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In deze aflevering vervolgen we het fascinerende verhaal van de legendarische blueszanger Leadbelly. Na zijn breuk met John Lomax keerde hij met zijn vrouw Martha terug naar huis, teleurgesteld over de financiële uitbuiting die hij had ervaren. Ondanks racistische obstakels en ongelijke behandeling, bleef Leadbelly doorzetten en wist hij een indrukwekkende muzikale erfenis op te bouwen. De aflevering volgt zijn levensloop, van zijn strijd voor erkenning tot zijn latere jaren toen hij kampte met de neurologische ziekte ALS. Hoewel Leadbelly in 1949 overleed, bloeide zijn invloed pas echt op tijdens de folk revival die volgde. Zijn nummers als "Goodnight Irene", "Rock Island Line" en "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" werden klassiekers, gecoverd door artiesten als The Weavers, Lonnie Donegan en zelfs Nirvana. Deze aflevering belicht hoe Leadbelly's muzikale nalatenschap de Amerikaanse cultuur diepgaand heeft beïnvloed en tot op de dag van vandaag doorwerkt in verschillende muziekgenres.Voor deze aflevering van de podcast heb ik me voornamelijk gebaseerd op het boek “The Life and Legend of Leadbelly”, geschreven door Charles Wolf.Vind je deze podcast inspirerend en leerrijk? Deel hem dan in jouw netwerk en volg de podcast zodat je geen enkele nieuwe aflevering mist. En een review is ook altijd fijn
We're revisiting a show from 2019 and it just happens to be our first show in the new Santa Rosa studios. It is one that celebrates that Old Chisholm Trail and other prairie passages that resemble all things that follow those romantic icons whose life on the range was less than what their songs usually embellish. In the western sunsets where John Lomax first went out in search of the ‘cowboy song', we'll explore more enlightened performances from the silver screen to the deep folk traditions that have become so laminated with romance that it's hard to see the images beneath. This week's show will take us from Carl T. Sprague, the original cowboy crooner, to Johnny Horton, Fess Parker, Rex Allen, and Roy Rogers. The music is sometimes sappy (Rick Nelson's My Rifle, My Pony, and Me), sometimes light (Roy Rogers' My Chickashay Girl), and other times full of storytelling and history. So many performances to light up the evening sky…just before dusk…just before that ceiling of stars appears in the night sky.
In augustus 1934 werd Leadbelly vrijgelaten. Met slechts tien dollar op zak had hij geen idee hoe hij zijn toekomst zou vormgeven. Leadbelly zocht contact met John Lomax, de man die eerder zijn muziek had vastgelegd in de gevangenis. Lomax zag het potentieel van Leadbelly en nam hem aan als assistent. Samen trokken ze door Amerika, op zoek naar authentieke folkmuziek. Hun reis was niet altijd gemakkelijk – de spanningen tussen de twee mannen liepen soms hoog op – maar leverde een schat aan opnames op die een belangrijke bijdrage zouden leveren aan het behoud van de Amerikaanse muzikale traditie. Ze ontmoetten talloze muzikanten en maakten historische opnames. Uiteindelijk werd Leadbelly geïntroduceerd in de intellectuele kringen van New York, waar hij in contact kwam met andere invloedrijke muzikanten en schrijvers. Voor deze aflevering van de podcast heb ik me voornamelijk gebaseerd op het boek “The Life and Legend of Leadbelly”, geschreven door Charles Wolf. Vind je deze podcast inspirerend en leerrijk? Deel hem dan in jouw netwerk en volg de podcast zodat je geen enkele nieuwe aflevering mist. En een review is ook altijd fijn
Choice Classic Radio presents Broadway Is My Beat, which aired from 1949 to 1954. Today we bring to you the episode titled "The John Lomax Murder Case.” Please consider supporting our show by becoming a patron at http://choiceclassicradio.com We hope you enjoy the show!
A few weeks before his death in November 1966, Mississippi John Hurt's rendition of “Payday” was released as the opening track on his Today album for Vanguard Records.At the time, many fans believed the 74-year-old bluesman wrote the song, despite his introduction in which he characterized it as “an old tune… a ‘bandit tune.'” And we now know that a quarter of a century earlier, folklorist John Lomax recorded a version of “Payday” by lesser-known blues artists Willie Ford and Lucious Curtis in Natchez, Mississippi.Still, it is the John Hurt version that has become loved among syncopated fingerpicking guitarists; to this day his take on “Payday” is taught in classes and on YouTube videos.The John Hurt Odyssey: Part IThe Today album, hitting record stores in October 1966, marked the end of a remarkable three years for the venerable blues artist, who was born the son of freed slaves around 1892 in Teoc, Mississippi. John Smith Hurt grew up in the Mississippi Delta, living in Avalon, which sits midway between Greenwood and Holcomb just west of Highway 51.He left school at age 10 to be a farm hand and was taught guitar by a local songster and family friend. Hurt lived most of his life without electricity, did hard labor of all sorts and played music as a hobby at local dances. In the late 1920s, performing with local fiddler Willie Narmour, he won a competition and a chance to record with Okeh Records in two sessions, one in Memphis and another in New York City. John Hurt: Part IIThe resulting records were not a great commercial success — John went back to farming and raising a family that would grow to 14 children — but a quarter of a century later, his music entered the folk music canon. That's when two of those 1928 tracks were included in the holy grail of American music, Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, considered one of the main catalysts for the folk and blues revival of the 1960s and ‘70s. A decade later, in 1962, the presence of those old cuts — “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues” — on in the Smith anthology prompted musicologist Dick Spottswood and his friend, Tom Hoskins, to track Hurt down. Hoskins persuaded him to perform several songs for his tape recorder to make sure he was the genuine article. Quickly convinced — in fact, folkies found Hurt even more proficient than he had been in his younger Okeh recording days — Hoskins encouraged him to move to Washington, D.C., to perform for a broader audience.For the last three years of his life, Hurt performed extensively at colleges, concert halls and coffeehouses, appearing on television shows ranging from “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson to Pete Seeger's “Rainbow Quest” on public TV. Much of Hurt's repertoire also was recorded for the Library of Congress, and his final tunes, recorded in 1964 and released two years later, are on Today.He also developed a delightful friendship with a young folksinger named Patrick Sky who produced that final album for Vanguard, where “Payday” is the opening track.Deeper Roots of “Payday”By the way, in the brand new book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories, published last spring, author Elijah Wald finds a much longer tail on the tune, not to mention a possible connection to another Flood favorite.Wald notes that back in 1908, Missouri pianist Blind Boone published a pair of “Southern Rag” medleys that African Americans were singing in that region around the turn of the century.“Medley number one was subtitled ‘Strains from the Alleys',” Wald writes, and included the first publication of “Making Me a Pallet on the Floor.'” Wald says the medley also featured “a song that probably reaches back to slavery times and would be recorded in later years as ‘Pay Day,' ‘Reuben,' and various other names.”Our Take on the TunePurists say this doesn't sound much like Mississippi John Hurt's original, but that's pretty much by design. Once The Flood folks learn a song, they usually stop listening to the original so it is free to find its own form in the Floodisphere. That's their take on what Pete Seeger's folklorist father Charles called “the folk process.”And in this instance, “Payday” has been processing in Floodlandia for more than 20 years now, ever since its inclusion on the band's first studio album back in 2001.Here's the current state of its evolution, taken from a recent rehearsal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com
Today's Mystery: Around New Year's Eve, a drunk in a skid row hotel claims to be a man who was supposed to have died in a hit-and-run.Original Radio Broadcast Date:December 31, 1949Originating in HollywoodStarring: Larry Thor as Lieutenant Danny Clover; Charles Calvert as Sergeant Gino Tartaglia; Jeanette Nolan; Jay Novello; Leo Penn; Fred Howard; Bob Bruce; Barton YarboroughSupport the show monthly at https://patreon.greatdetectives.netPatreon Supporter of the Day: Candyce, Patreon Supporter since October 2021Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectivesJoin us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.
Today's Mystery: Around New Year's Eve, a drunk in a skid row hotel claims to be a man who was supposed to have died in a hit-and-run.Original Radio Broadcast Date:December 31, 1949Originating in HollywoodStarring: Larry Thor as Lieutenant Danny Clover; Charles Calvert as Sergeant Gino Tartaglia; Jeanette Nolan; Jay Novello; Leo Penn; Fred Howard; Bob Bruce; Barton YarboroughSupport the show monthly at https://patreon.greatdetectives.netPatreon Supporter of the Day: Candyce, Patreon Supporter since October 2021Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectives
Two great episodes of Broadway is My Beat especially for 1001 listeners
As played by Kentucky fiddler J.W. Day and recorded in 1937 by John Lomax, No Corn on Tygart is a delightful tune with its minor chord in the A part and descending melody in the B part. I went with "guitar tuning" -- gDGBE.
