Podcast appearances and mentions of jimmie rodgers

French-American musician and composer Zoé Basha released her debut album Gamble on April 17. Blending storytelling traditions, Appalachian mountain songs, Irish traditional music, and American blues and ragtime, the album is a woozy melange. We talk about her life journey, travelling around the US, joining the Occupy San Francisco protests, moving to Dingle, Dublin, France to learn traditional French timber framing, and back to Ireland. Throughout it all, there's music, though she did fall out of love with it for a while before Rufous Nightjar started up with Anna Mieke and Branwen Kavanagh. And now comes her debut solo album Gamble. From the press release: Zoé's debut is an intimate exploration of identity, grief, the deconstructing of societal norms, and the complexities of human connection, all delivered with a mesmerising voice that echoes the vulnerability and depth of her diverse influences. Inspired by the greats of times passed such as Billie Holiday, The Mills Brothers, Jimmie Rodgers, Joni Mitchell, Texas Gladden, Edith Piaf and The Steve Miller Band– as well as her peers in the Irish folk music scene, Zoé Basha savours the sounds of golden eras with contemporary nuance and shameless honesty. Zoé Basha tour dates: April 24: De Burgos Club, Galway April 25: The Glens Centre, Manorhamilton, Leitrim April 26: The Duncairn, Belfast April 27: The Record Room, Limerick May 1: Fennelly's of Callan, Kilkenny May 2: Bray Jazz Fest, Wicklow May 3: The Crane Lane Theatre, Cork May 4: Blennerville, Tralee, Co. Kerry (co-headling with Rachel Sermanni) Buy Gamble: https://zoebasha.net/album/3407338/gamble

WSM Collection 1953-05-26 Jimmie Rodgers Memorial

Send us a textHONKYTONK MAN TGTPTU continues to play its old hits with Episode 5 of Season 14, its redux series season celebrating five years and don't you worry about us, hoss, we'll get through this pairing of Eastwood flicks starting with HONKYTONK MAN (1982).  Originally discussed toward the end of the epic run covering all of Clint Eastwood's filmography (Season 3, Episode 12), founding cohosts Ken and Jack invite the show's newer hosts Ryan and Thomas in to session with fresh ears and silver tongues on this adaptation of the Dust Bowl era, vaguely veiled retelling of the final years of country wester legend Jimmie Rodgers novel by Clancy Carlile adapted by him and Eastwood into a semi-comedic bildungsroman road trip movie.  Two years prior to the creation of the PG-13 rating by the MPA (né MPAA), this Eastwood-directed and starring flick brings in Eastwood's own son Kyle, roughly 14 years of age at the time, to play the nephew of a singer/songwriter who gets into all kinds of trouble with his honkytonk uncle man, from underage driving to poultry theft to jailbreaking and whoring (procured, not proffered) and contact marijuana highs and hit song composing between f-bombs and s-words and statutory rape.  Original ep guest Patrick drops in with some words of encouragement before the gents figure out on mic that this movie was Ryan's other rewatch flick pick and the show gets on the road with recently promoted host Ryan having things to say about the music scoring; Thomas checking facts like a hockey enforcer checks bodies on the ice; Ken having a spell during which he actively hallucinates Eastwood wearing his hat backwards and suppresses coughs; and Jack, staying mostly awake for this retirement home movie that borders on a “lead paint flick” designation, brings the low energy by the bushel. Also of interest, pod fav Tracey Walter appears “right chair” in the movie and “black pill” is the word of the day.  Find out what these four have to say now that the dust has settled and chickens come home to roost and learn why this Depression Era coming-of-age and one final hurrah adult-teen road trip movie with musical act interludes might be one of the least watched of Clint Eastwood's films.   CONTENT WARNING: The hosts say the titular “h word” a lot. THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.comFacebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTUInstagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0Bluesky: @goodpodugly.bsky.socialYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-gBuzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/Letterboxd (follow us!): Podcast: goodpoduglyKen: Ken KoralRyan: Ryan Tobias

Citizen Vinyl is Asheville's own vinyl record-producing facility. It lives in the former Citizen-Times newspaper building.  The historic building was designed and built in 1938-1939, and it became the home for two newspapers and a radio station. In 2019, Citizen Vinyl moved into the first floor, mezzanine, and third floor to create spaces for recording and manufacturing space, as well as an event area with a small bar/cafe and shop.  Listen to this full episode for the full history of the recording space and radio station.Music featured in this episode includes: Jimmie Rodgers, "Away Out on the Mountain" Bill Munroe and the Bluegrass Boys, "Mule Skinner Blues" Mainer's Mountaineers, "Concord Rag" Jim Lauderdale, "My Carolina Sunshine Girl" To learn more about music along the Blue Ridge Music Trails, visit BlueRidgeMusicNC.com.

Citizen Vinyl is Asheville's own vinyl record-producing facility. It lives in the former Citizen-Times newspaper building.  The historic building was designed and built in 1938-1939, and it became the home for two newspapers and a radio station. In 2019, Citizen Vinyl moved into the first floor, mezzanine, and third floor to create spaces for recording and manufacturing space, as well as an event area with a small bar/cafe and shop.  Listen to this full episode for the full history of the recording space and radio station.Music featured in this episode includes: Jimmie Rodgers, "Away Out on the Mountain" Bill Munroe and the Bluegrass Boys, "Mule Skinner Blues" Mainer's Mountaineers, "Concord Rag" Jim Lauderdale, "My Carolina Sunshine Girl" To learn more about music along the Blue Ridge Music Trails, visit BlueRidgeMusicNC.com.

