Podcasts about Hastings Street

“God said, give 'em drum machines—and see what happens.” That's the dream Mike Huckaby shared, and it's the heartbeat of God Said Give 'Em Drum Machines, the acclaimed documentary by Detroit filmmaker Kristian Hill that restores techno's true story—deeply rooted in Black Detroit creativity, culture, and resilience. “We had a grocery store on Hastings Street. My grandfather ran numbers,” Hill recalls, grounding his storytelling in generations of Detroit legacy, from his grandmother Mabel White teaching home economics at Kettering and cooking for Aretha Franklin, to DJing with friends like Al Ester and parking cars outside Cheeks while legends like Jeff Mills and Stacey Hale spun inside. The film traces the untold journey of techno's pioneers—Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Eddie Fowlkes, Blake Baxter, and Santonio Echols—as Hill and his team follow the music from Detroit to Amsterdam, Japan, South Africa, and even Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, where locals called it “the Detroit of Russia” and clubs pulsed with Detroit's sound. “We got the stars,” Hill says, referring to the Belleville Three and others, “but nobody ever tells the story.” Fueled by years of footage and shaped in long, late-night edit sessions, the documentary is not only a cinematic reclaiming of techno's Black roots but a personal odyssey of creative purpose. “It's not just a link. It's an experience,” Hill emphasizes, reminding audiences that this is more than a movie—it's Detroit history set to a beat that moved the world. Detroit is Different is a podcast hosted by Khary Frazier covering people adding to the culture of an American Classic city. Visit www.detroitisdifferent.com to hear, see and experience more of what makes Detroit different. Follow, like, share, and subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and Sticher. Comment, suggest and connect with the podcast by emailing info@detroitisdifferent.com

Kerala Kitchen - 9386 120 St #103, Surrey Hugo's Mexican kitchen - 19151 Fraser Highway, Surrey Dhaliwals Lounge - #112 – 7938 128 Street, Surrey Chao Mami - 4088 Hastings Street, Burnaby Claudio's Ristorante - 4402 Skyline Dr #103, Burnaby Secret Garden Korean Buffet - 9628 Cameron St, Burnaby Guest: Richard Wolak - Editor/Publisher vancouverfoodster.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GUEST: Carol Lee, Chair of the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cha-ching! New West Councillors express concerns over former mayor's severance. Vancouver Bandits update GUEST: Dylan Kular, President of the Vancouver Bandits Metro Vancouver board chair announces sewage plant review...without telling directors. GUEST: Dylan Kruger, Delta City Councillor 0-100: The rise of the B.C Conservative Party GUEST: John Rustad, Leader of the Conservative Party of B.C  B.C's food industry crisis – Why are firms leaving the province? GUEST: Sylvain Charlebois, Director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University Exploring the rich heritage of Hastings Street and Chinatown GUEST: Carol Lee, Chair of the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join me as I sit down with Rio Capurso from Locale, one of Noosa's most beloved restaurants. From Puglia, Italy to the picturesque Greek Islands and the bustling streets of London, Rio's journey is a great tale. In this episode, we'll delve into how one of Noosa's most successful restaurant ticks and what makes Locale a household name in Noosa's dining scene. We'll talk about the skills required to succeed in the fast-paced hospitality industry, and how family and heritage have, and are shaping Rio's approach to food and community.

Catherine Cangany, Everyday Life on Hastings Street.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lindiwe Coyne performed as Wandering Lucy in the 1990s and her music came out on K Records. Her Discorder cover story is here. Her live set on CiTr's Live from Thunderbird Radio Hell is here. The Malcolm Lowry Room was at 4125 Hastings Street in Burnaby, operated by the writer Michael Turner as a music venue in the mid-1990s. It was previously the North Burnaby Inn, a stripclub. Other venues discussed: The Good Jacket, The Starfish Room, the Treehouse Lounge at the St Regis Hotel, Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, the Blinding Light!, St Michael's Multicultural Anglican Church (409 E Broadway), the Sugar Refinery. Other musicians mentioned:  Bob Wiseman, Bob's your Uncle/Sook Yin Lee, Lisa Marr/cub, the Smugglers, the Colorifics, Built to Spill, Calvin Johnson, Dub Narcotic, Beat Happening, Halo Benders, Mecca Normal, Furnace Face, Trenchmouth, Fitz of Depression, Link, Shadowy Men for a Shadowy Planet, the Sadies, Fifth Column, Phonocomb, July Fourth Toilet, Ticker Tape Parade, Hard Rock Miners, Dan Bejar/Destroyer, Neko Case, DOA. K Records is a legendary independent record label founded in 1982 in Olympia, Washington. Yoyo A Go Go was a festival they put on for the first year in 1994. Thank you to Jean Smith. Music clips used with artist permission Wandering Lucy: Lady Genius from Leap Year (1996, K Records) Mecca Normal: Ribbon from Flood Plain (1993, K Records) Wandering Lucy: I Know One Thing from Leap Year (1996, K Records)      

This week we travel to the world famous Noosa Heads where we take you from the stunning main beach of Noosa to the most beautiful headland walk in the world. I mean where else can you see dolphins swimming in crystal clear water on one side of a hiking track and at the same time look up and see koalas in the trees? After that we take you wandering down the famous main street - Hastings Street - and give you an overview of the glamorous shops, restaurants and bars along the way. We were excited to take a day trip to Habitat Noosa which is a nature lovers delight.  You start at Lake Cootharaba and take a leisurely boat ride through one of only two everglades in the world. The Noosa Everglades is so beautiful, relaxing and quiet and you can definitely capture some amazing photos in the reflective waters.  After the cruise you can try one of their special artesian craft beers in the restaurant and outdoor dining area. Stay listening to the end to hear all about Lyle's participation in the world renown Noosa Triathlon and also the main reason we love Noosa so much and I'm positive you won't guess what that is. Click here to see all the one page summary with pictures, links and maps for this episode: www.beachtravelwine.com/podcast/92/noosa --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leanne-mccabe/message

Vancouver is beautiful except for one little thing. Tickets to Boyle's Canadian shows below VANCOUVERhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/david-boyle-finally-here-tickets-731105936537?aff=oddtdtcreator TORONTOhttps://www.eventbrite.ca/e/david-boyle-backroom-comedy-club-tickets-727186092177?aff=oddtdtcreator