As played by Kentucky fiddler J.W. Day and recorded in 1937 by John Lomax, No Corn on Tygart is a delightful tune with its minor chord in the A part and descending melody in the B part. I went with "guitar tuning" -- gDGBE.
In de vorige en de volgende afleveringen van de podcast vertel ik over het leven en de legende van bluesman Huddie Ledbetter. Bij het grote publiek staat hij gekend als Leadbelly en je kan het al raden: Leadbelly heeft een torenhoge impact gehad op de bluesgeschiedenis. In de jaren dertig belandde Leadbelly meermaals in de gevangenis en het was daar dat hij zijn bijnaam en artiestennaam verwierf: "Lead Belly", de man die geen darmen in zijn lijf had, maar lood in zijn buik. Het leven in de gevangenis was hels, maar Leadbelly was een taaie jongen en hij wist zich te handhaven. Tot hij in 1933 vrij kwam, mede dankzij de hulp van folklorist Alan Lomax en zijn zoon John Lomax. Voor deze aflevering van de podcast heb ik me voornamelijk gebaseerd op het boek “The Life and Legend of Leadbelly”, geschreven door Charles Wolf. Vind je deze podcast inspirerend en leerrijk? Deel hem dan in jouw netwerk en volg de podcast zodat je geen enkele nieuwe aflevering mist. En een review is ook altijd fijn
This is the latest episode of the Chocolate News Podcast. We bring you news that discusses issues affecting the Black community.On today's show, we will be discussing the passing of WKRC-TV anchor John Lomax, the 96th Academy Awards, Marcia Fudge stepping down as HUD secretary, and more.This week's episode is hosted by John Alexander Reese (Digital Editor, The Cincinnati Herald) and Andria Carter (Digital Correspondent).Originally recorded on Wednesday, March 13, 2024.Make sure to check out the stories we talked about today on our website at www.TheCincinnatiHerald.com. You can also follow us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We also have our own YouTube channel. Just search for The Herald TV.
Ah, memories. It was an autumn night 52 years ago, and Pamela and Charlie Bowen went to a theater in downtown Huntington is see the new Cicely Tyson/Paul Winfield movie called Sounder. What a wonderful film, and Charlie especially loved the bluesy musical score performed by Taj Mahal, who also played the character “Ike” on screen.Charlie loved it so much, in fact, that he started haunting Davidson Records Store down the street, just waiting to buy the soundtrack LP and learn some of the tunes. Besides Taj Mahal's excellent work, the real star of the soundtrack is legendary bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins doing the opening track: a gospel tune called “Needed Time.” As reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, it was around this time that The Flood was just getting started. As soon as Charlie shared “Needed Time” with the band's fellow founder Dave Peyton, the song quickly got played regularly at their fledgling jam sessions, especially after Roger Samples came along a short time later to sing the harmonies and add his tasty guitar solos.About the Song“Needed Time” — often called “Jesus Will You (or sometimes Won't You) Come by Here” — seems to have first been collected by song catcher Robert W. Gordon in the 1920s (and later by John Lomax in 1937).The Robert Gordon connection is particularly significant. That's because Gordon's main claim to fame among folkies today is that in 1926 he also collected an early version of “Kumbaya.” This African-American spiritual's origin is unclear, but it is known to be sung in the Gullah culture of the islands off South Carolina and Georgia with ties to enslaved Central Africans. In the 1960s folk music revival, “Kumbaya” was regularly heard at coffeehouses across America (and later at any field trip that involved a campfire….)Kim ba ya, which translates to “come by here,” might well have inspired “Needed Time,” which Lightnin' Hopkins recorded in the early 1950s (and re-recording it many times later). It's Hopkins' original RPM track that is used in the opening moments of Sounder.“I play it from my heart and soul,“ Hopkins once said. “The blues is something that the people can't get rid of. And if you ever have the blues, remember what I tell you. You're gonna hear this in your heart… slowly rough and delicately brutal, like stones being rattled in a can of ribbon cane syrup.”Today the song has a particular strong connection with folksinger/blues artist Eric Bibb who performs at practically every concert. In fact, in the late 1990s, he even named his band “Needed Time” in recognition of the tune.More recently, it came back to the fore when renowned country artist Hank Williams Jr. recorded “Jesus Won't You Come By Here” for his 2022 Rich White Honky Blues album.“It's just perfect for an old southern hymnal,” Williams commented, “a reminder to slow down and enjoy ourselves.”Our Take on the TuneThe Flood has done the song for a very long time, and it's always different, depending on who is in the room. In this rendition from a rehearsal a few weeks ago, our man Danny Cox makes it memorable with his signature guitar stylings. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com
John Lomax III harkens from the first family of American Music Folklore. The Lomaxes have been chronicling and preserving American Folk music for over 100 years and five generations. John was born in New York then moved to Houston, Texas; he studied history at the University of Texas and has worked as a journalist, publicist, author, music distributor, and has managed musicians including Kasey Chambers, Steve Earle, and the late Townes Van Zandt. He has donated archival material that has been exhibited in museums and used in documentaries and is the recipient of the Jo Walker Meador International Award awarded by the Country Music Association. John Lomax lll and his wife currently make their home in Nashville, Tennessee.
JESUS CONDEMNED BY THE SANHEDRIN – Jesus Walking in the Way of the Cross LYRICS TO MUSIC: Why do you come against me Why do you seek false testimony I tell you you will find none But still you say ‘Show us, show us you Son of God' Two have brought their witness Saying ‘he will destroy he will rebuild in three days' No words I say could sway you But still you say by the Living God ‘Show us, show us you Son of God' What blasphemy what further need Now tell me people what do you think He deserves death every bit of it Come prophesy whose mouth forfeits this ‘Show us, show us you Son of God' MESSAGE SUMMARY: In the summer of 1933, John Lomax visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola with a singular goal: to collect and record American folk music. A pioneer musicologist and folklorist, Lomax was influential in the preservation of much of America's folk music. But it was in that particular June, amidst a stifling Louisiana summer, that he recorded the oldest surviving rendition of ‘He Never Said A Mumblin' Word.' The now commonly known American spiritual originated in the deep south many years before Lomax's recording. It chronicles some of the specific events during the crucifixion of Jesus, but within the simple words of the refrain lies its power: ‘And he never said a mumblin' word, not a word, not a word, not a word.' That Jesus would be falsely accused, spit on, and struck, and yet not speak out a word in his own defense is fascinating. Jesus becomes the definition of what it means to be meek. The people cry out for displays of his power, commanding him to ‘prophecy' as they beat him with their fists (Mark 14:65), yet Jesus' mouth remains shut. Why would Jesus allow false testimony after false testimony come against him, and not defend himself? Peter's first letter to the exiles answers this question beautifully. “[Jesus] committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return, when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly,” (1 Peter 2:22-23). Jesus was able to be meek because he trusted his Father in heaven. Jesus was able to be meek because he knew his Father's plan was perfect, despite blasphemous accusations. Jesus held his tongue because he trusted the only just judge. This can be incredibly difficult to do. Our culture often promotes, even rewards, self-centeredness and aggression. All the while, meekness is often associated with weakness and submission. Numbers 12:3 tells us that ‘…Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.' As we know from Moses' life, being passive and submissive was not his thing. Nor could this erroneous definition be applied to Jesus when he turned the tables in the temple (Matthew 21:12), or when he called out the scribes and pharisees for being hypocrites (Matthew 23:12-13). The Bible shows us that meekness does not mean weakness. The King of Kings is ‘gentle and humble in heart,' (Matthew 11:29), but that in no way lessens his strength and power, ‘for all authority in heaven and on earth' is his (Matthew 28:18). Before the chief priests and the whole council, as part of his Father's perfect plan, Jesus only speaks when the high priest asks him, ‘Are you the Christ…' To this question he replies with an all-powerful truth. ‘I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.' This is the man Jesus, meek and mild, yet possessing the full power of the Almighty. Written by Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper golgothamusic.com // poorbishophooper.com // Second edition ©2022 Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper TODAY'S PRAYER: When do you seek power when you should pursue peace? Ask God to create in you a sense of true meekness. Entrust your life, your circumstances, and your reputation to the One who judges justly. TODAY'S AFFIRMATION: Today, Because of who I am in Jesus Christ, I will not be driven by Loneliness. Rather, I will abide in the Lord's Presence. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5). SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): Mark 14:55-65: “The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.'” Yet even then their testimony did not agree. Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. “You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as worthy of death. Then some began to spit at him; they blindfolded him, struck him with their fists, and said, “Prophesy!” And the guards took him and beat him.”. A WORD FROM THE LORD WEBSITE: www.AWFTL.org. THIS SUNDAY'S AUDIO SERMON: You can listen to Archbishop Beach's Current Sunday Sermon: “How Does God Say He Loves You: Part 5 The New Covenant”, at our Website: https://awtlser.podbean.com/ DONATE TO AWFTL: https://mygiving.secure.force.com/GXDonateNow?id=a0Ui000000DglsqEAB
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture' actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination' is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk' in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