Classic female country artists like Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, and Faith Hill, along with modern-day musicians like Kasey Musgraves, Carrie Underwood, and Shania Twain are pioneers of the genre. Despite their influence and hand in elevating country music to the heights it's reached in the modern era, only 10% of country music airplay and awards are granted to women. This is one of the astonishing facts in Tami Neilson's latest show ‘The F Word', which combines music with the research of musicology professor Dr Jada Watson. The two first met on Twitter, both very vocal about challenging inequality in the country music industry. “I followed her because she wrote, you know, these incredible articles," Neilson told Francesca Rudkin. “What I loved about her work was that for an artist, she was kind of giving us the tools to feel validated I guess, you know, vindicated.” Neilson says she wanted to tell the story of women in country music through song, backing it with the black and white statistics of Watson's research. Despite country being one of the largest genres of music in the United States, women are disproportionally represented, an issue Watson says has historic roots. “We have to remember where country came from and the time in which it was developed, and this was 1920's United States, racially segregated country.” “Most cultural institutions were racially segregated and then sort of built into that framework was also different forms of discrimination or oppression,” she said. One of the stories they tell in ‘The F Word' is that of the Carter Family – one of the founding families of the country music genre. Watson says that in the recording sessions including people like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carters said that a woman in the lead would never sell. “We think of them as the founding family of country music,” Watson told Rudkin. “And so that idea of women not selling, or not being possible to sell has really been baked into the fabric of the institution that is country music.” The ‘F Word' will be performed on Saturday, March 8th at Auckland Town Hall. Tickets are available at aaf.co.nz/ LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

durée : 00:55:45 - Very Good Trip - par : Michka Assayas - Very Good Trip fait un tour en Amérique, c'est d'actualité, avec un retour aux sources qui devrait vous faire du bien.

Han kallas countrymusikens fader, men vem är egentligen Jimmie Rodgers? Detta är en berättelse om död, familjetragedi, sjudomar, countrymusiken, och kanske framförallt - järnvägen.Källor:Waiting for a train : Jimmie Rodgers's America (Flera förf. 2008)The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad (PBS, American experience)Countrymusikens historia (PBS, Ken Burns 2019)Jimmie the kid : the life of Jimmie Rodgers (1981)Jimmie Rodgers : the life and times of America's blue yodeler (Porterfield, Nolan 1992) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Han kallas countrymusikens fader, men vem är egentligen Jimmie Rodgers? Detta är en berättelse om död, familjetragedi, sjudomar, countrymusiken, och kanske framförallt - järnvägen.Källor:Waiting for a train : Jimmie Rodgers's America (Flera förf. 2008)The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad (PBS, American experience)Countrymusikens historia (PBS, Ken Burns 2019)Jimmie the kid : the life of Jimmie Rodgers (1981)Jimmie Rodgers : the life and times of America's blue yodeler (Porterfield, Nolan 1992) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Are you sure?' - 'Yep!'Young Marble Giants, Matthew Syed, Rufus Wainwright & David Byrne, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Marshall McLuhan, Generationals, Fin Taylor, The Lost Brothers, George Zimbel, The Grey Sisters, Etta James, Jimmie Rodgers, Eugene Mirman, The Jaynetts, Jeffrey Martin, Davi Não Vê Estrelas, The Fatima Mansions, Maya Angelou

WSM Collection 1953-05-26 Jimmie Rodgers Memorial

This week's show, after a 1984 Damned ditty: brand new Blushing, New Model Army, Real Estate, J. Robbins, Neutrals, Jon Snodgrass, and Aluminum, plus Tomorrow, Koko Taylor, Reg King and The Action, Jimmie Rodgers, Turtles, Jacob Miller, and Fairport Co...

Happy Mother's Day Weekend! For our first stop of the day, we're celebrating the state's rich and diverse music and art at the 3rd Annual Mississippi Makers Fest, May 11th in Jackson at the Two Mississippi Museums with Tori Rice, Events Manager, then we'll check-out what's happening around your neck of the woods for Mother's Day Weekend, before a final stop in Meridian to pay homage at the 71st Annual Jimmie Rodgers Festival, May 12th through the 19th with Leslie Lee, Executive Director, at Jimmie Rodgers Museum and Foundation. Stay tuned, buckle up and hold on tight for your Next Stop Mississippi!Next Stop, Mississippi is your #1 on-air source for information about upcoming events and attractions across the state. Get to know the real Mississippi! Each week the show's hosts, Germaine Flood and Kamel King, Tourism Development Bureau Manger with Visit Mississippi, highlight well-known and unknown places in Mississippi with the best food, parks, music and arts. They'll not only tell you what's going on in your neck of the woods, but also share the history and people behind the markets, sporting events, concerts, fairs and festivals all over Mississippi. Hear the personal stories and traditions behind that favorite event you attend each year on Next Stop, Mississippi. Check out our Sipp Events calendar to help plan your next trip! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sounds Like Radio Volume 168 is here and with it Your Humble Host has brought with him a couple of hives of bees!! Yipe, don't worry, it's all for Leroy who wants to start up a bee business. The Great Gildersleeve wanted Leroy to think of ways to make money he didn't count on it being bees though. Never Fear Your Humble Host is here with a gang of friendly folks all with a bit of help for Gildy. Today we hear from Jimmie Rodgers, Doris Day, Bing Crosby, Billie Piper (featured with this show's picture), Dean Martin, Burl Ives, Julie London, & Johnny Hartman. Now that's what I call assistance.