Jen St. Denis is a Vancouver-based journalist for The Tyee, covering housing and city issues with a focus on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Where We Live: The discovery of ghost signs in cities, such as Vancouver, is a delightful yet bittersweet experience.  These signs, painted directly onto buildings in the past, often resurface during development but are usually covered up or destroyed again.  Most of these signs are found in and around Vancouver's downtown area, with examples like an ad for "4X" bread on Hastings Street and an old movie poster for "Grandma's Boy." Guest: John Mackie, Reporter for The Vancouver Sun Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seg 1: When did we start having conversations about sexuality? Sex used to be a taboo subject, and people had no idea about the sexual behaviors of others. Guest: Jonny Thomson, Philosopher and Writer for Big Think Seg 2: Do you drink 8 glasses of water everyday?  Guest: Scott Shantz, Contributor for Mornings with Simi and Steven Cheung, Professor of Kinesiology at Brock University Seg 3: View From Victoria:  BC Ferries scheduled a media briefing to talk about the holiday weekend preparations. The Union says to expect more bad news. We get a local look at the top political stories with the help of Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer. Seg 4: The Government of British Columbia has announced a $20 million investment to support travel assistance for individuals in rural, remote, and smaller communities in BC who require cancer treatment. Guest: Dr. Sandra Krueckl, Executive Vice President of Mission, Information and Support Services at the Canadian Cancer Society Seg 5: Where We Live: The discovery of ghost signs in cities, such as Vancouver, is a delightful yet bittersweet experience. These signs, painted directly onto buildings in the past, often resurface during development but are usually covered up or destroyed again. Most of these signs are found in and around Vancouver's downtown area, with examples like an ad for "4X" bread on Hastings Street and an old movie poster for "Grandma's Boy." Guest: John Mackie, Reporter for The Vancouver Sun Seg 6: Kickin' it with The Caps The Whitecaps finally have a game at home after being on the road for the last 7 games. Guest: Vanni Sartini, Coach of the Vancouver Whitecaps Seg 7: Niki Sharma is addressing a critical shortage of sheriffs that led to 86 court appearances being canceled or delayed this year. Guest: Niki Sharma, Attorney General of British Columbia Seg 8: Two women MLAs from different political parties, Selina Robinson and Elenore Sturko, are advocating for improved protections against online harassment following a wave of death threats and misogynistic abuse they received. Guest: Selina Robinson, Minister of Post-Secondary and Future Skills for the BC NDP Guest: Elenore Sturko, Shadow Minister for Mental Health and Addictions and Recovery for BC United Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hear Neil Breen recap the news of the day, including a man is in critical condition after being shot multiple times by police north of Brisbane this afternoon, plus, police are investigating the murder of an 87-year-old man who was killed on the boardwalk near Noosa Woods at the northern end of Hastings Street at about 6am yesterday. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As an author, he's the final word on Hastings Street myth and lore--the blues, the blood, the boundaries bloated and bemused. When it comes to what Hollywood says, they refer to his books and then twist it up with some glamor that never happened to sell tickets. Cohassey calls their bullshit and bluffs. He talked to those that knew John Lee Hooker, that worked the strip, that knew where the actual clubs were and went behind the scenes. Ahmad Jamal, Yusef Lateef, Elvin Jones, and ...Jack Kerouac? Ernest Hemingway? Neil Young? Back room cross-dressing? Yeah, this one dives deep folks! Soundgarden's Ben Sheppard worships him. You don't want to get John Cohassey started unless you plan to listen--he will give you the real story if you have time to pay attention.  Here in part 2 we get down to particulars with Sunnie Wilson, Hemingway, Joe Louis, and how Hollywood continues to twist Detroit's plot. Listen up now!

As an author, he's the final word on Hastings Street myth and lore--the blues, the blood, the boundaries bloated and bemused. When it comes to what Hollywood says, they refer to his books and then twist it up with some glamor that never happened to sell tickets. Cohassey calls their bullshit and bluffs. He talked to those that knew John Lee Hooker, that worked the strip, that knew where the actual clubs were and went behind the scenes. Ahmad Jamal, Yusef Lateef, Elvin Jones, and ...Jack Kerouac? Ernest Hemingway? Neil Young? Back room cross-dressing? Yeah, this one dives deep folks! Soundgarden's Ben Sheppard worships him. You don't want to get John Cohassey started unless you plan to listen--he will give you the real story if you have time to pay attention. So listen up and dig into Part 1 NOW!

Academics from universities across Canada have issued an open letter calling for an end to the eviction of encampments in Vancouver. The letter is in response to the wholesale removal of tents along Hastings Street that took place in the first week of April. It's addressed to the mayor and council, union and health officials plus members of the provincial government. We talk with Jeff Masuda, Professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria.

Why should open drug use be restricted in public gathering spaces?  Ahmed Yousef, Maple Ridge City Councillor discusses why open drug use should be restricted in public gathering spaces?  Changes to the Strata Property Regulation Ravi Kahlon, Minister of Housing describes changes to Strata Property Regulation If Surrey doesn't want $150 million in policing, other cities do Paul Minhas, New Westminster City Councillor discusses why other municipalities are feeling left out by the provincial government  Surrey police transition discussed in Question Period Richard Zussman, Global BC Legislative Reporter discusses today's hot Question Period topic A vow was broken over the Hastings Street encampment Kareem Allam, Partner at Fairview Strategy and former Chief of Staff for the City of Vancouver describes his views on the Hastings Street decampment. The CMHC sees no return to pre-pandemic home prices Michael Geller, President of The Geller Group, Architect, Planner and Real Estate Consultant discusses a potential return to pre-pandemic home prices The death of the cup fee, and could bag/takeout container fees follow suit? Ian Tostenson, President of the BC Restaurant and Foodservices Association discusses what impact the cup fee may have had in Vancouver Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kareem Allam, Partner at Fairview Strategy and former Chief of Staff for the City of Vancouver describes his views on the Hastings Street decampment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vancouver City Council met this week to consider the recent clearing of the Downtown Eastside tent city on Hastings Street, the sale of wine in grocery stores, a new climate change initiative and the possible sale of an elementary school on the West Side. Redeye Collective member Ian Mass joins us with his City Beat report.

Ken Sim clears Hastings Street and has thoughts on housing. Brenda Locke stands by her interpretation of a meeting. The post E3-1283 A rathaus of mayor brains appeared first on Cambie Report.

Seg 1: Can UV testing stop the rise of maple syrup smuggling in Canada? Guest: Maria Corradini, Co-Author of Study and Associate Professor of Food Science and the Arrell Chair in Food Quality at the University of Guelph Seg 2: Could Mounjaro be the key to tackling obesity? The obesity-drug industry is expected to reach $50 billion annually by 2030 Guest: Dr. Nadia Khan, Professor of Medicine at UBC, Internal Medicine Specialist at St. Paul's Hospital, and Practitioner of Obesity Medicine at Revolution Medical Clinic Seg 3: How can art restoration benefit the future? Art restoration is the process of restoring damaged or deteriorating artworks to their original condition or as close as possible. Guest: Alicia Coutts, Founder and Head Conservator at Toronto Art Restoration Seg 4: How the future of an up-and-coming football player is being impacted by the SFU Varsity Football closure. Guest: Massimo Ryan, Former SFU Football Player Guest: Sandra Crema, Massimo's Mother Seg 5: Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim cites rising fire risks and deteriorating public safety in the homeless encampment on Hastings Street as a turning point Guest: Ken Sim, Mayor of Vancouver Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim cites rising fire risks and deteriorating public safety in the homeless encampment on Hastings Street as a turning point Guest: Ken Sim, Mayor of Vancouver Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tents are back on Hastings street. Surprised? Nicole Mucci - Manager of Media Relations with Union Gospel Mission 

Vancouver removing tents on East Hastings Street today Sarah Blythe, Advocate for the DTES and Executive Director for the Overdose Prevention Society discusses the city of Vancouver's action to remove the 'tent city' on Hastings street. The Vancouver Canadians have been sold to U.S. based Diamond Baseball Holdings Jake Kerr, Chairman of the Vancouver Canadians discusses the sale of the team to U.S. based Diamond Baseball Holdings B.C.'s minimum wage will increase to $16.75 per hour on June 1 Sussanne Skidmore, President of BC Federation of Labour discusses the rise of BC's minimum wage - beginning June 1st  ‘It is unsafe': Vancouver asks police to help end Hastings Street tent encampment Vancouver Police Department Chief Adam Palmers discusses the process taken to remove Vancouver's Hastings Street encampment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hastings street encampment Adam Palmer - VPD Chief Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hastings street encampment Adam Palmer - VPD Chief The mess at the dilapidated 24 Sussex Drive Stefan Novakovic - Senior Editor of Azure Magazine If the cop doesn't show up to court, do you beat the ticket? Kyla Lee - Traffic lawyer, Acumen Law Fossil “fools” debate Marcus Peterson - Fossil Fools Protestor Cody Battershill - Founder of “Canada Action” that is a pro oil and gas advocacy group Burnaby train back in business! Ken Lear - President of BCSME (British Columbia Society of Model Engineers) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Blythe, Advocate for the DTES and Executive Director for the Overdose Prevention Society discusses the city of Vancouver's action to remove the 'tent city' on Hastings street. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vancouver Police Department Chief Adam Palmers discusses the process taken to remove Vancouver's Hastings Street encampment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ongoing DTES encampment sweep Hamish Ballantyne - VANDU Community Organizer Time for some travel news! Claire Newell - Travel Best Bets President/Founder Minimum wage will increase June 1st Ian Tostenson - President/CEO BC Restaurant and Food Association Council's focus on surveillance of non-profit grantees Amanda Burrows - Interim Executive Director, First United Church Community Ministry Society Vancouver asks police to help end Hastings Street tent encampment  Nicole Mucci - Spokesperson, Union Gospel Mission Downtown Van releases 2023 state of downtown report Jane Talbot - Interim President/CEO Downtown Van

Vancouver asks police to help end Hastings Street tent encampment  Nicole Mucci - Spokesperson, Union Gospel Mission

Support Ben on Patreon - patreon.com/benbankas - patrons get access to a weekly bonus podcast and other bonus content. This episode Ben and Armin recount their time in Victoria and Surrey from their friend apartment in Vancouver. Ben talks about how bad Vancouver is to walk around in compared to Toronto and how it's mostly white people with drug addictions who have ruined the city. Asians are Vancouver's only hope. Enjoy the show.