More than a hundred years ago, musicologist John Lomax recorded an African American woman named "Dink" singing a song as she washed her man's clothes in a Texas work camp on the banks of the Brazos River near Houston.Lomax and his son, Alan, were the first to publish it, including it in American Ballads and Folk Songs, which Macmillan brought out in 1934.A decade later, the great Josh White put the song on his first album. Since then, it has been recorded by scores of performers — Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, Bob Dylan and Fred Neil — sometimes as "Fare Thee Well," but most often simply as "Dink's Song."Now flash forward three quarters of a century and a highlight of Joel and Ethan Coen's extraordinary 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in one winter's week in 1961 Greenwich Village, is Oscar Isaac, in the title role, performing a moody rendition of the same tune.That moment especially resonates with all us folk music lovers, because most of us learned the song from a 1960s recording by the late folk genius Dave Van Ronk, whose work seems to have inspired the Coens' film in the first place. Dear Dave. They didn't call him “the mayor of MacDougal Street” for nothing.Our Take on the TuneHave you ever notice the magic in folk melodies, that they are both ancient and stunningly contemporary at the same time?And the magic doesn't end there. Besides their wonderful timelessness, these well-worn melodies also are almost universal in their emotional appeal.This song has floated around the Floodisphere for many years, but it didn't really take flight until Vanessa came along to blend it with a soulful Old World aire, and then Randy stepped up to take the lead on the vocals. Here, with pensive soloing by Dan and Sam, is our merging of the thoroughly American “Dink's Song” and the lovely Scottish “Loch Lomond.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com
There's a story behind this week's show. The Blues Society of Omaha asked me and Glenn, who fills in from time to time, to go on the main stage of our annual, In the Market for the Blues, and discuss the history of the blues.So we did. Sorta.The blues is a pretty big topic - especially to pack into 45 minutes. Instead, I put together A History of the Blues (rather than The History...). I decided to discuss some of the events that made the blues the artform it is today including The Great Migrations of Blacks from the American South to the north and west, some of the sources for blues music including field recordings, Chess Records, and John Hammond. I also told some stories like how John Lomax's efforts to get a recording label for Leadbelly tied together with the sit-com Friends, or how John Hammond's search for Robert Johnson created, in large part, the sound that was Classic Rock, or how a Memphis kid's love of a jug band player lead, indirectly, to several hit recording acts in the 60s and 70s. Or how Reg Dwight played the blues and became Elton John. We are ecclectricity and, ideally, listeners find that entertaining and informative. At the very least, but perhaps the most important, the show is not predictable or driven by cliches of what the blues is or isn't.Thanks for giving this a listen.It was an act of love putting this together.I hope you enjoy the effort.Pacific Street BluesAugust 7, 2022Link to Visuals23. Billie Holiday / Ain't Misbehavin'24. Stevie Ray Vaughan / The Sky is Cryin' 25. Charley Patton / Hang It On the Wall 26. Robert Johnson / Sweet Home Chicago27. Eric Clapton / Malted Milk Blues 28. BB King / The Thrill is Gone 29. Joe Bonamassa / You Upset Me Baby 30 Chuck Berry / House of Blues Lights 31. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers / Carol 32. The Rolling Stones / Confessin' the Blues 33. John Mayall Bluesbreakers / Parchman Farm34. Cyril Davis All Stars / L.A. Breakdown (Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, Charlies Watts, Ian Stewart, Mick Jagger) 35. Long John Baldry / Don't Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock n Roll 36. Elton John /Susie 37. Dana Fuchs / Save Me 38. Mike Farris / Precious Lord, Take My Hand 39. Hadden Sayers / Tip of My Tongue40. Hector Anchondo / I'm Going to Missouri
There's a story behind this week's show. The Blues Society of Omaha asked me and Glenn, who fills in from time to time, to go on the main stage of our annual, In the Market for the Blues, and discuss the history of the blues. So we did. Sorta. The blues is a pretty big topic - especially to pack into 45 minutes. Instead, I put together A History of the Blues (rather than The History...). I decided to discuss some of the events that made the blues the artform it is today including The Great Migrations of Blacks from the American South to the north and west, some of the sources for blues music including field recordings, Chess Records, and John Hammond. I also told some stories like how John Lomax's efforts to get a recording label for Leadbelly tied together with the sit-com Friends, or how John Hammond's search for Robert Johnson created, in large part, the sound that was Classic Rock, or how a Memphis kid's love of a jug band player lead, indirectly, to several hit recording acts in the 60s and 70s. Or how Reg Dwight played the blues and became Elton John. We are ecclectricity and, ideally, you find that entertaining and informative. At the very least, but perhaps the most important, the show is not predictable or driven by cliches. Thanks for giving this a lesson.It was an act of love putting this together. I hope you enjoy the effort. Pacific Street BluesAugust 7, 2022Link to Visuals1. Blue House and the Rent to Own Horns / I Put a Spell on You2. Dave Alvin / Highway 663. W.C. Handy /Beale Street Blues 4. Louis Armstrong / What Did I Do (to be so Black and Blue)? 5. Alan Lomax / Spoken Word6. Rev. Gary Davis / Candy Man 7. Bessie Jones and the Group8. Blind Willie Johnson / John the Revelator (Rex Granite Band, Mellencamp, Son House) 9. Tedeschi Trucks Band / Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning 10. Leadbelly / New Orleans11. Lonnie Donegan / Rock Island Line12. The Animals / House of the Rising Sun13. Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits) / Donegan's Gone 14. Bruce Springsteen / spoken15. Woody Guthrie / This Land is Your Land 6. The Carter Family / When the World's on Fire 17. Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash / Jackson18. Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash / North Country Girl 19. Memphis Jug Band / KC Moan20. Charlie Musselwhite / Blues Gave Me a Ride (Elvin Bishop [Paul Butterfield Blues Band], Ben Harper)21. Lovin' Spoonful / What a Day for a Daydream (Even Dozen Jug Band; Jonathan Sebastian, David Grisom (Grateful Dead), Steve Katz (Blood Sweat & Tears), 22. Maria Muldaur/ Midnight at the Oasis
* David Patrick Kelly talks David Lynch, Walter Hill, James Agee, Irish Accents, and depicting folklorist John Lomax in Night Music * Castro's Spies: Director Gary Lennon on his documentary depicting the heroic undercover Cubans known as the Cuban Five infiltrating Miami
JESUS CONDEMNED BY THE SANHEDRIN – Jesus Walking in the Way of the Cross (VIDEO) LYRICS TO MUSIC: Why do you come against me Why do you seek false testimony I tell you you will find none But still you say ‘Show us, show us you Son of God' Two have brought their witness Saying ‘he will destroy he will rebuild in three days' No words I say could sway you But still you say by the Living God ‘Show us, show us you Son of God' What blasphemy what further need Now tell me people what do you think He deserves death every bit of it Come prophesy whose mouth forfeits this ‘Show us, show us you Son of God' MESSAGE SUMMARY: In the summer of 1933, John Lomax visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola with a singular goal: to collect and record American folk music. A pioneer musicologist and folklorist, Lomax was influential in the preservation of much of America's folk music. But it was in that particular June, amidst a stifling Louisiana summer, that he recorded the oldest surviving rendition of ‘He Never Said A Mumblin' Word.' The now commonly known American spiritual originated in the deep south many years before Lomax's recording. It chronicles some of the specific events during the crucifixion of Jesus, but within the simple words of the refrain lies its power: ‘And he never said a mumblin' word, not a word, not a word, not a word.' That Jesus would be falsely accused, spit on, and struck, and yet not speak out a word in his own defense is fascinating. Jesus becomes the definition of what it means to be meek. The people cry out for displays of his power, commanding him to ‘prophecy' as they beat him with their fists (Mark 14:65), yet Jesus' mouth remains shut. Why would Jesus allow false testimony after false testimony come against him, and not defend himself? Peter's first letter to the exiles answers this question beautifully. “[Jesus] committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return, when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly,” (1 Peter 2:22-23). Jesus was able to be meek because he trusted his Father in heaven. Jesus was able to be meek because he knew his Father's plan was perfect, despite blasphemous accusations. Jesus held his tongue because he trusted the only just judge. This can be incredibly difficult to do. Our culture often promotes, even rewards, self-centeredness and aggression. All the while, meekness is often associated with weakness and submission. Numbers 12:3 tells us that ‘…Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.' As we know from Moses' life, being passive and submissive was not his thing. Nor could this erroneous definition be applied to Jesus when he turned the tables in the temple (Matthew 21:12), or when he called out the scribes and pharisees for being hypocrites (Matthew 23:12-13). The Bible shows us that meekness does not mean weakness. The King of Kings is ‘gentle and humble in heart,' (Matthew 11:29), but that in no way lessens his strength and power, ‘for all authority in heaven and on earth' is his (Matthew 28:18). Before the chief priests and the whole council, as part of his Father's perfect plan, Jesus only speaks when the high priest asks him, ‘Are you the Christ…' To this question he replies with an all-powerful truth. ‘I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.' This is the man Jesus, meek and mild, yet possessing the full power of the Almighty. Written by Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper golgothamusic.com // poorbishophooper.com // Second edition ©2022 Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper TODAY'S PRAYER: When do you seek power when you should pursue peace? Ask God to create in you a sense of true meekness. Entrust your life, your circumstances, and your reputation to the One who judges justly. TODAY'S AFFIRMATION: Today, Because of who I am in Jesus Christ, I will not be driven by Loneliness. Rather, I will abide in the Lord's Presence. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5). SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): Mark 14:55-65: “The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.'” Yet even then their testimony did not agree. Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. “You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as worthy of death. Then some began to spit at him; they blindfolded him, struck him with their fists, and said, “Prophesy!” And the guards took him and beat him.”. A WORD FROM THE LORD WEBSITE: www.AWFTL.org. THIS SUNDAY'S AUDIO SERMON: You can listen to Archbishop Beach's Current Sunday Sermon: “How Does God Say He Loves You: Part 5 The New Covenant”, at our Website: https://awtlser.podbean.com/ DONATE TO AWFTL: https://mygiving.secure.force.com/GXDonateNow?id=a0Ui000000DglsqEAB