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1170, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: At The Bookstore 1: Kathryn Glasgow's first novel, "Another Song About the King", features a mom obsessed with this singer. Elvis Presley. 2: 2 men travel America with this man's brain in a Tupperware bowl in the true story "Driving Mr. Albert". Albert Einstein. 3: This prolific novelist proved her "metal" once again with her 2000 bestseller "The House on Hope Street". Danielle Steel. 4: "Dark Eagle" by historian John Ensor Harr is called "A Novel Of" this traitor "And the American Revolution". Benedict Arnold. 5: The front cover of "Hooking Up" by this "Bonfire of the Vanities" author shows his name but not the book's title. Tom Wolfe. Round 2. Category: Ends In Ola. With Ola in quotation marks 1: It's what you ride along the canals of Venice. a gondola. 2: It often includes rolled oats, wheat germ, honey, fruit and nuts. granola. 3: This early phonograph began cranking out music in 1906. a Victrola. 4: Italy's Lombardy region is famous for producing this soft (and smelly) blue cheese. Gorgonzola. 5: Haiti occupies a third of this island; the Dominican Republic covers the rest. Hispaniola. Round 3. Category: Classic Country 1: 1 of 3 original members of the Country Music Hall of Fame. (1 of) Hank Williams, Sr., Jimmie Rodgers and Fred Rose. 2: To make it as "A big star in the movies", Buck Owens said he had to "act" this way. naturally. 3: Lefty Frizzell told his honey, "If you've got the money, I've got" this. the time. 4: Migrants leaving this state's "Dust Bowl" helped bring country music to the West. Oklahoma. 5: In 1958, the first country music Grammy Award went to this Kingston Trio song. "Tom Dooley". Round 4. Category: The Last Word Said In Classic Films 1: "The Wizard of Oz". home. 2: "Gone with the Wind". day. 3: "Casablanca". friendship. 4: "King Kong", from 1933. beast. 5: "Apocalypse Now". Horror. Round 5. Category: Ute Tell Me. With Ute in quotation marks 1: To water down. dilute. 2: Drive in from the burbs. commute. 3: Hairy. hirsute. 4: In a proper one of these, the forefinger touches the hat just to the right of the right eye. salute. 5: Jekyll calls Hyde this type of rough fellow "that slept within me". brute. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

Six String Hayride Classic Country Podcast Episode 38. The 1930's Episode. The Carter Family Continues, Jimmie Rodgers dies from Tuberculosis. Patsy Montana, Roy Acuff, and Bob Wills enter the Country Music Charts. Gene Autry Rides in to Save the Day. FDR ends prohibition and guides a recovery from The Great Depression. Duke Ellington and Bob Wills bring swing music to theaters and dance halls. Frankenstein and King Kong pioneer a classic era in Movies. The Marx Brothers make us laugh and Orson Welles scares us with a radio broadcast of Martian Invaders. Radio rules the air to inform, entertain, and comfort a nation hurt by economic depression and the threat of war in Europe. Sons of The Pioneers inspire Chris to serve up some White Russian Drinks. All this and The Usual Fun with Chris and Jim. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086513555749https://www.patreon.com/user?u=81625843

Six String Hayride Episode 37, Classic Country in the 1920's. Chris and Jim build a time machine and visit the 1920's. WLS in Chicago and WSM in Nashville start Radio's Golden Era with national music broadcasts, , Prohibition starts and so does Bootleg Booze, RCA Victor provides phonographs for the home, Jukeboxes and Radios come on the dance hall scene, Ralph Peer records the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Bristol, Chris defines what "Classic" really means and Jim runs down the world of the 1920s. How "Frankie and Johnny" and "Wreck of the Old 97" became American Classics , Another fine cocktail recipe and Charleston Lessons too. Join us on the Six String Hayride Classic Country Podcast.

En unas fiestas tan entrañables con todo el mundo de vacaciones, nada mejor que un desfile de personalidades tan poderosas como Big Joe Turner, Cab Calloway, Bob Skyles, Count Lasher, Jimmie Rodgers, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ben Selvin... A partir de las ocho horas de la mañana del sábado en la sintonía de Radio 3.Escuchar audio

Still finding treasures in my deepest shelves of bluegrass LP's. This week's show has music from Billy Baker (fiddler), Mac Wiseman & the Osborne Brothers, and Merle Haggard singing a Jimmie Rodgers favourite. There's a brand-new release from Missy Raines & Allegheny, and songs from Peter Rowan, the Bluegrass Album Band, the HCBB and others; and some fine resonator playing from Kathy Barwick.

The greatest Jerry show kicks off Jerry Garcia Band month in February. In Pacific High, Garcia pays tribute to Dylan, Lennon, Wonder, Ray Charles, Doc Pomus, Jimmie Rodgers and Jesse Winchester. Audio highlights of some of the greatest improvisation you will ever hear,..And, an interview with former JGB member, Ozzie Ahlers.

John Romulus Brinkley was born in Burnsville, North Carolina, to a former Confederate medic and his housekeeper. From those humble beginnings young Brinkley grew up to become a traveling "Quaker doctor," a medical huckster and conman in both Knoxville, Tennessee and Greenville, South Carolina, a student at several "eclectic medical schools," a successful surgeon in Kansas, renowned for his "goat gonad" transplants into willing men hoping to boost their sexual prowess, the owner of two radio stations, one of which was on the Mexican border and blasted out his goat gland pitches, along with performances by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and many other early country music stars, all across North America with a million watt signal, and, most importantly for him, a very, very rich man. Until it all came crashing down.Today we tell the story of Appalachia's own goat gland doctor, from Burnsville, another one of the Stories of Appalachia!Be sure to subscribe to the Stories podcast on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing our stories with your friends!