Over 30 years ago, on Friday, July 3, 1992, Lenore Rattray, then 21, was taken at gunpoint from a Hastings Street business in Vancouver to a hideout near Mosquito Creek in North Vancouver. For over a week she was held captive and sexually assaulted by her captor until he was apprehended by North Vancouver RCMP on July 12, 1992. He was sentenced as a Dangerous Offender for violent sexual crimes against four women in BC and finally convicted for a double murder. Lenore, for the last three decades, has chosen to remain silent about her traumatic experience despite the media sensation her abduction/disappearance created at the time. Until now. STAND UP EIGHT - a personal account of survival, living with trauma/PTSD, and how her past experiences have impacted her life both professionally and personally, especially as a mother to her young daughter.

Are the Hastings street sweeps an effective way of tackling the homeless situation? More coverage of China's alleged interference in Canadian elections. Comparing the current state of air travel to the golden age of flying! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On special Black History Month editions of the Talking Michigan Transportation, conversations about the Michigan Department of Transportation's project to transform the I-375 freeway into an at-grade urban boulevard, reconnecting neighborhoods to the east with downtown Detroit. In this episode, retired Detroit Free Press reporter and editor Bill McGraw talks about what he learned in his reporting about the history of the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods on the city's east side. Black business owners and residents were displaced as city administrations dating back to the 1940s pursued an urban renewal plan that included eventual plans for a freeway through the neighborhood. McGraw explains how a once thriving Black business district on Hastings Street, with banks, hospitals, clothing stores, restaurants, and other service providers, was destroyed to make way for development that largely benefitted white developers and residents.  One Detroit Free Press story (paywall) describes in rich detail what was lost: "One of many notable establishments was Sunnie Wilson's sprawling Forest Club, at Forest and Hastings. It featured a 107-foot bar, bowling alley, banquet hall and a two-story roller-skating rink. Beginners went upstairs." Later this week, another podcast episode will feature a conversation with Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who has strong family connections to the neighborhoods, and he talks about what the project means to him. We'll also talk about a major economic development announcement this week that he participated in with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as Ford Motor Co. unveiled plans for a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Marshall, Michigan.

Travel with us to the paradise that is the Noosa Shire. We visit the famous Noosa main beach and the most beautiful headland walk in the world in Noosa National Park. We wander down the famous main street - Hastings Street - and give you an overview of the glamorous shops, restaurants and bars along the way. There are many great restaurants to tempt you in Noosa and we share some of our favourites, including the Noosa Surf club. Noosa accommodation is varied, and we have a couple of favourites, plus we give you some other great options. Noosaville is another popular spot we visit along the Noosa River as well as the Noosa Marina. We take a day trip to Habitat Noosa which is a nature lovers delight. You start at Lake Cootharaba and take a leisurely boat ride through one of only two everglades in the world. The Noosa Everglades is so beautiful, relaxing and quiet and you can definitely capture some amazing photos in the reflective waters. After the cruise you can try one of their special artesian craft beers in the restaurant and outdoor dining area. Next, we visit the Eumundi Markets with over 600 stalls and then enjoy another craft beer at the Imperial Hotel across the road. Listen to the end to hear all about a bonus audio we have done with this episode and also the main reason we love Noosa so much and visit regularly, and I'm positive you won't guess what that is. You can go to show notes here to access the bonus audio www.beachtravelwine.com/39/noosa (hint - it's about Lyle and a world famous event that is held every year in Noosa) Access show notes here. www.beachtravelwine.com/39/noosa Or visit our website at www.beachtravelwine.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leanne-mccabe/message

ALSO: A legislative panel has given Gov. Phil Scott's administration the green light to wind down rental assistance and emergency housing services as federal dollars dry up; Brattleboro's police department is testing a program in which civilians take over roles that had been occupied by police officers; St. Johnsbury police, responding to a report that an individual may have been shot, found a person dead at a Hastings Street home early Wednesday.

In this week's episode, the boys were up to no good as usual . They discuss everything from how deal with confrontational situations to what songs are in their sex playlist. They also dug deep in Providence's sexual exploitations and Daniel's reservations on having a threesome with Providence. They finished off the show with their usual light banter about Provy's encounters with taller women. Enjoy!

Monologue update on the open-air drug market in Vancouver B.C. on E. Hastings Street...

Chapter 1: Hockey Canada appears to be trying to salvage its World Juniors championship as the tournament gets underway in Edmonton. Guest: Dan Mason, Sports culture expert and professor of sport management at the University of Alberta. Chapter 2: If you are trying to avoid your friends and family online, WhatsApp privacy changes may be able to help you out.  Guest: Raji Sohal, Mornings with Simi Contributor Chapter 3: Building cities that are resilient to climate change has become an urgent necessity in the face of extreme weather Guest: Brent Toderian, City planner, Urbanist at TODUrbanWORKS. Former Vancouver chief planner. Chapter 4: City of Vancouver crews began removing homeless encampment tents along Hastings Street on Tuesday and it was not without chaos. Guest: Constable Tania Visitin, Media Relations Officer/ Public Affairs for the Vancouver Police Department Chapter 5: One person has died and another has been transported to the hospital following another daylight shooting in Surrey. Guest: Kim Bolan, Crime Reporter for the Vancouver Sun. Chapter 6: The removal of tents from the Downtown Eastside was done to reduce the risk of fire hazards. But what new risks come about from displacing the people who lived in those tents? Guest: Contributor Raji Sohal interviewed Stepan Wood, Canada Research Chair in Law, Society and Sustainability, Professor Allard School of Law at UBC.

