Ernteausfall, Heimweh und ähnliches sind einige Beispiele dafür. Eine andere Theorie zur Entstehung des Begriffes ist die, dass "Blues" ein aus "blue devils" zusammengezogenes Wort sei. Demzufolge müsste die oft verwendete Phrase "I got the blues" soviel bedeuten wie "Ich habe die blauen Teufel (in mir)". Zunächst, dass heißt beginnend mit dem ersten belegten Stück, welches das Wort "Blues" im Titel enthält (Memphis Blues von W. C. Handy, 1912), bis mindestens in die 20er Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts hinein, bezeichnet "Blues" noch keine eigene musikalische Stilrichtung, sondern bezieht sich auf den getexteten Inhalt des jeweiligen Musikstücks. Auch wenn es gängige Praxis ist, die Mitglieder der Mississippi Sheiks als Bluesmusiker zu bezeichnen, so wird jedoch dadurch die Stilvielfalt der eigentlichen Musik deutlich beschnitten. Gospel, Balladen, Ragtimes und Tanzmusik sind ebenso im Repertoire wie einige Blues. Dies gilt auch für viele andere Urväter und -mütter wie Papa Charlie Jackson, Charlie Patton, die Memphis Jug Band, Mance Lipscomb, Furry Lewis und vor allem Leadbelly. Daher ist es aus meiner Sicht zutreffender, das Genre als afroamerikanische Volksmusik zu bezeichnen. Betrachtet man die grandes dames des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith und Ida Cox) so kann dort eher von einer Vorform oder einer frühen Spielart des Jazz gesprochen werden, und das nicht nur weil ein gewisser Louis Armstrong auf einigen frühen "Blues" zu hören ist. Wenn also die genannten Sängerinnen Bluesmusik gemacht haben, muss das bedeuten, dass Blues auch der Ursprung vom Jazz ist, was, glaube ich, die Jazzenthusiasten unter Umständen stören könnte. Meine Meinung dazu ist ohnehin die, dass Jazz und Blues analog zu Affen und Menschen den gleichen Ursprung haben, und nicht dass das eine sich aus dem anderen entwickelt hat. Um die Jazzfreunde wieder etwas zu besänftigen, wird in dem Bild der Blues dem Affen zugeordnet, da die Musikform auch als die primitivere gilt, was den musikalischen Gehalt anbelangt. Vielleicht sind dann die Damen doch das evolutionäre Bindeglied? Blues als Stilbezeichnung ist erst eindeutig in dem Moment, wo die Interpreten nahezu ausschließlich "Blues" singen, denn in diesem Moment werden stilistische Gemeinsamkeiten offenbar. Songlisten von Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson und Son House können so gelesen werden. Es ist weit verbreitet diese Musiker dem Deltablues zuzuordnen. Diese Präzisierung ist aber nur zulässig, wenn die Musiker tatsächlich aus dem Mississippi-Delta kommen, denn viele Musiker, die einen ähnlichen Stil spielen, kommen aus anderen Regionen der USA, womit sich die Differenzierung auf die regionale Ebene bezieht. Also: Lightnin' Hopkins - Texas Blues, Blind Boy Fuller - Piedmont Style und Buddy Moss - Atlanta Blues. Will man alle diese Künstler zusammenfassen macht eine andere Kategorie Sinn: Country-Blues. Das darf insofern nicht missverstanden werden, als dass der Begriff nicht eine Mischung aus Country- und Bluesmusik meint, sondern beschreibt, dass der Stil aus einer ländlichen Umgebung stammt. Zwar sind sich Country und Blues in den 20er und 30er Jahren musikalisch bisweilen nicht unähnlich, allerdings sind bis auf ganz wenige Ausnahmen die Interpreten der einen Gattung Euroamerikaner und die der anderen Afroamerikaner. Da das soziokulturelle Umfeld von Musik für mein Dafürhalten immer mit einbezogen werden sollte, muss also Countryblues von Countrymusik getrennt werden. Dem Countryblues gegenüber steht ab den späten 40er Jahren der urbane Blues, der weitestgehend synonym ist mit Chicagoblues. Auch hier muss aber regional differenziert werden, denn es gibt auch einen Detroit-Sound, einen Memphis-Sound und einen Westcoast-Sound. Der ohrenfälligste Unterschied zwischen urbanem und ländlichem Blues ist, dass der urbane mit elektrisch verstärkten Instrumenten gespielt wird, während der ländliche unplugged gespielt wird. Desweiteren verschwindet zunehmend das Anhängsel "Blues" in den Songtiteln. Der Blick auf die Rückseite eines Muddy Waters-Albums bestätigt das. Ab den 60er Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts entsteht eine Stilrichtung, die als Bluesrock bezeichnet wird. Auch hier schadet eine Prüfung nicht, wenn die Frage gestellt wird, spielen Johnny Winter, Canned Heat und später Stevie Ray Vaughan Rock mit Bluesanleihen oder doch eher Blues mit Rockattitüde? Ich denke eindeutig letzteres, weshalb Rockblues zutreffender wäre, zumal damit auch ein Unterschied zu tatsächlichem Bluesrock von z.B. ZZ Top, Ten Years After, Fleetwood Mac und Humble Pie geschaffen wäre. Ich weiß, dass erscheint alles ein bisschen haarspalterisch, aber das ist eben die Sache mit dem Wollpullover und der Pulloverwolle. Ist es nun Wolle oder ein Pullover? Unverfänglich ist demzufolge die Schreibweise Blues/Rock, wenn deutlich gemacht werden will, dass die Musik eine Kombination aus beidem ist, oder aber weder dem einen noch dem anderen eindeutig zugeordnet werden kann. Um die eingangs erwähnte Kritik an den unpräzisen und zum Teil unpassenden Angaben in Konzertankündigungen aufzugreifen, erscheint mir der subjektive Eindruck, dass bei den meisten Blues/Rock-Sessions kaum Blues präsentiert wird, zutreffend. Ein Sweet Home Chicago steht oft ziemlich einsam den ganzen Sweet Home Alabamas, In A White Rooms und After Midnights gegenüber. Es wird klar, dass der Begriff "Blues" nicht leicht zu fassen ist, da er vielfach verwendet wird. Der Klammerblues in der Disco, der Blues des von einer Midlifecrisis gebeutelten Piloten und der Musikstil sind dabei nur die verbreitetsten, wobei ein ganz wichtiges aber irgendwie banales Muster bisher gänzlich vernachlässigt wurde, nämlich die Verwendung von "Blues" als "die Blauen", wie die Spieler des FC Chelsea auch genannt werden. Aber auch in Bezug auf die Musik selbst ist die Kategorisierung "Blues" nicht unproblematisch, da sich wie oben aufgezeigt eine Vielzahl an Substilen identifizieren lassen, die sich mitunter arg voneinander unterscheiden und sich mit anderen Stilen vermischen. Das Kollaborat von R. L. Burnside mit der Jon Spencer Blues Explosion hat klanglich sicherlich wenig gemein mit den Aufnahmen von Blind Boy Fuller mit Sonny Terry. Noch schwieriger wird es natürlich, wenn Puristen von "wahrem" Blues sprechen, da ist dann die Platte Still Got The Blues von Gary Moore mit Sicherheit ausgeschlossen (aus meiner Sicht zurecht, aber lassen wir meine persönliche Abneigung gegenüber Gary Moore besser außer acht). Kurzum ich denke, dass sich jeder Mensch ohnehin sein eigenes musikalisches Schubladensystem zurechtlegt, anhand dessen Musik geordnet wird. Für mich ist und bleibt Blues eine Volksmusik und eine Popularmusik afroamerikanischen Ursprungs. In diesem Sinn Gruß und Blues - Euer Gitarrenwalther