Mais il y a une histoire qui s'est également poursuivie, celle de Robert Johnson. En effet, l'album King of the Delta Blues Singers a déclenché une recherche d'informations sur Johnson au sein de la communauté des spécialistes et musiciens blancs du blues, et des gens comme Al Wilson de Canned Heat, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Paul Oliver, Peter Guralnick, Steve LaVere et Mack McCormick ont commencé à enquêter sur la vie de Johnson et à écrire des articles et des livres à son sujet.  PLAYLIST Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues" Uncle Dave Macon, "Death of John Henry" Willie Brown, "M&O Blues" Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting for a Train" Lonnie Johnson et Louis Armstrong, "Hotter Than That" Charlie Patton, "You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die" Son House, "Preaching the Blues" Johnnie Temple, "Lead Pencil Blues" Robert Jr Lockwood, "Steady Rollin' Man" Robert Johnson, "They're Red Hot" Robert Johnson, "Sweet Home Chicago" Kokomo Arnold, "Old Original Kokomo Blues". Robert Johnson, "Come on In My Kitchen" Robert Johnson, "Love in Vain"

Junto al Flamin's Moe nuestro bebedizo favorito es el Hadacol: un asombroso tónico curalotodo cargadito de alcohol. En homenaje a esta medicina paleta hoy sonará "Hadacol Boogie" en la versión de Jesse Rogers, el primo de Jimmie Rodgers. También lo harán, entre otros pelotazos, "Bacardí Special" y "Pancho López". A partir de las ocho de la mañana del sábado en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

I've chosen some favourite albums and performers for this episode of BPBg, including Laurie Lewis, the Johnson Mountain Boys, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, Merle Haggard singing songs of the great Jimmie Rodgers, and High Fidelity singing a song from their new gospel album. Lots to enjoy.

Guest host Garrett Cash and Justin begin Part 4 of Elvis and Country Music journey right where they left off: Elvis' iconic 1969 sessions at Memphis producer Chips Moman's American Sound, which provide Elvis his first country hits – as the industry considered them – in a decade. They then trace Elvis' path from Las Vegas, where he brings together the finest country-rock band ever assembled in the TCB Band, back to Nashville where he not only embraces the “Countrypolitan” evolution of the Nashville sound, but pays homage to the genre's diverse pop, blues, and folk roots with his only concept album, an artistic triumph which fully showcased how Elvis viewed the history of country music, with its many lineages all under one banner: “Elvis Country.” Our hosts also take sidebars to reflect on women's rising voices in country music during this period, the development of a movement within Nashville that came to be dubbed “outlaw country,” and songwriters such as Mac Davis, Dallas Frazier, Lee Hazlewood, and Dennis Linde, whose “Burning Love” once again drives home the failings, inherent flaws and revealing biases in the way we discuss genre using the music industry's classifications; a “rock” hit from a “country” writer, originally recorded by “soul” singer Arthur Alexander. Finally, we arrive in Hawaii, where – as Jimmie Rodgers once reminded us – everybody does “it.” What is “it,” exactly? Sure seems like country music, since “Aloha from Hawaii” is jam-packed with it! And what to make of Elvis' interpretation of country writer Mickey Newbury's “An American Trilogy?” All that and more – next week's episode (we promise it'll be shorter!) will take us from Elvis' 1973 Stax Sessions all the way to the morning of August 16, 1977. You can find more of Garrett on "The Beat! With Garrett Cash" on SoundCloud at: https://soundcloud.com/garrett-cash-635212819 As well as on the Let It Roll Podcast miniseries "Holy Roll" at: https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com/p/let-it-roll-with-garrett-cash  In late October 2023 we will be releasing a YouTube and Spotify playlist with as many songs featured on this series as possible. Stay tuned to our social media pages for details. This series would not be possible without the support of TCBCast Patreon backers, thank you to all of our patrons! This is not remotely comprehensive or in any order whatsoever but among some of the key resources that we found useful for this 4th episode are: Ken Burns' Country Music - Documentary, Book & Soundtrack Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick Elvis Presley: A Life in Music by Ernst Jorgensen How Nashville Became Music City USA by Michael Kosser Cocaine and Rhinestones: "Dallas Frazier: Can't Get There from Here" by Tyler Mahan Coe: https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/dallas-frazier Cocaine and Rhinestones: “Billy Sherill's Nashville Sound” by Tyler Mahan Coe: https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/billy-sherrill

Episode 283, The Kitchen Sink, is an eclectic assortment of recordings that didn't fit into specific themes but are worthy of remembering. Performers include Max Morath, Peter Howard, Jimmie Rodgers, Kermit the Frog, Dinah Washington,... Read More The post Episode 283, The Kitchen Sink appeared first on Sam Waldron.

The epic saga begins. Music aficionado Garrett Cash joins Justin for the first part of a sweeping miniseries on Elvis Presley's lifelong, intertwined history with country music. We begin with the complex web of myriad influences that paved the way for rock and roll, and we start by treating the history of the genre not as strictly "hillbilly music" but as part of a vital continuum of American music that has always, in practice, blurred social, racial and class lines, encompassing blues, pop, swing & big band, jazz, showtunes, and gospel - and we bring receipts. We deep dive the history of its stereotypical sounds like the fiddle, banjo and steel guitar, the development of country as a commercial entity following Ralph Peer's Bristol sessions and the introduction of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, and trace the development of its subgenres, such as western swing, bluegrass, jug bands and hokum music, singing cowboys, honky-tonk and country boogie, leading us directly to the doorstep of 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. You can find more of Garrett on "The Beat! With Garrett Cash" on SoundCloud at: https://soundcloud.com/garrett-cash-635212819 As well as on the Let It Roll Podcast miniseries "Holy Roll" at: https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com/p/let-it-roll-with-garrett-cash  In late October we will be releasing a YouTube and Spotify playlist with as many songs featured on this series as possible. Stay tuned to our social media pages for details. This series would not be possible without the support of TCBCast Patreon backers, thank you to all of our patrons! This is not remotely comprehensive or in any order whatsoever but among some of the key resources that we found useful for this first episode are: Ken Burns' Country Music - Documentary, Book & Soundtrack American Epic - Documentary & Soundtrack Sets Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century by Barry Mazor The Birth of Rock and Roll: The Illustrated Story of Sun Records by Colin Escott and Peter Guralnick Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick Walk A Lonely Street: Elvis Presley, Country Music and the True Story of Heartbreak Hotel by Tony Plews Cocaine and Rhinestones by Tyler Mahan Coe The Nashville Sound by Paul Hemphill African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions by Cecelia Conway A History of Rock in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music from JSP Records At the Louisiana Hayride Tonight by Bear Family Records

Songs include: Casey Jones, Ben Dewberry's Final Run, Wreck of the Old 97 and Wreck of the Royal Palm. Singers include: Eddie Arnold, Marty Robbins, Blind Alfred Reed, Jimmie Rodgers and Vernon Dalhart.