City of Vancouver staff to start removing tents along East Hastings Street. Those living in tents and other makeshift structures on Vancouver's Hastings Street have been warned they'll have to move on, starting today. Guest: Anna Cooper - Staff Lawyer, Pivot Legal Society 

Steffan challenges CD-7 candidate Brittany "SIS" Pettersen to travel to Hastings Street in Vancouver. We'd even do a GundFundMe so cost isn't a factor. Very good BREAKING news out of the U.S. Senate: the PACT Act passes after a deal between Schumer and McConnell. Some House Repubs blocked it last week due to pork. Great call on "SIS" - caller Jason comes up with the GFM slogan: "Brit P Does Brit C." Classic. We bring the sad piano music in for dramatic effect. We wrap with results of our Pelosi-Taiwan poll and more sound.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Celeste Moy, ESQ – Oversees business affairs for the estate of her late sister Sylvia Moy, the honored songwriter and producer best known for her longtime collaborations with Stevie Wonder. Discussing a cover song contest of Motown songs. There separate conversations. Gary discusses plowshare theatre and there upcoming play about Detroit. It's a musical that talks about the history of street that's no longer here.Plowshares Theatre Company, Michigan's only professional African American Theater, to present the world premiere of HASTINGS STREET, an original musical set to jazz about Detroit's Black Bottom community. Detroit cover song competition

Hastings Street is a work that Plowshares Theater Company is in the best position to present. July 21 – 31 at Detroit's Music Hall the company re-launches post-COVID-19 welcoming audiences to a very special show. The show captures the story of the center of Detroit's historic Black Bottom community. The musical captures the essence of Jazz, song, Soul, and much more. In this Detroit is Different feature Gary Anderson that is the Artistic Director of Plowshares Theater Company opens up about this show and much more. Learn about his journey to Detroit and Wayne State University's theater program in the 1980s and Detroit 1980s being an eclectic center. Check out this feature on Gary Anderson and the work of bringing to live theater in Detroit for decades.  Detroit is Different is a podcast hosted by Khary Frazier covering people adding to the culture of an American Classic city. Visit www.detroitisdifferent.com to hear, see and experience more of what makes Detroit different. Follow, like, share, and subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and Sticher. Comment, suggest, and connect with the podcast by emailing info@detroitisdifferent.com Find out more at https://detroit-is-different.pinecast.co Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/detroit-is-different/1d0da29d-3c7d-44e9-b61f-f649e28facf3