Music From 100 Years Ago
Memphis Minnie and Other Memphis Blues Musicians

Music From 100 Years Ago

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2007 24:53


A tribute to blues singer and guitarist, Memphis Minnie.Songs Include: In My Girlish Days, When the Levee Breaks, Bumble Bee and Memphis Yo Yo Blues.Artists include: Memphis Minnie, Kansas Joe, Furry Lewis and the Memphis Jug Band.

BackAlleyBlues
Robert Wilkins

BackAlleyBlues

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2006 3:06


Robert Timothy Wilkins was a seminal blues guitarist and vocalist. Of African American and Cherokee descent, he was born January 16, 1896, in Hernando, Mississippi, 21 miles from Memphis, Tennessee. He died May 26, 1987. Wilkins worked in Memphis during the 1920s at the same time as Furry Lewis, Memphis Minnie (whom he claimed to have tutored), and Son House. He also organized a jug band to capitalize on the "jug band craze" then in vogue. Though never attaining success comparable to the Memphis Jug Band, Wilkins reinforced his local popularity with a 1927 appearance on a Memphis radio station. Like Sleepy John Estes (and unlike Gus Cannon of Cannon's Jug Stompers) he recorded alone or with a single accompanist. He sometimes performed as Tim Wilkins or as Tim Oliver (his step-father's name). His best known songs are "That's No Way To Get Along" (covered as "The Prodigal Son" by The Rolling Stones), "Rolling Stone" (covered by Muddy Waters and which inspired The Rolling Stones very name), and "Old Jim Canan's". He became an elder of the Church of God in Christ in the 1930s and began playing gospel music with a blues feel. The "Reverend" Robert Wilkins was rediscovered by blues enthusiasts during the 1960s blues revival, making appearances at folk festivals and recording his gospel blues for a new audience. His distinction was his versatility; he could play ragtime, blues, minstrel songs, and gospel with equal facility

Troubled Men Podcast
TMP 133 Robert Gordon: A Writer on the Edge

Troubled Men Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 1970


The Grammy-winning author and filmmaker's landmark book, "[It Came from Memphis ](https://therobertgordon.com/books#/it-came-from-memphis-updated-and-revised)," has just been reissued in a 25th anniversary revised edition. The cultural collisions between bluesman Furry Lewis, producer Jim Dickinson, Alex Chilton, pro wrestling, photographer Bill Eggleston, fife & drum bands, the Panther Burns, integration, and other disparate elements form a compelling narrative of outsiders, misfits, and rock 'n' roll in this classic chronicle of the subterranean Memphis music scene. Robert believes that if you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much space. He should feel right at home with the Troubled Men. Topics include a virtual gala, a swingers convention recap, a new campaign platform, the Hard Rock demo, the Ring Room reopening, a new monolith, the flaw in the grain, a teenage quest, Mudboy and the Neutrons, Randall Lyons, a childhood memory, the N.O.-Memphis-Baltimore axis, Barbarian Records, a rule of thumb, Jack White's Third Man Books, a letter of complaint, the ladies, sage advice, a film career, “The Best of Enemies,” the end of civility, an alternative strategy, “[Stranded in Canton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1eDzz5fKio),” the Quaalude ‘70s, TeleVista, Pat Rainer, Tav Falco, Lee Baker, ghosts, lessons to learn, and much more. Support the podcast [here.](https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/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 music: “Frank, This Is It” by Cliff Jackson and Jillian Delk with the Naturals; Outro music: “Memphis Tennessee” by Jerry Lawler; both from the companion compilation to “It Came from Memphis,” produced by Robert Gordon Audio Triage: Casey McAllister