How did an English song of love and loss vanish completely, only to pop up in a remote part of the Appalachian mountains as one of their many "love songs"? In tracing its story we come across the colourful characters who played a part in bringing it to the wider world. We cross the water in the cramped steerage quarters of a transatlantic sailing ship, and fly back over the ocean on the wings of a little bird to find an older song that may have been its source. MusicThe first verse of Pretty Saro is based on a version collected in North Carolina by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles.The mountain dulcimer version was kindly recorded for this podcast by Chris Nelson, you can hear Chris being interviewed on the podcast here.I've based the singing of Pretty Sarah (1911) collected by John Lomax on the singing of Cas Wallin, recorded in 1982 for the Alan Lomax archive.The Streams of Bunclody (first verse only) is the more well known tune, recorded by Luke Kelly and by Emmet Spiceland.The tune introducing Patrick Kennedy is The Boys of Wexford.The full version of The Streams of Bunclody, embedded into The Banks of the Boro is based on a version recorded by the Wexford traditional singer Aileen Lambert. I'm a big fan, and her version is as far away as possible from being "a maudlin lay"!ReferencesAn account of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles' travels in the Appelachians, including extracts from Sharp's journal, can be found here: https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/sharp.htm From: Cohane, Mary Ellen, and Kenneth S. Goldstein. “Folksongs and the Ethnography of Singing in Patrick Kennedy's The Banks of the Boro.” The Journal of American Folklore 109, no. 434 (1996): 425–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/541184.Maud Karpeles' own account of her visit to the Appalachians in 1950: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4521358Maud Karpeles' journals from her visit to Appalachia 1950: https://www.vwml.org/archives-catalogue/MK Some Ballads of North Carolina, by John Lomax: https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lomax/lomax.html A copy of The Banks of the Boro by Patrick Kennedy can be found here: https://archive.org/details/banksboroachron01kenngoogThe Maid of Bunclody http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/?query=+2806+b.9%28206%29The Streams of Bunclody in Halliday Sparling's Irish Minstrelsy. Irish minstrelsy. Being a selection of Irish songs, lyrics, and ballads : Sparling, H. Halliday (Henry Halliday) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Bundclody on the Mainly Norfolk website. https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/themaidfrombunclody.htmlAcknowledgementsHuge thanks to my family for putting up with my endless research and singing over Christmas and New Year, especially Steven Shaw who has the patience of a saint.Thank you as always to Maddy and Rose-Ellen at Stones Barn, who helped me to find my voice again.
Airing from 1949 to 1954, Broadway Is My Beat, is a radio crime drama, about a Times Square detective named Danny Clover who worked homicide "from Times Square to Columbus Circle—the gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world." GSMC Classics presents some of the greatest classic radio broadcasts, classic novels, dramas, comedies, mysteries, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Classics collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of radio. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through the classic age of radio, with this compiled collection of episodes from a wide variety of old programs. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed and some shows might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate give you a glimpse into the past.
I must say I have enjoyed the olympics....especially the friendship between the competitors,,, and the unbelievable skills of the young teenagers in the skateboarding,diving and gymnastics.....good to see respectful and well behaved youngsters displaying their talents instead of giving TV news coverage of complete morons throwing missiles at the police and the ambulance service....or acting like neanderthals at football matches.....even the boxers give each other a big hug after battering each other....let's hope some of this rubs off on the low life we have to put up with nowadays. s week my final travel feature takes us to Finland....not with Monty Lister but he strangely features in it....It was back n 2001 when I got a gig at a skiffle convention in Finland....I put a skiffle group together and off we went.....we arrived on a Friday...did the gig on the Saturday...spent Sunday looking around and back on the Monday....at the time I was working with Monty Lister on his Sunday morning programme on Radio Merseyside so I told him I would be missing on that day....the gig went very well on the Saturday night and the next day we were wandering around the town when a guy comes up to us and tells me how much he enjoyed the music and invited us to his restaurant for the afternoon....so we all jump in his car and he puts on a CD telling us this was the sort of music he liked.....first track was Monty Lister interviewing Bill Haley.....I couldn't believe it....he asked me if I knew this man....so I told him if I wasn't sitting in his car somewhere in the Arctic Circle I would be on the radio with him at that moment....took me a while to get over it....what were the chances of that? The story behind the Finland gig was I wrote a song for a dear friend of mine who was in one of the first skiffle groups in the area....called The Atlantics.....his name was John Lomax who I was inspired by in the late 50s....we became good friends when we met in the 90s which is when I wrote the song for him.....he sent it off to Hankasalmi in Finland where they have an annual skiffle convention.....we were then invited to go and perform there which we did....I put a small skiffle group together with John and we went there as The Atlantics....and had a great time.....so here is the song....The Story of Skiffle.
Plants can be carefully cultivated or can spread naturally. Songs, too, can spread deliberately or accidentally. Here's a small sampling of just a few of the song collectors who helped preserve gardens of old English, Scottish, and Irish ballads that travelled to North America. Alex Cumming and Catherine Crowe help untangle a few strands of the bountiful musical harvest of folk history and culture preserved by Francis Child, John Lomax, Helen Creighton, Elisabeth Bristol Greenleaf, Anne & Frank Warner, and Olive Dame Campbell (whose grave I'm determined to find by the end of the episode). * * * * * Thanks to everybody for listening. And a special thank you to this month's underwriters: Gašper Šinkovec, Sheila Worrall, Brian Benscoter, Marc Gunn, Suezen Brown, Paul DeCamp, Paul Grajciar, Elisabeth Carter, Jen and Bob Strom, Rick Rubin, Susan Walsh, Ken Doyle, Chris Armstrong, John Ploch, Benjamin Ruth, Joel DeLashmit, Finian McCluskey, Jon Duvick, Gerry Corr, Mike Voss, and Ian Bittle. Support the show and learn more at https://www.irishmusicstories.org
Imagine a people, passing through the crucible of slavery, for hundreds of years, until the first people in your new lineage are often lost in time – because slaves have no more families or histories any more than cattle or sheep do – and coming out the other side, proud, shining, and triumphant. Imagine using that experience to lay the foundations of music that became the soundtrack within the lives of billions of people around the world. In the wake of so much devastation, the sounds of faith, love, dignity and freedom were heard and shared until they echoed the world over. Many times, they were there to drown out more modern pains, and were used to inspire other people to face new adversities. It started with African Spirituals, and those Spirituals gradually became Gospel Music. This is a music that has given people a sense of holy urgency and righteousness all over the world. The Christians that created this music believed with everything they had in them that it was ‘the holy spirit' that gave them the authority. This was not performance. This was leadership.PS. My sincerest thanks to all of you repeat listeners out there in the following cities. Your interests in what I'm doing makes this so rewarding!· As Sulaymānīyah, As Sulaymānīyah· Atlanta, GA· Austin, TX· Birmingham, Al· Centennial, CO· Charlotte, NC· Chatillon, Ile-d-France· Clermont, FL· Clinchy, Ile-de-France· Columbus, OH· Compton, CA· Cordoba, Andalusia· Dallas, TX · Dusseldorf, N Rhine-Westpghalia· Fruitland, ID· Hough, OH· Hyderabad, Telangana· Islington, England· Lake Stevens, WA· Lanham-Seabrook, MD· Lillenthal, Lower Saxony· Los Angeles· Maidenhead, England· Manhattan, NY· Munster, North Rhine-Westphalia· Olympia, WA· Osaka, Japan· Placentia, CA· Reno, NV· San Antonio, TX· San Diego, CA· San Francisco, CA· Sao Paulo, Brazil· Sharjah, UAE· South Salt Lake, UT· Tokyo, Japan· Walsall, England· Washington, VA· Yorba Linda, CA Included in this episode:· Excerpt from Amistad· Excerpt from Fountain Hughes interview; WPA and John Lomax· Work Holler· West Indies Slave Chant - Roger Gibbs (Earliest Recorded Slave Chant from 1775)· Roll Jordan Roll - From 12 Years a Slave· Title Unknown - The Singing and Praying Band· Title Unknown - The McIntosh County Shouters· Rock My Soul - The Spirit Chorale of Los Ang
On this week's episode of Applaudable Perspectives, PLA Media president Pam Lewis sits down with John Lomax III to discuss his grandfather, John Avery Lomax, and his career as a song recorder of the 1800s and how the Lomax family business has shaped his own career, from writing for consumer and trade magazines, to music distribution and artist management for Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, David Schnaufer, The Cactus Brothers, Kasey Chambers and many others. For more episodes of Applaudable Perspectives check out our website, plamedia.com.