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect", and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Just a Mops" by the Mops. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I'm not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ Errata I say "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody". Also I say Spooner Oldham co-wrote "Do Right Woman". I meant Chips Moman. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. I also relied heavily on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You by Matt Dobkin. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Rick Hall's The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame contains his side of the story. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. And the I Never Loved a Man album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode,  I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this. This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny. I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening. Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying "why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue-signalling?" may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well, I won't mind. And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode -- this episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have. When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators -- people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis who did truly reprehensible things -- or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly "this is what happened to me and I want it on the public record". In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim *by others*, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways. But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about. At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her: "When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, “As long as I can approve it before it's published.” “Then it wouldn't be independent,” I said. “Why should it be independent?” “So I can tell the story from my point of view.” “But it's not your story, it's mine.” “You're an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.” “More burden than blessing,” she said." Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy. So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography, and things that she and the people around her did in public situations like recording studios and concert venues. But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about. So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode, incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out. That information is out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it. That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things, that's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because, of course, respect is what this is all about: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Respect"] One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby "Blue" Bland. We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes. He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B.B. King and Johnny Ace, he worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between blues and soul in the fifties and early sixties, with records like "Turn on Your Love Light": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all. It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s. As he said decades later: "Wasn't his words that got me—I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day, couldn't tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church. “‘Since when you so keen on church?' Mama asked. “‘I like that preacher,' I said. “‘Reverend Franklin?' she asked. “‘Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.'" Bland was impressed by C.L. Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians. Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B. King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city. And Bland studied Franklin's records. He said later "I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin." Bland would study Franklin's records, and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest": [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest"] And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's "I Pity the Fool": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "I Pity the Fool"] But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.L. Franklin had on the course of soul music. C.L. Franklin had grown up poor, on a Mississippi farm, and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather. But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on. At the age of sixteen he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher. He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there -- and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analysing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure. But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. He saw blues music and Black church sermons as both being part of the same thing -- a Black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but wasn't the main pastor at any of them. He got married aged twenty, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability. When that marriage failed, in June 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother who had attended Booker T Washington High School, the best Black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughn. While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest Black city in the US. Barbara would later be called "one of the really great gospel singers" by no less than Mahalia Jackson. We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] Rev. Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the Klan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Erma was born in 1938. They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour round multiple churches. He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8AM Sunday School or you'd be forced to stand. He also enrolled for college courses at LeMoyne College. He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist church. Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution, and to see much of the Bible as metaphor. Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L. Franklin. Franklin was a man who had many, many, admirable qualities -- he was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better. He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory. And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life. And so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad. For example in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin, in 1940, fathering a daughter with someone who is described as "a teenager" and "quite young". No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later the age of a girl who was then sixteen *is* given, talking about having known the girl in question, and so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens. Which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time. But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was *twelve years old* when she became pregnant, by C.L. Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways. Twelve years old. And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did -- he was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public. I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being, and I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth. So it's going to sound like he was a truly great man. But bear those facts in mind. Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times. They had three more children together -- Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn -- and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church, in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of Black nightlife in the city, as immortalised in John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Boogie Chillen"] Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights, but that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against Black protestors. Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit he was able to command a very high salary, and not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation. Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying "Once inside, I'm awestruck -- oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I've never seen nothing like that before!" He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money. He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcasts in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax. People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen. Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other Black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach. In 1948 though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband. She took Vaughn with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L. with their father.  But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children -- they would visit her on a regular basis, and stay with her over school holidays. Aretha later said "Despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us." Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women -- C.L. Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children, the ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children. There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the fifties, who had major R&B hits with records like her version of "Cold Cold Heart": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Cold Cold Heart"] Although my own favourite record of hers is "Big Long Slidin' Thing", which she made with arranger Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Big Long Slidin' Thing"] It's about a trombone. Get your minds out of the gutter. Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on young Aretha, but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of C.L. Franklin's many girlfriends. Ward was the longest-lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Rev. Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him. Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson. Where Jackson was an austere performer, who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life, and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion, Ward was a *glamorous* performer, who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head. Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer any more, she was going to devote her life to gospel music. Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket -- and her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to. But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L. Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer, when she saw Ward singing "Peace in the Valley" at a funeral: [Excerpt: Clara Ward, "Peace in the Valley"] As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person -- she became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her. After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers. For Aretha she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is. Doubts self. Some day—to the moon. I love that girl.” Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten, and Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so. Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion -- that she was a desperately private, closed-off, person who would rarely express her emotions at all, and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact. The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music. And music was hugely important in the Franklin household. Most preachers in the Black church at that time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige -- they saw it as a necessary evil, and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them. But Rev. Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe Von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street and also put out records by blues singers: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "I Am Climbing Higher Mountains" ] The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the fifties and sixties, who sang with groups like the Caravans: [Excerpt: The Caravans, "What Kind of Man is This?" ] Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of “Take My Hand Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano -- much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him “He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound”. Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha. And all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cooke, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the Soul Stirrers: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of his Garment"] Young Aretha and her older sister Erma both had massive crushes on Cooke, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it. Aretha later said "When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh... Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight." But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house. One of the major ways that C.L. Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in Black cultural life as gospel music. We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major Black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit. Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests: [Excerpt: Art Tatum, "Tiger Rag"] Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes. Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald. Nat "King" Cole was another regular visitor. The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people -- the most important musicians of the time -- were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer and also an accomplished pianist. Smokey Robinson later said: “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We'd pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I'd recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” C.L. Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe Von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "Dry Bones in the Valley"] Franklin was not a Marxist -- he was a liberal, but like many liberals was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous. For example in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti-colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of Black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of Black Americans. And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as Chess Records picked up the distribution for them and people started playing the records on other stations. People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to C.L. Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired -- a whole generation of Black Civil Rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the 1950s and 60s went on he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular. But C.L. Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music but with himself giving a sermon as the headline act. And he became very, very wealthy from these tours. On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it. A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car (albeit one that had broken down). Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership, and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him. By 1956 he was getting around $4000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a *lot* of appearances. He also sold half a million records that year. Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward Singers, would perform on the tours he organised, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha. Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her, while she accompanied her father on tour. Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age. She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience, but those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability. It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a fourteen-year-old, and immediately recognise them as a fully-formed Aretha Franklin. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that. For the latter half of the fifties, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there. But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music. This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that, with "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Aretha and Erma still worshipped Cooke, and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cooke appear on the TV. Their brother Cecil later said "I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren't going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn't believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o'clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn't matter 'cause Berry Gordy's sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.” Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world, but Rev. Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions. Erma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleo-Patrettes, at the suggestion of the Four Tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe Von Battle's J-V-B label, "No Other Love": [Excerpt: The Cleo-Patrettes, "No Other Love"] But the group didn't go any further, as Rev. Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer. Erma missed other opportunities for different reasons, though -- Berry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Roquel Davis, but Erma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R&B, and so "All I Could Do Was Cry" was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] While Erma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out. But Aretha had a different problem -- she was very insecure, and said that church audiences "weren't critics, but worshippers", but she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did. But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move. There was the possibility of her getting signed to Motown -- her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father -- but Rev. Franklin had his eye on bigger things. He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels. As Aretha's brother Cecil later said "He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia." They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars, but Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying "She does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration. It simply requires the right material. Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern. All that will come later. The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best. And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her." That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her, and Moore could help with that -- he was friends with John Hammond. Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already -- we mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode ninety-eight, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan. But Hammond was a legend in the music business. He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings. Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent, and the greatest understanding of Black musical culture. Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holley to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to. Major Holley was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington style bluesy jazz singer. The highlight of the demo was a version of "Today I Sing the Blues", a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording “Be Baba Leba” with Bill Doggett: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Today I Sing the Blues"] That original version had been produced by Hammond, but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol, Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Today I Sing the Blues"] Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo, and signed Aretha straight away, and got to work producing her first album. But he and Rev. Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do. Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Rev. Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market -- he was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat "King" Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted her recording standards like "Over the Rainbow". This showed a lack of understanding on Rev. Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. As Etta James later said, "If you wanna have Black hits, you gotta understand the Black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on Black stations... Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the Black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn't know nothing 'bout crossing over.” But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA Records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Rev. Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly he'd take up that offer, and so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B top ten hits, "Won't Be Long" and Aretha's version of "Today I Sing the Blues": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise -- she later said "I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion." And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records. Many, *many* people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who didn't understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style. That's not what's happening with the Columbia records. Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made -- and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums. The problem is that they're *unfocused*. Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music -- blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music -- and wanted to sing all those kinds of music. And she *could* sing all those kinds of music, and sing them well. But it meant the records weren't coherent. You didn't know what you were getting, and there was no artistic personality that dominated them, it was just what Aretha felt like recording. Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolised him in most areas, and she turned to another figure, who would soon become both her husband and manager. Ted White. Her sister Erma, who was at that time touring with Lloyd Price, had introduced them, but in fact Aretha had first seen White years earlier, in her own house -- he had been Dinah Washington's boyfriend in the fifties, and her first sight of him had been carrying a drunk Washington out of the house after a party. In interviews with David Ritz, who wrote biographies of many major soul stars including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying “Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha. My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid." She compared White to Ike Turner, saying "Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be." White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience -- he owned an unsuccessful publishing company, and also ran a chain of jukeboxes. He was also thirty, while Aretha was only eighteen. But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time -- he didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond. And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Erma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Hello Again"] Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Erma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Erma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price. And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow. Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single. "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] Rev. Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson -- Jolson, oddly, had a large Black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had *also* been a strong advocate of Black musicians like Cab Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the twenties through forties was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively OK. Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamouring for in 1961: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] That single came out the month after _Down Beat_ magazine gave Aretha the "new-star female vocalist award", and it oddly made the pop top forty, her first record to do so, and the B-side made the R&B top ten, but for the next few years both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her. None of her next nine singles would make higher than number eighty-six on the Hot One Hundred, and none would make the R&B charts at all. After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success. Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time -- people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patti Page, and Mel Tormé -- and it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point. To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, _The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin_, his production of Andy Williams singing "Moon River" was released: [Excerpt: Andy Williams, "Moon River"] This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales – the person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbra Streisand – though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz-soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles. The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cooke, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana, but the problem was that Cooke had built an audience before doing that -- she hadn't. But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention. Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said “Women are very catty. They'll see a girl who's dressed very well and they'll say, Yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo. Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about. She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.” The great jazz vocalist Carmen McRea went to see Aretha at the Village Vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards. She later said "Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn't say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz." So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like "Try a Little Tenderness": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cooke to include the song in his own lounge sets. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album. In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White. According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities. Her brother Cecil later said "Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,' she'd drop everything and do just that. I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King's cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.' But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.' She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely." In part her increasing activism was because of her father's own increase in activity. The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory. That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Rev. Franklin and Rev. Albert Cleage, a much more radical Black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance. They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the Mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, were included in the largely-Black March. It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr. King called it "one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America", and it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point. King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech”] He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington. During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, a collection of jazz standards  called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like "Solitude", "Ol' Man River" and "I Wanna Be Around": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Wanna Be Around"] The opening track, "Skylark", was Etta James' favourite ever Aretha Franklin performance, and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Skylark"] Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song: "Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn't you?' Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.” But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the wider public. Mersey decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha. He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke. She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me...For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.'” They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years. Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction. Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband/manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Cold Cold Heart"] Unfortunately, while Washington had been wildly popular, and one of the most important figures in jazz and R&B in the forties and fifties, her style was out of date. The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US. Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as "the new Dinah Washington" would doom her to obscurity. John Hammond later said "I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.” At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brook Benton, who had a much more R&B audience. For example, he'd written "Baby, You Got What It Takes" for Benton and Washington to do as a duet: [Excerpt: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington, "Baby, You Got What it Takes"] In 1962, when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent, Otis had produced thirty-three of the fifty-one singles the label put out that year that had charted. Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the R&B market, and assigned Otis to do just that. At first, though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing R&B than anyone else had. He later said "Aretha, though, couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra's own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That's not the point. The point is to find a hit.' But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,' Streisand's smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one's gonna beat Barbra at her own game." But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came round to the idea of making an R&B record. Otis produced an album of contemporary R&B, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market, songs like "My Guy", "Every Little Bit Hurts", and "Walk on By", along with a few new originals brought in by Otis. The title track, "Runnin' Out of Fools", became her biggest hit in three years, making number fifty-seven on the pop charts and number thirty on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Runnin' Out of Fools"] After that album, they recorded another album with Otis producing, a live-in-the-studio jazz album, but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her. By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left. But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating -- Otis and Ted White did not get on, Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was. Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit with Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte": [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"] Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer. At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and just after the sessions finished he'd go on to produce Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album. In the next few years he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon & Garfunkel's follow up Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Leonard Cohen's first three albums, and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow up At San Quentin. He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, the Byrds, and Burl Ives during that time period. But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with. Johnston produced a string-heavy session in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You". For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all. Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great -- there's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she *loved* old standards, and jazz tunes, and contemporary pop at least as much as any other kind of music. Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician if anyone was. Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life. But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer -- everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what "an Aretha Franklin record" really meant -- and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track -- from the timeline, it was probably the session for "Mustang Sally", which coincidentally was published by Ted White's publishing company, as Sir Mack Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] Whatever the session, it wasn't going well. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown. Pickett *hated* Brown -- it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown -- and went to physically attack Sledge. Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them -- both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit -- and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge. At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic. Rev. Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha. She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of a recent Otis Redding single, "Respect": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect"] Redding will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here. Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Redding -- something Bishop hadn't thought possible. When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do -- maybe she'd start her own label or something. She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on. Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of Aretha's, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up he'd like to sign her. Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up -- it was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important. Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up. Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself -- this was still the period when he and the Ertegun brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business, and so while he signed her to the label he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stax to record, as he had with Sam and Dave. But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself. And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians -- he wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as "the country-soul triangle" of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. So he booked a week's worth of sessions at FAME studios, and got in FAME's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis -- Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham. Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well -- he wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this. Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of FAME, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that. Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive. As Hall put it in his autobiography, "Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star." Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section. The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't that impressed with at first. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit hoping to sell his songs to Motown. He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha. On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) (demo)"] But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular. She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing, and Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Monk (who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her). While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future. Although while Wexler is the credited producer (and on this initial session Rick Hall at FAME is a credited co-producer), everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else. She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her. But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't. As Rick Hall said "After her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio other than Jerry or her husband for the rest of the day. I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing." The musicians started working on "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)", and at first found it difficult to get the groove, but then Oldham came up with an electric piano lick which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked the song for them: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"] After that, they took a break. Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy. But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point. He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Dowd, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition. During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session: [Excerpt: Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"] They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions -- Aretha's line was "as long as we're together baby, you'd better show some respect to me". Penn, Oldham, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn singing lead initially with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal. But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants. All the FAME and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler, Hall, and Dowd, and Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe, so he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some Black musicians. But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the Black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player but had never worked with any of the other musicians there -- he was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and had a pre-existing relationship. As the two outsiders, Laxton and Ted White had, at first, bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session -- at the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county. But as Wexler said, “A redneck patronizing a Black man is a dangerous camaraderie,” and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out. Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her -- Dan Penn later said “I always heard he patted her on the butt or somethin', and what would have been wrong with that anyway?”, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white Southern men who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were -- for white Southern men in early 1967. Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry. The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for "Do Right Woman", but nobody was very happy with it. Oldham said later “She liked the song but hadn't had time to practice it or settle into it I remember there was Roger playing the drums and Cogbill playing the bass. And I'm on these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood. And that was sort of where it was left. Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him. That's what they left with—Dan singing the wrong-key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum. We had a whole week to do everything—we had plenty of time—so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.” Penn was less optimistic, saying "But as I rem