In this illuminating episode, we saddle up to explore the deep-seated connection between blues and country music. Journey through time to understand how early hillbilly and Appalachian music fused with the blues to give birth to a genre replete with soulful stories and heartfelt melodies. With musical landmarks from Jimmie Rodgers to Willie Nelson, 'Countryside Blues' uncovers the intricate web of influences that shaped country music as we know it today. Tune in to discover how the essence of the blues is woven into the very fabric of country, making it more than just cowboy boots and southern drawls. SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://lnk.bio/TheBluesLegacy --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theblueslegacy/message

The Cherokee National Forest is divided into northern and southern sections by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  The 650,000-acre forest is the largest tract of public land in Tennessee and adjoins other national forests in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. The forest is home to 30 developed campgrounds and numerous picnic areas, over 700 miles of trails, seven whitewater rivers, two Forest Service scenic byways where you can enjoy a scenic drive through the mountains, the pursuit of wildlife, the thrill of whitewater, a night under the stars, or solitude on a backcountry trail.Hundreds of miles of lake shoreline and water await the fisherman, boating enthusiast, skier, and nature lover. South Holston Lake, a Tennessee Valley Authority reservoir covering 7,580 acres, is considered one of the top two lakes in Tennessee and among the best in the Southeast for smallmouth bass fishing and also is well known as a fly fisherman's paradise. The lake also provides many other recreational opportunities for residents, with 60% of its shoreline bordered by the Cherokee National Forest.Bristol is known for NASCAR as it is home to one of the world's greatest and most popular racetracks. Bristol Motor Speedway, which seats in excess of 150,000, hosts NASCAR Sprint Cup events in April and August and both draw fans from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries.Music also gives Bristol a universal appeal as the city holds the honor of being named the Birthplace of Country Music by U.S. Congress in 1998. In 1927, the legendary Bristol Sessions took place in the downtown area, giving birth to the “Big Bang” of modern country music with the likes of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers taking part in the historic occasion.The Twin Cities boast numerous parks, golf courses, spectacular caverns to go along with plenty of great restaurants – many of which are locally owned and operated – and wonderful shopping opportunities.Bristol is also rich in theater and arts and is home to the historic Paramount Center for the Arts, as well as Theatre Bristol. Numerous fine art galleries and studios of local artists can also be found in the downtown area.Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.Support the show

On a recent trip to Wellington, I went shopping for (and purchased) some second-hand CD's – but NEW to me. I thought I'd share them with you all. Music from Jim Lauderdale, Chris Jones, Alison Krauss, the original Jimmie Rodgers, Ricky Skaggs and Roy Acuff. There's some songs from Dierks Bentley, and Delia Bell and Bill Grant, as well as a tune from the HCBB featuring mandolinist Graham Lovejoy.

Chris and Jim discuss Ralph Peer, the man who first recorded The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and made the Victor Talking Machine an icon of music history. Jim gives a history of Nipper, the RCA / Victor Wonder Dog and Chris has another John Wayne drink and more Andrew Sisters shout outs.https://www.patreon.com/user?u=81625843

Roots music found commercial success in 2000 with the release of the movie O Brother Where Art Thou, a finely crafted but outrageous tale of Depression-era America with fantastical imagery of hair wax, baptisms, and chain gangs woven into a tapestry built from Homer's Odyssey. The music, assembled by T-Bone Burnett, was a major component of the film and recorded before the film even began with Burnett working with the Coen brothers while the script was in its working phases. It would become an effort that elevated a genre at the turn of the century called Americana. This week's show will share some of the period-specific music that helped to propel the notion that blues, jazz, bluegrass, country, and gospel could be used to put that time and a ghostly familiar culture into focus. We'll use O Brother's musical sensibilities to take us somewhere quite familiar (and at the same time quite terrifying) as we pay homage with Americana roots, featuring sounds from The Carters, Jesse Fuller, Dan Tyminski, Jimmie Rodgers, W. Lee “Pappy” O'Daniel & His Hillbilly Boys, among others.

The Cherokee National Forest is divided into northern and southern sections by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  The 650,000-acre forest is the largest tract of public land in Tennessee and adjoins other national forests in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. The forest is home to 30 developed campgrounds and numerous picnic areas, over 700 miles of trails, seven whitewater rivers, two Forest Service scenic byways where you can enjoy a scenic drive through the mountains, the pursuit of wildlife, the thrill of whitewater, a night under the stars, or solitude on a backcountry trail.Hundreds of miles of lake shoreline and water await the fisherman, boating enthusiast, skier, and nature lover. South Holston Lake, a Tennessee Valley Authority reservoir covering 7,580 acres, is considered one of the top two lakes in Tennessee and among the best in the Southeast for smallmouth bass fishing and also is well known as a fly fisherman's paradise. The lake also provides many other recreational opportunities for residents, with 60% of its shoreline bordered by the Cherokee National Forest. Bristol is known for NASCAR as it is home to one of the world's greatest and most popular racetracks. Bristol Motor Speedway, which seats in excess of 150,000, hosts NASCAR Sprint Cup events in April and August and both draw fans from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries.Music also gives Bristol a universal appeal as the city holds the honor of being named the Birthplace of Country Music by U.S. Congress in 1998. In 1927, the legendary Bristol Sessions took place in the downtown area, giving birth to the “Big Bang” of modern country music with the likes of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers taking part in the historic occasion.The Twin Cities boast numerous parks, golf courses, spectacular caverns to go along with plenty of great restaurants – many of which are locally owned and operated – and wonderful shopping opportunities.Bristol is also rich in theater and arts and is home to the historic Paramount Center for the Arts, as well as Theatre Bristol. Numerous fine art galleries and studios of local artists can also be found in the downtown area.This program brought to you by:The Angler MagazineSunrift Adventures Thank you for listening to this program. Please visit BizRadio.US for hundreds of other great conversational shows and be sure to bookmark Matt & Michele Outdoors on your browser for all sorts of great content.