Between World War 1 and the Great Depression, the Jazz Age picked up where Guy Town's vices left off. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Dynamic @DonWoods joins the vicarious @vincetracy to have a rant against #television programmes from #BBC and #itv which are not cutting the mustard! The standard of TV is becoming a joke......there are some decent programmes but you have to search for them by skilfully trying to dodge the cookery programmes or Ant and Dec.....and the talentless Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton with their selection of stars of stage screen and scrapheap....who they "chat" to about their latest book,play or comeback and have to roar laughing at nothing....then we have multi millionaire Gary Linacre sitting with a couple of football "pundits"discussing a football match we have just watched.....yes old Gary gets millions for his weekly 90 minutes....well worth my licence fee. The song this week is one I wrote for a dear friend of mine who is sadly no longer with us...."Skiffle"John Lomax who played in one of the first local skiffle groups in the 50s and I saw them on stage in 1958 which was the first time I heard an electric guitar played live......I met John many years later and we became good friends....John was featured in the TV series "Days That Shook The World" which was about the fatal water speed record attempt by Donald Campbell of which John had rare cine footage....this song was my tribute to him and actually got us a gig in Finland where we went and performed at their national skiffle convention ....so here it is "The Story of Skiffle" sung by John Lomax
Self-improvement is a never-ending battle.
Broadway Is My Beat, a radio crime drama, ran on CBS from February 27, 1949 to August 1, 1954. With Anthony Ross portraying Times Square Detective Danny Clover, the show originated from New York during its first three months on the air. For the remainder of the series, the role of Detective Danny Clover was portrayed by Larry Thor. The series featured music by Robert Stringer, and scripts by Peter Lyon. John Dietz directed for producer Lester Gottlieb (eventually succeeding him as producer). Bern Bennett was the original announcer. Beginning with the July 7, 1949 episode, the series was broadcast from Hollywood with producer Elliott Lewis directing a new cast in scripts by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin.---------------------------------------------------------------------------Sherlock Holmes Radio Station Live 24/7 Click Here to Listenhttps://live365.com/station/Sherlock-Holmes-Classic-Radio--a91441----------------------------------------------------------------------------Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/broadway-is-my-beat/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Broadway Is My Beat, a radio crime drama, ran on CBS from February 27, 1949 to August 1, 1954. With Anthony Ross portraying Times Square Detective Danny Clover, the show originated from New York during its first three months on the air. For the remainder of the series, the role of Detective Danny Clover was portrayed by Larry Thor. The series featured music by Robert Stringer, and scripts by Peter Lyon. John Dietz directed for producer Lester Gottlieb (eventually succeeding him as producer). Bern Bennett was the original announcer. Beginning with the July 7, 1949 episode, the series was broadcast from Hollywood with producer Elliott Lewis directing a new cast in scripts by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin.---------------------------------------------------------------------------Sherlock Holmes Radio Station Live 24/7 Click Here to Listenhttps://live365.com/station/Sherlock-Holmes-Classic-Radio--a91441----------------------------------------------------------------------------Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/broadway-is-my-beat/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrpChartable - https://chartable.com/privacy Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
We continue our way through the life of Leadbelly in Part 4. In this episode we see Leadbelly make a plea for a pardon with his music, and watch as he tries adjusting to life outside of prison. As hard as he tries starting life anew, he finds himself once again behind bars, this time in Angola, known as the Alcatraz of the South, one of the bloodiest prisons in US history. We finally meet John Lomax and his son Allen who would become key figures in Leadbelly's life as they traveled the South searching for American folk music to preserve for the Library of Congress. We clear up some Leadbelly myth with primary sources, learn a bit about the earliest attempts at musical preservation through recording, and even get to hear a 130-year-old Passamaquoddy war song recorded by anthropologist Jesse Walker Fewkes. The adventure continues.
Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)
Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Stagger Lee" by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "That Crazy Feeling" by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I've uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo' Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children's Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don't buy the "Kindle edition" at that link, because it's just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he's also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis' less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today's episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you're squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I'm dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I've used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I've come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I'll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I'll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we're going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we're going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don't, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa's studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino's biggest hits. Price had a song, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino's earlier hit "The Fat Man", and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, "Just Because" went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Just Because"] But it wasn't until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Stagger Lee"] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I've changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that's better known as "Alabamy Bound", but was here called "Don't You Leave Me Here": [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, "Don't You Leave Me Here"] The line, "If the boat don't sink and the Stack don't drown" refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were "more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell". But it was probably the boats' reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name "Stack Lee", at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn't want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as "Billy the Bully", but bully didn't quite, or didn't only, mean what it means today. A "bully", in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family -- one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons' rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Stack-A-Lee Blues"] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it's difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, "Who's treating?" and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons' step-brother had murdered Shelton's friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other's hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons' hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton's hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits -- seventy-five cents -- for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn't going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn't hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said "You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I'm going to *make* you kill me" and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said "I told you to give me my hat", picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, "Stack O' Lee Blues"] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail -- that's something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today's money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer -- a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics -- a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton's arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater's political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton's faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn't reselected, Shelton's trial wasn't held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn't going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he'd gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison -- presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial -- just before Dryden's death, in fact -- a song called "Stack-A-Lee" was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin's performance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair -- the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as "Little Egypt" who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin's, had written "Harlem Rag", which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, "Harlem Rag"] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton's release. While we can't know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the "Stagger Lee" song were written by Turpin. It's been suggested that he based the song on "Bully of the Town", a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here's a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, "Bully of the Town"] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully -- in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully -- and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It's easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went "Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee". In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called "Stack O'Lee Blues", and we've heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode -- that's what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called "Skeg-A-Lee Blues" in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, "Skeg-A-Lee Blues"] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from "Frankie and Johnny", another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn't sound like him to me, and I can't find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to "the Bully of the Town": [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull -- Down Home Boys, "Original Stack O'Lee Blues"] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can't arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Stack O'Lee (1928 version)"] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn't be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as "Bama" who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, "Stackerlee"] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone's repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with -- Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender's glass. From there, the story might change -- in some versions, Lee would go free -- sometimes because they couldn't catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn't as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I've read, able to play "Stagger Lee" for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by "Archibald and His Orchestra": [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, "Stack A'Lee"] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa's studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald's only hit. That's the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Stagger Lee"] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts -- which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price's career was revitalised -- and "Stagger Lee" was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song -- in versions usually based on Price's -- became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, "Stagger Lee"] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Stagger Lee"] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we've been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority -- a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some -- I've seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of "Stagger Lee" at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said "Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how 'lumpen' had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I'm concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee." The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called "toasts". Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry's "Jo Jo Gunne"), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain's daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition", whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson's field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here's the version of Stagger Lee he collected -- there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you're listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, "Stagger Lee"] After Jackson's book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including "The Great Stack-A-Lee", which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, "The Great Stack-A-Lee"] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Stagger Lee"] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson's book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there's more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There's this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Stagger Lee"] That's not in the versions of the toast in Jackson's book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, "Two-Time Slim": [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, "Two-Time Slim"] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin's great poem "Stagolee Wonders", a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from "Stagolee Wonders" on "Poems for a Listener",] Baldwin's view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, "a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee's roots are there, and Stagger Lee's often been a preacher. He's one who conveys the real history.” It's a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it's a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price's hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of "Stagger Lee", Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he's now best known, "Personality": [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Personality"] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion -- he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours -- indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with "Stagger Lee", and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.
Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo’ Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don’t buy the “Kindle edition” at that link, because it’s just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he’s also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis’ less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today’s episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I’m dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I’ve used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I’ve come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I’ll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I’ll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we’re going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we’re going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don’t, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino’s biggest hits. Price had a song, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino’s earlier hit “The Fat Man”, and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, “Just Because” went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Just Because”] But it wasn’t until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I’ve changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that’s better known as “Alabamy Bound”, but was here called “Don’t You Leave Me Here”: [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, “Don’t You Leave Me Here”] The line, “If the boat don’t sink and the Stack don’t drown” refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were “more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell”. But it was probably the boats’ reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name “Stack Lee”, at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn’t want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as “Billy the Bully”, but bully didn’t quite, or didn’t only, mean what it means today. A “bully”, in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family — one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons’ rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, “Stack-A-Lee Blues”] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it’s difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, “Who’s treating?” and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons’ step-brother had murdered Shelton’s friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other’s hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons’ hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton’s hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits — seventy-five cents — for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn’t going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn’t hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said “You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to *make* you kill me” and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said “I told you to give me my hat”, picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, “Stack O’ Lee Blues”] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail — that’s something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today’s money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer — a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics — a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton’s arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater’s political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton’s faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn’t reselected, Shelton’s trial wasn’t held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn’t going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he’d gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison — presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial — just before Dryden’s death, in fact — a song called “Stack-A-Lee” was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin’s performance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as “Little Egypt” who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin’s, had written “Harlem Rag”, which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, “Harlem Rag”] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton’s release. While we can’t know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the “Stagger Lee” song were written by Turpin. It’s been suggested that he based the song on “Bully of the Town”, a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here’s a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, “Bully of the Town”] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully — in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully — and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It’s easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went “Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee”. In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called “Stack O’Lee Blues”, and we’ve heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode — that’s what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called “Skeg-A-Lee Blues” in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, “Skeg-A-Lee Blues”] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from “Frankie and Johnny”, another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn’t sound like him to me, and I can’t find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to “the Bully of the Town”: [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull — Down Home Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues”] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can’t arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, “Stack O’Lee (1928 version)”] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn’t be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as “Bama” who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, “Stackerlee”] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone’s repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with — Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender’s glass. From there, the story might change — in some versions, Lee would go free — sometimes because they couldn’t catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn’t as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I’ve read, able to play “Stagger Lee” for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by “Archibald and His Orchestra”: [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, “Stack A’Lee”] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald’s only hit. That’s the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts — which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price’s career was revitalised — and “Stagger Lee” was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song — in versions usually based on Price’s — became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, “Stagger Lee”] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, “Stagger Lee”] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we’ve been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority — a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some — I’ve seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of “Stagger Lee” at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said “Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how ‘lumpen’ had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I’m concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee.” The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called “toasts”. Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Jo Jo Gunne”), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain’s daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition”, whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson’s field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here’s the version of Stagger Lee he collected — there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you’re listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, “Stagger Lee”] After Jackson’s book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including “The Great Stack-A-Lee”, which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “The Great Stack-A-Lee”] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson’s book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there’s more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There’s this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] That’s not in the versions of the toast in Jackson’s book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, “Two-Time Slim”: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “Two-Time Slim”] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin’s great poem “Stagolee Wonders”, a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from “Stagolee Wonders” on “Poems for a Listener”,] Baldwin’s view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, “a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee’s roots are there, and Stagger Lee’s often been a preacher. He’s one who conveys the real history.” It’s a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it’s a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price’s hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of “Stagger Lee”, Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he’s now best known, “Personality”: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Personality”] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion — he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours — indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with “Stagger Lee”, and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.
Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers. I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The bulk of the information in this episode came from Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown, the person who finally identified Lee Shelton as the subject of the song. I also got some information from Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson, Unprepared to Die by Paul Slade, and Yo’ Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie. Lloyd Price has written a few books. His autobiography is out of print and goes for silly money (and don’t buy the “Kindle edition” at that link, because it’s just the sheet music to the song, which Amazon have mislabelled) but he’s also written a book of essays with his thoughts on race, some of which shed light on his work. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 . And you can get the Snatch and the Poontangs album on a twofer with Johnny Otis’ less explicit album Cold Shot. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start today’s episode, a brief note. Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it. Secondly, some of the material I’m dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast, for a variety of reasons. This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture. The source material I’ve used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here. There is frequent use of a particular racial slur which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say; there are transcripts of oral history which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African-American Vernacular English, which even were those transcripts themselves acceptable would sound mocking coming out of my English-accented mouth; and there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms. There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I’ve come up with the best compromise I can. I will not use, even in quotes, that slur. I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed. I’ll make an unexpurgated version available for my Patreon backers, and I’ll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud. The story we’re going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895, but we’re going to start our story in the mid 1950s, with Lloyd Price. [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in episode twelve, from Christmas 2018, but if you don’t, Price was a teenager in 1952, when he wandered into Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written, and arranged most of Fats Domino’s biggest hits. Price had a song, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino’s earlier hit “The Fat Man”, and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing, Domino on piano, and the great Earl Palmer on drums: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] That was one of the first R&B records put out on Specialty Records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cooke and others to prominence, and it went to number one on the R&B charts. Price had a couple more big R&B hits, but then he got drafted, and when he got back the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years. But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, and one song, “Just Because” went to number three on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Just Because”] But it wasn’t until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit, a song that would kickstart his career, and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1895: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family. Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling. This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay. There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939, but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went (I’ve changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start): Reason I like the Lee Line trade Sleep all night with the chambermaid She gimme some pie, and she gimme some cake And I give her all the money that I ever make The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that’s better known as “Alabamy Bound”, but was here called “Don’t You Leave Me Here”: [Excerpt: Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed, “Don’t You Leave Me Here”] The line, “If the boat don’t sink and the Stack don’t drown” refers to one of the boats on the Lee Line, the Stack Lee, a boat that started service in 1902. But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company. In 1948 the scholar Shields McIlwayne claimed that the captain, and later the boat, were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were “more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell”. But it was probably the boats’ reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name “Stack Lee”, at some time before Christmas Day 1895. On that Christmas Day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis Saloon. Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn’t want any trouble. Bill Lyons was known as “Billy the Bully”, but bully didn’t quite, or didn’t only, mean what it means today. A “bully”, in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise, and the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organised crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote. Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family — one of the richest black families in St. Louis. He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party. Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only thirty years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater Saloon, owned by Lyons’ rich brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans. Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar. Shelton was a pimp, and seems to have made a lot of money from it. Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang. [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, “Stack-A-Lee Blues”] Shelton was very big in the local Democratic party, and from what we can tell was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was. While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere. He was also a pimp who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though like almost everything in this story it’s difficult to know for certain more than a hundred and twenty years later. When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top. He had a slightly crossed left eye, and scars on his face. And he was wearing a white Stetson. Lee asked the crowd, “Who’s treating?” and they pointed to Lyons. There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons’ step-brother had murdered Shelton’s friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater Saloon. But nonetheless, the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while, until they started talking about politics. They started slapping at each other’s hats, apparently playfully. Then Shelton grabbed Lyons’ hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton’s hat off his head. Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits — seventy-five cents — for a new hat. Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn’t going to give Lyons any money. Lyons refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat. Lyons refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun. He then threatened to kill Lyons if he didn’t hand the hat over. Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, and said “You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to *make* you kill me” and came at Shelton, who shot Lyons. Lyons staggered and clutched on to the bar, and dropped the hat. Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said “I told you to give me my hat”, picked it up, and walked out. Lyons died of his wounds a few hours later. [Excerpt: Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, “Stack O’ Lee Blues”] Shelton was arrested, and let go on four thousand dollars bail — that’s something like a hundred and twenty thousand in today’s money, to give you some idea, though by the time we go that far back comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless. Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer — a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer. Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man. Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics — a mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse. But something happened between Shelton’s arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater’s political power waned somewhat. Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off. Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed. This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites. [Excerpt: Frank Westphal and his Orchestra, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St. Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants, so the black caucus within the party approved of the idea. But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds, and the party did nothing. This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the system of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people, who were expected just to vote for the Republicans. James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black US ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican party for the way it was treating black voters. Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention. Judge Murphy was coming up for reelection, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again. The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him. This was the last straw. In 1896, ninety percent of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat, for the first time. Shelton’s faction was now in the ascendant. Because Murphy wasn’t reselected, Shelton’s trial wasn’t held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defence, because Lyons had pulled out a knife. There was a hung jury, and it went to a retrial. Sadly for Shelton, though, Dryden wasn’t going to be representing him in the second trial. Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry. That had triggered a relapse, he’d gone on a binge, and died. At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison — presumably the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later. Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again, for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison. But even before his trial — just before Dryden’s death, in fact — a song called “Stack-A-Lee” was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City. The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin. Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result of Scott Joplin’s performance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as “Little Egypt” who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back. But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin’s, had written “Harlem Rag”, which was published in 1897, and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published: [Excerpt: Ragtime Dorian Henry, “Harlem Rag”] Turpin was another big man in St. Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton’s release. While we can’t know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest, ragtime, versions of the “Stagger Lee” song were written by Turpin. It’s been suggested that he based the song on “Bully of the Town”, a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans. That song was popularised by May Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed. Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast, so here’s a 1920s version by Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers: [Excerpt: Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, “Bully of the Town”] That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully — in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully — and so becomes the biggest bully himself. It’s easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song. By 1910, the song about Stack Lee had spread all across the country. The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went “Twas a Christmas morning/The hour was about ten/When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons/And landed in the Jefferson pen/O lordy, poor Stagalee”. In 1924, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called “Stack O’Lee Blues”, and we’ve heard instrumental versions of that, from 1923 and 24, earlier in this episode — that’s what those instrumental breaks were. Lovie Austin recorded a song called “Skeg-A-Lee Blues” in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about: [Excerpt: Ford & Ford, “Skeg-A-Lee Blues”] The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey, in 1925. In her version, the melody and some of the words come from “Frankie and Johnny”, another popular song about a real-life murder in St. Louis in the 1890s: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, “Stack O’Lee Blues”] According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song. It doesn’t sound like him to me, and I can’t find any other evidence for that except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia. Sites I trust more say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track. By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants. Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to “the Bully of the Town”: [Excerpt: Long Cleve Reed and Little Henry Hull — Down Home Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues”] And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can’t arrest that bad man Stagger Lee: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, “Stack O’Lee (1928 version)”] By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn’t be until the early nineties that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song. During the thirties and forties, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians, almost all of them either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as “Bama” who recorded this for the Lomaxes: [Excerpt: Bama, “Stackerlee”] None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana. It was a song in everyone’s repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with — Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps, Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway. Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender’s glass. From there, the story might change — in some versions, Lee would go free — sometimes because they couldn’t catch him and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off. In other versions, he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death. Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him, all dressed in red. In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to Hell, where he would usurp the Devil, because the Devil wasn’t as bad as Stagger Lee. There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Doctor John was, according to some things I’ve read, able to play “Stagger Lee” for three hours straight without repeating a verse. Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by “Archibald and His Orchestra”: [Excerpt: Archibald and His Orchestra, “Stack A’Lee”] That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point, and took up both sides of a seventy-eight record. It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fats Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio. It went top ten on the Billboard R&B charts, and was Archibald’s only hit. That’s the version that, eight years later, inspired Lloyd Price to record this: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Stagger Lee”] That became a massive, massive hit. It went to number one on both the Hot One Hundred and the R&B charts — which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today. Price’s career was revitalised — and “Stagger Lee” was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture. Over the next few decades, the song — in versions usually based on Price’s — became a standard among white rock musicians. Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis and the News: [Excerpt: Huey Lewis and the News, “Stagger Lee”] Mike Love of the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: Mike Love, “Stagger Lee”] and Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Stagger Lee”] But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community. You see, up to this point all we’ve been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time. But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the Devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans. He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority — a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well. He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic. Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some — I’ve seen the label applied to everyone from O.J. Simpson to Malcolm X. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of “Stagger Lee” at parties. In an interview, later, Seale said “Now I transformed Stagolee, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity. In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how ‘lumpen’ had been described historically. My point is this; that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler. Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness as far as I’m concerned. To me, this brother was really getting ready to move. So symbolically, at one time he was Stagolee.” The version of Stagger Lee that Seale knew is the one that came from something called “toasts”. Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming, and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene. Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar. Many of the stories told in toasts are very well known, including the story of the Signifying Monkey (which has been told in bowdlerised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Jo Jo Gunne”), and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic, who swims for safety and refuses to help the Captain’s daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help. Shine outswims the sharks who try to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking. Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure. These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Poetry from Oral Tradition”, whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic. Jackson’s field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached. Here’s the version of Stagger Lee he collected — there will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you’re listening to the regular version of this podcast: [Excerpt: Unknown field recording, “Stagger Lee”] After Jackson’s book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including “The Great Stack-A-Lee”, which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “The Great Stack-A-Lee”] That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recentish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson’s book, but the melody is very, very, close to the Johnny Otis version. And there’s more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track. There’s this line: [Excerpt: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Stagger Lee”] That’s not in the versions of the toast in Jackson’s book, but it *is* in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, “Two-Time Slim”: [Excerpt: Snatch and the Poontangs, “Two-Time Slim”] This is the Stagger Lee of legend, the Stagger Lee who is the narrator of James Baldwin’s great poem “Stagolee Wonders”, a damning indictment of racist society: [Excerpt: James Baldwin, reading an excerpt from “Stagolee Wonders” on “Poems for a Listener”,] Baldwin’s view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, “a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church. And Stagger Lee’s roots are there, and Stagger Lee’s often been a preacher. He’s one who conveys the real history.” It’s a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895. And it’s a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price’s hit version will have known nothing of. As a result of “Stagger Lee”, Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he’s now best known, “Personality”: [Excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Personality”] Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion — he was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Mohammed Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight. Lloyd Price is eighty-seven years old, now, and released his most recent album in 2016. He still tours — indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop. He opened his show, as he always does, with “Stagger Lee”, and I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.