This week's Talking Michigan Transportation podcast puts a spotlight on the project transforming I-375, a stub freeway built six decades ago, piercing the City of Detroit and displacing whole neighborhoods in the era of urban renewal.  Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joined Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) Director Paul C. Ajegba, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, and interested parties this week at a roundtable discussion after MDOT and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI). This follows thorough documentation and review of public comments, which is the final National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) decision document. The document describes why the I-375 improvement project will not have any significant environmental impacts expected to occur upon implementation of the selected alternative design.  Tony Migaldi of the infrastructure design firm HNTB is managing the project in consultation with MDOT planners and engineers. He joins the podcast to talk about the significance of this week's milestone, the work that brought the project to this point, and what lies ahead. Migaldi talks about the amount of listening that went into the process and the robust engagement with the owners of businesses along the corridor and the residential neighbors. He also discusses excess property that will be freed up with a conversion of a sunken freeway to an at-grade urban boulevard, which will include options for cyclists and pedestrians and connections that were lost to the freeway. This animation offers an idea of what to expect with the finished product. Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who has some family history in the neighborhoods lost to the freeway, spoke on the podcast previously about what the project could mean to the city and acknowledging mistakes of the past. When work to build I-375 began in 1959, the thriving black neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were demolished to make way for the freeway. Built through a thriving Hastings Street, the new I-375 opened in 1964 and created a barrier between the central business district in Detroit and the neighborhoods to the east, resulting in decades of underinvestment and a lack of opportunity for the predominantly Black communities on the other side of the freeway.   

Today on The Pulse, Gunargie O'Sullivan took to the streets and caught up with artist Jerry Whitehead and graffiti artist Take5. The two are collaborating on a mural on Hastings Street commemorating the families and victims of the mass grave found this summer at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Today on The Pulse, host James Mainguy follows up with Vince Tao as they discuss this week's report from the Independent Investigations Office of BC, which cleared two Vancouver Police Officers in the shooting death of a distressed man on Hastings Street, on January 5, 2021.

THE PETOSKEY AREA IS MORE THAN JUST THE TOWN OF PETOSKEY.FREDERICK WILLIAMS AUTHOR OF THE BOOK “TULSA MASSACRE” BLACK WALL STREET AND ADOLF MONGO DETROIT'S PARADISE VALLEY, HASTINGS STREET, AND THE BLACK BOTTOM.

Sage tells Dani about a local barber with a penchant for murder. This guy really, really sucks.

Hastings Street and the DTES have long been in pitiful shape ... until now! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now brought to you by Scout Magazine. In this episode it delighted us to bring on two prominent hospitality veterans in Paul Grunberg and Romano Castillo. You might recognize these two as the former faces of Gastown’s L’Abattoir, where they helped distinguish that restaurant as being one of Vancouver’s best for many years. However, a few years back, Paul and his partners ventured out on their own to open a trio of new restaurants. First up was Osteria Savio Volpe, an upscale Italian joint with one of the most beautiful dining rooms in the city. Next came Pepino’s Spaghetti House and its sister grocery and coffee bar, Caffe La Tana. All three have emerged as classic representations of old school family dining with the added bonus of top-notch hospitality. Assisting to provide this ideal for Paul and his team is his lead man, General Manager, Romano Castillo, who has help shepherd all three establishments. Because of their longstanding working relationship, we wanted to talk to them about how they’ve dealt with the COVID — 19 pandemic, shifting to delivery and takeout and how they plan to reopen their restaurants to the dining public. We also waxed on the state of the restaurant community as a whole, thoughts on what can be improved, wholesale liquor pricing, patio expansions, past experiences and much much more. This was a fun chat as both men highlight that even though times may seem dour for our restaurant community at present, there’s still space for much optimism. It was refreshing to hear their insights and much needed candor. We hope you enjoy this one as much as we did. **Side note: Mickey was having microphone issues on this one, so he’s barely in this episode. We apologize if hearing Mickey’s witty comments is partly why you tuned in. We’ve sourced the problem and it won’t happen again. Osteria Savio Volpe is located just off Fraser Street and Kingsway. It’s fantastic. We highly recommend you check it out. The restaurant opens to the public today, June 1st. They will continue to offer pick up via Tock to go and delivery via DoorDash. Jamie is super stoked about their Cynar spritz to go bottles. http://www.saviovolpe.comPepino’s Spaghetti House is located on Commercial Drive close to Hastings Street. Dine in is still closed for the time being. However, pick up via Tock to go and delivery via DoorDash are available. Get the Pork Chop!https://pepinos.caCaffe La Tana is located just next door to Pepino’s. It is still closed for dine in service. They are offering grocery delivery on their website. We haven’t tried it yet, but the pizza kit looks delicious and fun. https://caffelatana.ca***Scout is one of Vancouver’s leading food and culture magazines. If you’re wanting to learn more about the city’s food and cultural sphere with regards to community news, new restaurant openings, essential guides to some of the city’s best offerings as well as who’s hiring, Scout is where you should go. They also have a sister website called Islandist. Same type of content only Island driven. That’s Islandist.ca.We’re proud to have Scout as our presenting sponsor as we believe what they “Scout out” is an excellent compliment to what we’re offering here with Track and Food. Do check them out.scoutmagazine.ca

How Covid 19 has shut down Vancouver leaving addicts with nothing to steal to make a living on Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside.

Episode 35. This week’s guest joins us from Vancouver. Jason is an avid listener of the show who reached out to us via email to share some war stories. We were lucky enough to get him in for a recording when he was in LA on travel last week. My God. Jason has some killer stories. He joins Mike, Keith and Russian Danny to talk everything from exploding bowels to hallucinating amputations, from growing up in Chilliwack, Canada to seeking lower companionship on Hastings Street in Vancouver, and from the ritual and obsession of heroin addiction to the horror of fentanyl. Thanks for listening.

On this inaugural episode we interview 83-year-old soul singer Willie Jones about his early years on the Chitlin’ Circuit, his influence on an entire generation of Motown stars, the making of his 1959 record “Fast Choo Choo”, and staying out of trouble on Hastings Street in Detroit. Produced by Mike Dutkewych. Mastered by David Jerkovich. Interview conducted by Mike Dutkewych & Adam Stanfel, June 30, 2019.