This week my guest is Mark Brine, an Americana folk and blues singer-songwriter creating art that is "pure and rootsy, and brimming with emotion harkening back to Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family."We discuss the evolution of country music and the underbelly of Nashville on this hour of Appalachian Vibes Radio Show from WNCW. You can learn more about Mark Brine at https://markbrine.com/Appalachian Vibes Radio Show from WNCW is listener nominated, you can nominate an artist by emailing Amanda at appalachianvibes@gmail.com. Appalachian Vibes Radio Show is created and produced by Amanda Bocchi, a neo soul singer-songwriter, multi instrumentalist and journalist hailing from the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.

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

This week, a collection of consummate cow poke crooners recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park. Also, commentary from these bovine balladeers. Included on this show are Grammy nominated cowboy performer Don Edwards, inimitable cowboy poet & humorist Glenn Ohrlin, and Arkansas original cowgirl, singer, songwriter, actress and Country Music Hall of Fame superstar Patsy Montana. One of America's best loved and most enduring cowboy singers, Don Edwards is indeed an American treasure. His love and passion for traditional cowboy songs is second to none and has earned him a fan base worldwide. He knows the songs, the stories, and even some of the old trails that made the old West famous. Accompanied by his trusty guitar, Don takes us on a trip back in time when cowboy singers and songs echoed through the trails, taverns, and cattle drive camps of yesterday. Born in Minneapolis, MN in 1926, Glenn Ohrlin was a veteran of the cattle industry and worked the rodeo circuit, both while being an acquisitive singer, poet, & story teller. Glenn put his extensive knowledge and years of experience collecting Western folk songs into a book, “The Hell Bound Train,” as well as performing his authentic style of cowboy poetry & prose. Ohrlin performed at cowboy poetry gatherings across America, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. In the 1970's, Glenn moved to Mountain View, Arkansas, where he continued his music career, lending regular performances at the Ozark Folk Center. We at the Ozark Folk Center State Park reap the benefit of having years of Glenn's live performance recordings in our archives. Patsy Montana was an American country music singer, songwriter and actress. Montana was the first female country performer to have a million-selling single with her signature song "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart,” and is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. She was a mainstay on the National Barn Dance on Chicago radio station WLS for many years. Born “Ruby Blevins” in Beaudry, Arkansas, the 11th child and first daughter of a farmer, Patsy attended schools in President Bill Clinton's hometown of Hope, Arkansas. She was influenced early on by the music of Jimmie Rodgers, and paved the way for women in the male dominated world of country music. In this week's “From the Vault” segment, OHR producer Jeff Glover offers a 1981 archival recording of Ozark original Dean Hinesley performing the tune “Letter Edged in Black,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives. In his segment “Back in the Hills,” writer, professor, and historian Dr. Brooks Blevins discusses the origin of some odd words and pronunciations in the native dialect of Ozarkian.

The history of the Blues in Mississippi is rich, and there are no two better people to take us through it than Burgin Mathews and Scott Barretta. Burgin joins us from the Southern Music Research Center and Scott is an author and music historian. Listen to this exclusive episode recorded live from the Jimmie Rodgers Festival during music history night.

Nan Crossman of the Macomb Arts Center returns to preview two upcoming concerts at the MAC: Songs & Stories: A Casual Evening with Jimmie, Hank and Johnny (Saturday, June 10th) - An musical celebration of country-western legends Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash, performed by local artist Bill Maakestad. Admission is free-will donation, with all proceeds benefiting the MAC. Doors open at 7, show at 7:30.  John Byrne in Concert (Friday, June 16th) - Dublin-born singer/songwriter John Byrne returns to the MAC to share some traditional Irish music as well as songs from his catalog. Doors open at 6:30, show at 7. Tickets are $10 For more information on these shows or to buy your ticket online, visit the Macomb Arts Center website.  

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

Amid our long cultural intermission, the greatest ever critic and historian of ROCK & ROLL welcomes me into his home for an afternoon reverie on some of our favorite music artists and their covers of the American Dream.   Greil Marcus was the very first records editor of Rolling Stone and the author of critical masterpieces Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, as well as several other books including The History of Rock n Roll in Ten Songs and most recently Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in 7 Songs. His famous long-running column now appears on Substack.    Enjoy this free episode, then give strong thought to following the rest of the twisted adventure by subscribing on patreon.com/filthyarmenian for access to more than twice as many episodes, including the most intimate and scandalous ones.    Episode set list: Etta vs Beyoncé, Hitchens, Paglia, Madonna, Howlin Wolf and Jimmie Rodgers, John Hammond, Robert Johnson, Altemont, Rolling Stones, Lebron James, Rihanna, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Leon Russell, Harry Smith's Anthology of Folk Music, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone Magazine (early days), Teaching, Joni Mitchell, Melrose Place   Follow us on twitter and instagram @filthyarmenian

In this episode, we trace the history of country music in Kenya, dating back to the 1920s and 30s when local populations first heard Jimmie Rodgers on early country western 78 records, to the current day, where the clubs of Nairobi are filled with rising stars bringing their own unique sounds to country music. Hear their takes on the hits of Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and more. Tune in for an interview and performance from Kenyan country singer Steve Rogers, radio and tv presenters Catherine Ndonye and David Kimitho, music historian Elijah Wald, and Olvido Records founder Gordon Ashworth. Produced by Brandi Howell.

Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West "Stratosphere Boogie"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Love For Tender"Martha Davis "Kitchen Blues"Freakwater "Bolshevik and Bollweevil"The Light Crust Doughboys "Dirty Dish Rag Blues"Adia Victoria "Mortimer's Blues"The Carter Family "Bear Creek Blues"Memphis Jug Band "Papa's Got Your Bath Water On"Chris Whitley "Dust Radio"Billie Holiday "Long Gone Blues"Homesick James "Lonesome Road"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Bad Trick"Wynonie Harris "Quiet Whiskey"Roger Miller "Private John Q"Fletcher Henderson "Sing, Sing, Sing"Viola James "On That Rock"Angel Olsen "Lights Out"Stack Waddy "Willie the Pimp"Clem Snide "Moment in the Sun"Andrew Bird "Railroad Bill"Duke Ellington and His Orchestra "Love Is Like a Cigarette"Bob Corritore - Valerie June "Crawdad Hole"Kansas City Kitty & Georgia Tom "Gym's Too Much For Me"Loretta Lynn "Blue Steel"Rebirth Brass Band "Leave That Pipe Alone"Tom Waits "I Wish I Was In New Orleans [in The Ninth Ward]"The Nite Owls "Married Man Blues"S.G. Goodman "Dead Soldiers"Bukka White "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues"Hank Williams "Nobody's Lonesome For Me"Blue Lu Barker "That's How I Got My Man (10-25-49)"Trapper Schoepp "Eliza"Jimmie Rodgers "Let Me Be Your Side Track"Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers "Give Me Back My Wig"Bessie Jones "So Glad I'm Here"The Breeders "When I Was a Painter"R.L. Burnside "Peaches"Dead Meadow "Sleepy Silver Door"Billy Bragg "Greetings To The New Brunette"Drag The River "Fire & Flood"Willie Humphrey "Oh How I Miss You Tonight"Howlin' Wolf "Ridin' In the Moonlight"The Yardbirds "Respectable (Live)"Gang of Four "Armalite Rifle"Jimmy Smith "Got My Mojo Workin'"John Lee Hooker "Boogie Chillen  (1949 Original Version)"Lucero "San Francisco"

We kick-off with an old-timer from the HCBB, then straightaway we're into Bill Emerson & Sweet Dixie, Hot Rize, Flatt & Scruggs, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and Bluegrass Parkway from Australia. A couple of gems from Merle Haggard's recordings of Jimmie Rodgers' songs, rounded out with the Country Gentlemen, Flatt Lonesome and Curly Seckler. And what could be better than a fiddle-and-banjo tune from Bill Evans & Fletcher Bright to take us out?

So far in the show we've spent some time exploring Rock's ancestry on the Blues side of its musical family tree. In this episode we begin our exploration of the roots of Rock's Country & Western heritage. The topics we cover include the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, yodeling, modal harmonies, and, briefly, the Blues Brothers, and...Captain Planet...?

Episode #29. Just Good Records. “Fiddle Bustdowns, Fair Warnings and Gully Jumpers” Enjoy a nice selection of records across a variety of styles. Please subscribe to the show if you haven't done so already and share with family and friends. Also, go take a visit to the show's new website olddingyjukebox.com and have a look around. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the show. Donate to the podcast: https://paypal.me/christiangallo1?locale.x=en_USWebsite: https://www.olddingyjukebox.com/homeFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/olddingyjukeboxpodcastInstagram: @olddingyjukeboxpodcastE-mail: olddingyjukebox@gmail.comPaul Warmack and his Gully Jumpers-”Robertson County” Victor 1929Johnny Shines-”Ride, Ride, Woman” Columbia 1946 Unissued TestThe Johnson Family- “Precious Lord” George Mitchell Field Recording Skene Mississippi, July of 1969The Grant Brothers and Their Music- “Tell It To Me” Columbia 1928Coy Jackson- “Lookout Heart” Rimrock 1966The Vicksburg Blowers- “Twin Blues” Gennett 1927Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band w/ Sippie Wallace “Separation Blues” Mountain Railroad Records 1967D.L Menard & The Louisiana Aces “Lacassine Special” Rounder Records Recorded 1973 in DL's KitchenBlind Alfred Reed “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?” Victor 1929Earl Hooker “Dust My Broom” Cuca 1967Ford & Grace “Hideaway” Okeh 1928Ocie Stockard and his Wanderers “Twin Guitar Polka” King 1947Fats Waller “Sweet & Low” RCA Victor 1935James “Thunderbird” Davis “Instrumental #4” George Mitchell Field Recording Mississippi 1960sCliff Bruner & His Boys “Truck Driver's BLues” Decca 1939Joke & The Jokers “I've Got The Time” Tennessee Records 1965Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers “Flyin' Clouds” Columbia 1926Support the show