In 1997, as workers were stripping asbestos out of the old Woodward’s building, the Vancouver planner overseeing the project predicted it would take 10 to 20 years for Hastings Street to change. “From anything we can see, the community will be overwhelmingly low-income for that long,” Nathan Edelson told the Vancouver Sun.Flash forward 22 years, and he was both right and wrong. True, a lot has changed on Hastings Street since the opening of the new Woodward’s Building in 2010. The central passion of legendary activist, non-profit housing developer, and city councillor Jim Green, Woodward’s has led the urban revitalization — or gentrification — of the west end of the Downtown Eastside. It sure did take a long time to change, but change it did, no matter how you label it.Yet, one could say it’s also taken a long time for nothing much to change. Edelson can acknowledge a modicum of success, but he’s clear on one thing — there’s lots more to be done.Because it’s all still happening. The 24-hour drug market. Unchecked addictions amongst the city’s most vulnerable populations. A lack of safe, affordable housing. It clearly gave Edelson pause recently, as he reflected on the past, present and future of inner city planning.He does so from a different perch today, as consultant with the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association for their *RePlan project (which is focused on the 1,800 housing units on City-owned, leasehold land between the Cambie and Burrard bridges). Back in the day, Edelson and his ‘brothers and sisters’ in the city’s planning department were in the thick of it, focused on what he calls “a reasonable public purpose”: to provide temporary shelter for the poorest in our society and to, over time, replace that with self-contained, permanent social housing.And so, despite any perceived equivocation over the outcomes of his work over the years, there’s no doubt Woodward’s was a success in providing some of that social housing. It’s just one example of the many civic projects Edelson helped usher through local community planning and consultation processes, and ultimately through the Councils of the day, for populations co-existing across the entire spectrum of need in society. Go ahead, Google him. You’ll see.Humble almost to a fault — “some of my best ideas were his”, he says, deflecting credit to Jim Green — Edelson continues to carry the torch for housing, which is, in his opinion, job #1 for planners.So yes, as Gord put it, he was right. Right in his beliefs and his methods, because it all had an impact. Still, Edelson thinks it’s not enough. He’s just not done focusing on those in our city who are in need, and how he can help shape what the future will bring.Nathan Edelson is this year’s speaker at the Jim Green Memorial Lecture, tomorrow evening (March 13) at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at Woodwards, 149 West Hastings Street. Read more »

Bluesman John Lee Hooker's recording career spanned more than 40 years -- from his hit record, Boogie Chillen', which was recorded in a Detroit basement in 1948, to his Grammy Award-winning LP The Healer. Hooker is a total product of Detroit's Black Bottom, the city's African-American neighborhood. We track his career, with help from John Lee Hooker's son, John Lee Hooker Jr.; to Marsha Music, whose father, Joe von Battle, owned Joe's Record Shop, one of Hooker's hangouts. Detroit musician R.J. Spangler places Hooker in this country's blues galaxy. Stick around after the credits for a preview of John Lee Hooker Jr.'s new song: Testify.

Today's guest on Economics Detective Radio is Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns. Strong Towns is a non-profit that seeks to reform America from the ground up, starting with its towns and cities. It aims to promote healthy local economies by improving local governance. The Growth Ponzi Scheme Chuck began recognizing the problems in America's towns and cities when he was working as a civil engineer. He recounts a story of working in a little city in central Minnesota in the late 1990s. The city had a 300-foot pipe that had cracked, allowing ground water to leak in and overflow their treatment facility. Chuck proposed a $300,000 solution to fix the pipe. However, this was a tiny town with an annual budget of $85,000. So Chuck went to higher levels of government (the federal government, the USDA, etc.) to find someone to fund the project. They all said, "This feels like maintenance. We don't have money for maintenance, so you need to pay for this yourself." Since the feds would only fund expansion projects, Chuck devised a plan: He would propose the largest expansion project he could, then repair the pipe as part of the expansion. This wasn't so much deviousness on his part as it was standard practice in his profession. He designed a couple miles of new pipe, doubled their treatment facility, and as part of that he included repairs for the old pipe. This new project cost $2.6 million. Everyone was happy about this project. The grant agencies were happy. The legislators issued glowing press releases and held a big ribbon cutting. Chuck got a big bonus from his company. The city was ecstatic. The only lingering problem was that this tiny city that couldn't afford to maintain 300 feet of pipe would now be left with a few miles more pipe and a larger treatment facility. This is an example of one part of what Chuck calls the Growth Ponzi Scheme. This is when cities and towns expand in ways they can't maintain without further expansion. There's a political reason why things like this happen. Building new infrastructure is very politically appealing. You can build a new highway and name it after a prominent politician, you can have a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, and you can get all sorts of good press for the project. Maintenance is less sexy; you close down a lane of some existing highway, delay everyone's commute, and then you don't have a ribbon-cutting or positive press for all the potholes you filled in. That's why higher levels of government have been paying for big projects and passing off the responsibility for maintaining them to local governments. These local governments become insolvent when the revenue from the initial big project runs out and the maintenance expenses come due. This process leads to a form of development where the local tax base is not sufficient to pay for the infrastructure that supports it. When the expansion can't go on any longer, the infrastructure crumbles, the affluent people leave, and the community ends up locked in poverty. What's Wrong with Big Box Stores? Embracing this form of unsustainable growth has made our cities less dense and walkable. Instead we have heavily subsidized driving as a means of getting everywhere. One consequence of this has been the rise of big box stores. The public debate on big box stores tends to miss the mark. The left says big box stores crowd out local businesses, which is true. The right says they pass the market test, offering lower prices and thus improving poor people's standard of living, which is also true. What both miss is that these big box stores only pass the market test because they don't bear the costs of the infrastructure needed to support them. By subsidizing infrastructure, and by building our cities to be spread out and unwalkable, we make bringing groceries to the people unviable. Instead, the people drive to where groceries are. In addition to the rise of big box stores, we've seen the demise of small town living. While small towns still exist, they used to have enough small businesses, shops, and grocers to allow a full and comfortable life without leaving the town. Today, small town life consists of driving to the regional hub, perhaps multiple times every week, to get many of your necessities. What's Wrong with Hastings Street? Chuck coined the term "STROAD" to push back against the interchangeable use of the terms "street" and "road." A street is where value lives. Homes and businesses locate themselves along streets so that they can be connected to rest of the transportation network, but the street itself features narrow lanes, low speed limits, and good sidewalks because it's designed more for pedestrians and less for vehicles. Roads, by contrast, are not meant to be valuable locations in themselves; they are optimized for transporting large volumes of traffic over long distances. They feature wider lanes and faster speed limits. STROADs are an unhappy blend of both elements. Wide lanes and low speeds make them bad for both pedestrians and drivers. One example of a STROAD is Hastings Street in Vancouver, which tries to be a major thoroughfare for thousands of commuters during rush hour, while still catering to the many businesses along its ten-kilometer span. Because of its high volume of traffic and many stop lights, motorists can expect to average just twenty kilometers an hour on their commutes to downtown Vancouver. Gentrification as Part of an Organic System Chuck wrote an article titled "The Gentrification Paradox," in which he argues that gentrification was actually a healthy part of urban development in the pre-automobile age: The pre-automobile development pattern was an organic process. It was both incremental and complex... Gentrification – investment followed by displacement – was part of the natural order of things and, as with any organic system, it had a positive role in making things work for everyone. Before the twentieth century, cities would gradually grow and change over time. But we've used zoning laws to turn our neighbourhoods into unchanging time capsules. Cities used to be antifragile, to borrow a term from Nassim Taleb. In the past, poorer people would buy property on the outskirts of town, on which they would live and run small businesses. Over time, as the city grew, these outskirts would gradually come to be incorporated into the urban ecosystem. These properties would become more valuable and they would grow with the community, perhaps adding a second storey and expanding the business. You couldn't do this today. Building codes and zoning laws make any new development into a million-dollar endeavor. People with very little capital can't start with a small property and gradually increase its value over time. This makes the modern form of urban development much less equitable than it was in the past.

Morgan Black met me in my hotel room in Vancouver to talk about his job at Insite. Insite is the safe injection place on Hastings Street in Vancouver. It's a place in heroin alley where junkies can go to get clean needles and they can use those needls to shoot up in a place that's supervised by people like Morgan. He watches over them to make sure they don't overdose. If they begin to, it's up to him to try and save them. He's seen a lot since he's been there and he shares it here.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, British Columbia with comedian and podcaster Dave Shumka, co-host with Graham Clark of Stop Podcasting Yourself. They discuss what everyone in Vancouver is, a little bit; the city's much-touted "livability"; becoming that icon of fun that is a comedian in "No Funcouver"; the origin of Stop Podcasting Yourself; the newly classic Vancouver lifestyle up in downtown condos versus the classic classic Vancouver lifestyle in his hundred-year-old house; waking up in adulthood to find himself in a reasonably cool city; the pull, for comedians and media people, of both Toronto and the United States; his job overseeing international music at the CBC, and to what extent it puts his finger on the pulse of the Canadian musical consciousness; whether music will always out-cool comedy; the quaintness of the Canadian media experience; whether Vancouver has stories to tell, and how he'd like to see them told; the scarred hookers of the less-scary-than-sad Hastings Street; how many Torontonians it takes to screw in a lightbulb; the struggle for comedic visas; the descent of the stretchpant; Vancouverites' tendency to luxuriate in the idea that they could, theoretically, ski and windsurf in a single day; how he heard the call of comedy at a Salvadoran restaurant; his strategic conversational use of mundane topics; Vancouver's stinkiest buses; and the most fruitful sources of ridiculousness he has, including dumbness and his own simulation thereof.

Colin Marshall sits above Hastings Street in Vancouver, British Columbia with Gordon Price, Director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, former Councillor for the City of Vancouver, and creator of the electronic magazine Price Tags. They discuss his personal definition of "Vancouverism"; his city as a mid-20th-century version of 19th-century city-building; the balance of trying to maintain the place's Edenic qualities while shipping out its natural resources; the D-word of density, and whether Vancouver's West End ever really had the highest density in North America; how built environments age in place, passing from horror to heritage;  how building for the car worked, until it didn't; "stroads," like Los Angeles' La Cienega, which combine the worst of streets with the worst of roads; budgets as the sincerest form of rhetoric; the role technology plays in our newfound adoption of transit; whether Los Angeles could become "the Vancouver of 2020" — or maybe 2030; how New York came from the brink, and what he saw during its decline; whether the Utopian question of how to prevent dullness matters to Vancouver; the erotic power of the surreptitious, the illegal, and whatever you can't regulate; the element of his personal life that got him interested in cities, where he used to find them emblems of what had gone wrong in society; gay men as urban pioneers; and how cities can do better with whatever they've already got.

Vancouver City Council, under the direction of the ruling Vision Vancouver party, wants to remove two remnants of the never fully realized inner city highway system in the downtown core. But, in the process, two long-standing community gardens are threatened with demolition. In this documentary, Green for All or Green for Some, Peter Driftmier explores the debate around the removal of the viaducts through the twin lenses of gentrification and environmental sustainability.As of April 2013, city staff have yet to come back to council with final recommendations on the removal of the viaducts. In recent months, the Strathcona Residents Association has expressed serious concerns about the possibility of increased traffic volume on Prior Street, and community groups in the Downtown Eastside have also expressed similar concerns regarding increased traffic along Hastings Street.This documentary was originally produced for Redeye on Vancouver?s Coop Radio 100.5 FM and aired in Fall 2012. Peter Driftmier is a producer with the Redeye Collective, and we are pleased to bring you this documentary.

Playlist podcast Artiest: Joe Weaver & the Blue Notes – I Got The Blues For My Baby Album: Battle of Hastings Street Label: Ace Artiest: Eddie Burns – Hello Miss Jessie Lee Album: Battle of Hastings Street Label: Ace Artiest: Henry Smith – Good Rockin’ Mama Album: Detroit Blues Label: JSP Artiest: Eddie Burns – Papa’s Boogie Album: Detroit Blues Label: JSP Artiest: John Lee Hooker – Just Me And My Telephone Album: Complete J.L. Hooker Vol. 4 1950-1951 Label: Body & Soul Artiest: Detroit Count Hastings Street Opera Part 1 Album: Detroit Blues Rarities Vol. 4: Hastings Street Blues Opera Label: P-Vine Artiest: Detroit Count Hastings Street Opera Part 2 Album: Detroit Blues Rarities Vol. 4: Hastings Street Blues Opera Label: P-Vine Artiest: Walter Mitchell – Stop Messing Around Album: Detroit Blues Rarities Vol. 2: Harp-Suckers! Label: P-Vine Artiest: Baby Boy Warren – Please Don’t Think I’m Nosey Album: Stop Breakin’ Down Label: Official Artiest: Big Ed & His Combo – Superstition Album: Blues For Big Town Label: Chess Artiest: Robert Henry – Early In The Morning Album: King 4646 [78 rpm single] Label: King Artiest: Big Maceo – Do You Remember Album: Dark Muddy Bottom Blues Label: P-Vine Artiest: Bobo Jenkins – Democrat Blues Album: Blues For Big Town Label: Chess Artiest: Baby Boy Warren – Stop Breakin’ Down Album: Stop Breakin’ Down Label: Official Artiest: Calvin Frazier – Lillie Mae Album: Vintage Toledo Blues 1950-1980 Label: T-R-H Artiest: Eddie Burns – Treat Me Like I Treat You Album: Chess Blues Guitar: Two Decades of Killer Fret Work 1949 to 1969 Label: MCA/Chess Artiest: Johnny Wright – I Stayed Down Album: Battle of Hastings Street Label: Ace Artiest: Sam Kelly – Ramblin’ Around Blues Album: Detroit Ghetto Blues 1948-1954 Label: Nighthawk Artiest: Sylvester Cotton – I Tried Album: Blues Sensation – Detroit Downhome Recordings 1948-1949 Label: Ace Artiest: Little Sonny – I Gotta Find My Baby Album: Duke 186 [45 rpm single] Label: Duke Artiest: Eddie Kirkland & His Houserockers – I Must’ve Have Done Something Wrong Album: A Fortune of Blues Label: Regency Artiest: John Lee Hooker – Canal Street Blues Album: The Complete J.L. Hooker Vol 3 1949-1950 Label: Body & Soul

photo by UW, art’ed by Bread the Producer At a thwarted benefit concert for Insite, the supervised injection clinic in Vancouver’s troubled downtown Eastside, Uncle Weed chronicles the massive show of force by the Vancouver Police Department who shut down the Bedouin Soundclash concert and blockaded a full block of Hastings Street – ironically because, … Continue reading High Witness Report at In-site Police Standoff – Choogle On! #71 →

Affordable Podcasting $5.99 a month includes Web Hosting Suppport The Classic Blues at Music Maker Visit The Uncle Shag Today Buy Your 50 mp3 classic radio shows for $5.00 inclues shipping Easy Rider Blues by Soileau and Robin is a really sweet cajun blues holler in an equally mesmerizing and haunting style. Hastings Street has Blind Arthur Blake on guitar and Charlie Spand on piano in an impromptu and rollicking guitar/piano duet blues. The Corley Family have a ragged but sweet down home family gospel vocal sound with a lot of charm on Give The World A Smile. The Original Stack O'Lee Blues by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull (aka the Down Home Boys) is not only really rare - it in fact is a one of a kind record being the only copy known in existence! - it is also a mellow finger picking blues which would make Dylan melt.