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Transcript It's the middle of December, as you have probably noticed, and that means it's a time when the airwaves in both the UK and the US are dominated by Christmas music. The music that's most prominent in the UK will have to wait until we get to the seventies for a discussion, but this week and next week in these bonus episodes I'll be looking at a few American Christmas classics: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Here Comes Santa Claus"] If I'd been doing these Patreon bonus episodes from the beginning of the podcast, rather than waiting for the first six months or so to do them on a regular basis, I'd have covered Gene Autry in one by about the fourth episode. He's someone whose name you'll have heard a lot in the podcast -- he was an influence on all sorts of musicians we've looked at, in all areas of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, Hank Ballard, Bo Diddley, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, and Les Paul all acknowledged him as someone they were trying to imitate in one way or another, and that's just the ones where I've been able to find clear confirmation. Autry was not, in any direct sense, a precursor to rock and roll. He didn't make records that included any of the elements that later became prominent in the new music, and he didn't have a rebellious image at all. But from the early 1930s to the early 1950s, he was the single biggest star in country music. He starred in many films, had his own radio show, had a line of comics about him, and he was so popular that even his *horse* had his own radio and TV show. British people from my generation may well remember Champion, The Wonder Horse still being repeated as kids' TV in the eighties. THAT's how big Gene Autry was, and so it's unsurprising that he influenced pretty much every singer of note in the rock and roll field. But he was also, along with Bing Crosby, one of the people who pioneered American secular Christmas music: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer"] I specify "American" secular Christmas music here, because one thing that differs between the US and the UK when it comes to Christmas is the music that's ubiquitous. In the UK, Christmas music mostly means glam rock -- you hear Slade and Wizzard incessantly, and other 70s artists like Mud. In the US, though, it means primarily the music of the forties and fifties -- the music of people like Gene Autry. Autry started his career as just another country singer, who performed as "Oklahoma's Yodelling Cowboy". His early recordings were very much in the style of Jimmie Rodgers, and were very different from his later clean-cut image: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Black Bottom Blues"] But in 1932 he had a hit with a song he wrote, which would soon become a standard of country music, a rather maudlin ballad called "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine"] As a result of that hit, Autry started appearing in films. The first film he appeared in was a serial -- The Phantom Empire -- in which he starred as a singing cowboy who is kidnapped by people from the underground super-science kingdom Murania, descendants of the lost tribe of Mu, and has to help them defend themselves from an evil scientist who wants to steal their radium. It may not surprise you that the writer of the film came up with the plot for it while on nitrous oxide, having a tooth extracted. Autry made another forty-four films in the next five years, and every year from 1937 through 1942 he was the top star of Western films in the US, as well as having a whole series of hits with songs like "Blueberry Hill": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Blueberry Hill"] However, in 1942 he enlisted in the army, against the wishes of Republic, the film studio for whom he worked. They told him that if he was just going to go off and fight Nazis instead of making singing cowboy films, they were going to promote Roy Rogers instead. So from 1942 through 1945, Autry was off fighting in the Second World War. After he got back, he was the *second* most successful singing cowboy film star, after Rogers. It was in 1947 that Autry got the inspiration for the song that would define his career. He was riding his horse in a Christmas parade, known as the Santa Claus Lane parade, and he heard spectators saying "here comes Santa Claus": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Here Comes Santa Claus"] "Here Comes Santa Claus" not only charted that Xmas, it charted the Xmas after as well. Given that Autry's recording career was slowly fading, it seemed to make sense for him to record another Christmas song about Santa and see if he could repeat his success: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"] Not only did that go to number one -- and become the first number one of the fifties -- but "Here Comes Santa Claus" charted for the third year in a row. So of course, the next year (after an Easter single, "Peter Cottontail", which also charted, but didn't have the same repeat success as the Christmas songs), he recorded yet another Christmas single, "Frosty the Snowman": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Frosty the Snowman"] The next year, he didn't release a Christmas single at all, and he seemed to lose momentum. In 1952 he released one final Christmas record, "Up on the Housetop": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Up on the Housetop"] But that had nothing like the success his earlier Christmas records had. He carried on making films and TV shows until the mid-fifties, and he finally retired in 1964. He died in 1998. His Christmas records still occasionally hit the charts in December, and regularly feature in the special Holiday charts Billboard publish every year.

We trace the history of country music in Kenya, dating back to the 1920s and 30s when local populations first heard Jimmie Rodgers on early country western 78 records, to the current day, where the clubs of Nairobi are filled with rising stars bringing their own unique sounds to country music. Hear their takes on the hits of Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and more. And an interview and performance from Kenyan country singer Steve Rogers, radio and TV presenters Catherine Ndonye and David Kimitho, music historian Elijah Wald, and Olvido Records founder Gordon Ashworth. The music and stories of other artists in this episode include: John Nzenze. Reuben Kigame, Don Williams, Sir Elvis, Sammy Ngaku-Rosana, Herbert Misango, Frances Rugwiti, Carlos Kiba, Ythera Cowgirl, Steve Rogers, HM Karuiki, Joseph Kamaru. Produced by Brandi Howell for Afropop Worldwide The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Support comes from the National Endowment for the Arts and contributors to the non-profit Kitchen Sisters Productions. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

“The boy with the hundred year old voice” Dr. Ralph Stanley grew up in the hills of Southwest Virginia during the Great Depression. He and his brother Carter were heavily inspired by The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Bill Monroe, who The Stanley Brothers would feud with decades later. Radio was king, and The Stanley Brothers became a household name throughout Appalachia by merciless appearances. Hear the story of how this farmhand persisted through waves of personal and career hardships, always staying true and believing in the old-time country music he played until becoming the international patriarch of traditional mountain music. Support THIS Independent Program: Join the Patreon Send a one-time donation through Venmo or PayPal — Follow American Songcatcher | Instagram | TikTok Credits: Nicholas Edward Williams - Production, Editing, Recording and Distribution Ryan Eastridge - Writing Source Credits: Musical Holdouts CMT.com The Stanley Brothers' Story 1969 Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times Appalshop Clinch Mountain Echo Ralph Stanley Museum Arts.Gov --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

With September birthdays for all three, how could I resist! (54 minutes) The post Coverville 1415: Cover Stories for Patsy Cline, Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers appeared first on Coverville | The Cover Music Podcast.