John Lomax is drunk in a hotel room, even though he was killed by a hit-and-run driver! Mr. Lomax is then thrown out of a hotel window! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/iloveoldtimeradio/message
Radiokeys members Stewart and Emily drink some Coronas on one of the hottest St. Helena days in recent memory to discuss the legendary folk and blues heavyweight, Lead Belly. They talk about his early days playing on the streets with Blind Lemon, his relationship with John Lomax, his frequent run-ins with the law, correlating prison stints, as well as his overall historic timeline. If you like the podcast, please lend us a 5 Star Review on iTunes or the Apple Podcast App (the algorithms seem to like that), tell a friend, and please subscribe, it'd mean the world to us! Radiokeys' Information: RadiokeysMusic.com Instagram: @RadiokeysMusic Twitter: @Radiokeys Facebook: Facebook.com/radiokeysmusic Download our music for free at reverbnation.com/Radiokeys
I watched The Eurovision Song Contest which was hard going......and as usual we were bottom of the pile.....what I can't understand is why don't we realise that NOVELTY is what is required....Bucks Fizz with the skirts pulled off....Brotherhood of Man with their silly dance....the bearded "lady" etc.....much as I like the lad who represened us we missed the best song in the run up....it was called "Freaks" and would have done well....but our public unfortunately thought otherwise....the music business is,and always has been,full of egotists who would have difficulty playing a tambourine yet think they know more than real musicians.....and when we come last every year we blame "politics".....which has nothing to do with it....professional songwriters and someone who actually knows about presentation is required then perhaps we would have something we can offer......or perhaps just call it a day? 2.There is a strange addiction with modern day road users....they simply HAVE to overtake....no matter what speed you are doing they MUST get past....you could be doing 150 m.p.h. and they would still HAVE to get past........I live in a cul de sac and have to turn into it from the main road...sometimes I have to wait for oncoming traffic to clear and I can guarantee some idiot will struggle to squeeze past on the inside....WHY??....they will save themselves about 10 seconds...everyone is in such a hurry and every day we have huge tailbacks on motorways because of brainless idiots.....anyone who thinks they are Lewis Hamilton and isn't should get a life ban which would make the roads a lot safer. 3.The Jeremy Kyle Show has been axed by ITV because one of the contestants has committed suicide....this is a terrible situation which has sadly been waiting to happen.....I think all shows like this should be scrapped....it is not entertainment and wouldn't be missed by anyone with half a brain....the small percentage of sad fools who watch this garbage shouldn't be given any consideration...and as for Mr.Kyle I don't know how he got where he is (or was).....he MUST have been smacked around in school....he MUST have been....he is such a prat........and Martin Clunes has been removed from his programme on animals because he climbed up on an elephant using its ears...which hasn't gone down too well with elephant lovers.....and as he is a white heterosexual Anglo Saxon male he has no argument as he can't use the racist card or the sexist card or the discrimination card....so that's that. 4.There was a very interesting programme on BBC4 called "the people's history of pop" which looked back to the beginnings of skiffle and rock and roll....it was presented by Twiggy....it included people who were there at the time (including our mate Roger Baskeyfield)....it was a great programme but unless you were there it is hard to comprehend the impact it created....I was 11 when I walked into a local cinema with a mate and saw Rock Around The Clock......I walked out of the cinema a different lad....learnt to play guitar (which my dad made me from a kit) formed a skiffle group and off we went.....the programme illustrated this so well as it progresed through the beginning of Merseybeat etc.....and the strange thing is it didn't seem that long ago.....are we really that old? 5.Which brings me to this weeks song.....during those very early years I saw one of our local top skiffle groups called "The Atlantics" which was the first time I heard an electric guitar played live....the leader of the group was John Lomax who went on to make award winning films (he was featured in the Donald Campbell drama called Days that Changed The World).....forty years later we met and became great friends and put a skiffle group together and topped the bill at a skiffle convention in Finland....John was a great guy who I thought the world of....sadly he is no longer with us....but I wrote this song for the convention and got him in the studio.....so here it is my tribute to my mate "The Story of Skiffle" by John Lomax
I watched The Eurovision Song Contest which was hard going......and as usual we were bottom of the pile.....what I can't understand is why don't we realise that NOVELTY is what is required....Bucks Fizz with the skirts pulled off....Brotherhood of Man with their silly dance....the bearded "lady" etc.....much as I like the lad who represened us we missed the best song in the run up....it was called "Freaks" and would have done well....but our public unfortunately thought otherwise....the music business is,and always has been,full of egotists who would have difficulty playing a tambourine yet think they know more than real musicians.....and when we come last every year we blame "politics".....which has nothing to do with it....professional songwriters and someone who actually knows about presentation is required then perhaps we would have something we can offer......or perhaps just call it a day? 2.There is a strange addiction with modern day road users....they simply HAVE to overtake....no matter what speed you are doing they MUST get past....you could be doing 150 m.p.h. and they would still HAVE to get past........I live in a cul de sac and have to turn into it from the main road...sometimes I have to wait for oncoming traffic to clear and I can guarantee some idiot will struggle to squeeze past on the inside....WHY??....they will save themselves about 10 seconds...everyone is in such a hurry and every day we have huge tailbacks on motorways because of brainless idiots.....anyone who thinks they are Lewis Hamilton and isn't should get a life ban which would make the roads a lot safer. 3.The Jeremy Kyle Show has been axed by ITV because one of the contestants has committed suicide....this is a terrible situation which has sadly been waiting to happen.....I think all shows like this should be scrapped....it is not entertainment and wouldn't be missed by anyone with half a brain....the small percentage of sad fools who watch this garbage shouldn't be given any consideration...and as for Mr.Kyle I don't know how he got where he is (or was).....he MUST have been smacked around in school....he MUST have been....he is such a prat........and Martin Clunes has been removed from his programme on animals because he climbed up on an elephant using its ears...which hasn't gone down too well with elephant lovers.....and as he is a white heterosexual Anglo Saxon male he has no argument as he can't use the racist card or the sexist card or the discrimination card....so that's that. 4.There was a very interesting programme on BBC4 called "the people's history of pop" which looked back to the beginnings of skiffle and rock and roll....it was presented by Twiggy....it included people who were there at the time (including our mate Roger Baskeyfield)....it was a great programme but unless you were there it is hard to comprehend the impact it created....I was 11 when I walked into a local cinema with a mate and saw Rock Around The Clock......I walked out of the cinema a different lad....learnt to play guitar (which my dad made me from a kit) formed a skiffle group and off we went.....the programme illustrated this so well as it progresed through the beginning of Merseybeat etc.....and the strange thing is it didn't seem that long ago.....are we really that old? 5.Which brings me to this weeks song.....during those very early years I saw one of our local top skiffle groups called "The Atlantics" which was the first time I heard an electric guitar played live....the leader of the group was John Lomax who went on to make award winning films (he was featured in the Donald Campbell drama called Days that Changed The World).....forty years later we met and became great friends and put a skiffle group together and topped the bill at a skiffle convention in Finland....John was a great guy who I thought the world of....sadly he is no longer with us....but I wrote this song for the convention and got him in the studio.....so here it is my tribute to my mate "The Story of Skiffle" by John Lomax
Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)
Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)
.While sifting through the rubbish we are subjected to on television I actually found a program I enjoyed....it was the story of Jimmy Perry and David Croft who created Dad's Army....it was about the struggle they had to get it off the ground...and the two actors who played them were really good and the chap who played Captain Mainwaring was spot on....it was a brilliant insight into problems of trying to convince TV boffins of the credibility of good comedy...boffins who can't see further than the end of their noses......the pair went on to write Hi-de-Hi which is also classic comedy........................and another interesting documentary was the story of Fawlty Towers...another classic...it was interesting to see how John Cleese stopped after the second series as he felt it had run its course...a wise decision....unlike "Benidorm" which started well but has now reached rock bottom....definitely well past its sell-by date.....sadly great comedy is a thing of the past. 2.I thought after his appearance on Strictly Come Dancing Ed Balls would vanish off the scene....how wrong I was....he features in a new documentary called Travels in Trumpland with Ed Balls....where he travels around the southern states of the U.S.A. meeting Donald Trump supporters......and is he a dark horse or what....he got involved in wrestling...gun handling and even trained with the police and volunteered to be tazered....very impressive stuff which will be the making of him...I now see him in a totally different light....Go Ed !!! 3.Rick Astley was on the Zoe Ball show on Saturday morning....he is going back on tour to promote his latest album....which he made in his garage.....he is a really good personality and is quite modest....he talked about the occasional problems of doing concerts which I can relate to...because of the success of his album he intends to go back into his garage and make another one...a man after my own heart....I built a recording studio in my attic back in the day as I failed to see what difference Abbey Road would make to my records....nowadays with modern technology you can make a record on a computer in your bedroom....so I'm afraid it's goodbye to the greedy major labels....who needs 'em. 4.It is nice to see my pales The Krankies on the Marigold Hotel programme....they really are a lovely couple whom I have known for around 20 years and have written many songs for them which they have used in their many pantomimes over the years............also Donald Campbell's Bluebird has been restored and put back on the water....I actually have a connection to this....back in 1958 I saw a skiffle group called The Atlantics on our local cinema which was the first time I heard an electric guitar on stage....the leader of the group was called John Lomax and he went on to make a cine film of Cambell's last tragic attempt at the world water speed record in the Lake District....the film won several awards and his story was featured in a programme called "Days That Changed The World" a while back...with an actor playing John.....in the mid nineties I met John and we became very good friends....we even formed a skiffle group in 2001 and played at the International Skiffle Convention in Finland.....he was a great guy and a good friend but is sadly no longer with us...as a small tribute I wrote a song for him called "The Story of Skiffle" which we recorded and got quite a bit of airplay. 5.Skiffle was the beginning of it all in tis country so the song this week is in memory of my pal ......."The Story of Skiffle" by Skiffle John Lomax.....a great friend who I still miss.
.While sifting through the rubbish we are subjected to on television I actually found a program I enjoyed....it was the story of Jimmy Perry and David Croft who created Dad's Army....it was about the struggle they had to get it off the ground...and the two actors who played them were really good and the chap who played Captain Mainwaring was spot on....it was a brilliant insight into problems of trying to convince TV boffins of the credibility of good comedy...boffins who can't see further than the end of their noses......the pair went on to write Hi-de-Hi which is also classic comedy........................and another interesting documentary was the story of Fawlty Towers...another classic...it was interesting to see how John Cleese stopped after the second series as he felt it had run its course...a wise decision....unlike "Benidorm" which started well but has now reached rock bottom....definitely well past its sell-by date.....sadly great comedy is a thing of the past. 2.I thought after his appearance on Strictly Come Dancing Ed Balls would vanish off the scene....how wrong I was....he features in a new documentary called Travels in Trumpland with Ed Balls....where he travels around the southern states of the U.S.A. meeting Donald Trump supporters......and is he a dark horse or what....he got involved in wrestling...gun handling and even trained with the police and volunteered to be tazered....very impressive stuff which will be the making of him...I now see him in a totally different light....Go Ed !!! 3.Rick Astley was on the Zoe Ball show on Saturday morning....he is going back on tour to promote his latest album....which he made in his garage.....he is a really good personality and is quite modest....he talked about the occasional problems of doing concerts which I can relate to...because of the success of his album he intends to go back into his garage and make another one...a man after my own heart....I built a recording studio in my attic back in the day as I failed to see what difference Abbey Road would make to my records....nowadays with modern technology you can make a record on a computer in your bedroom....so I'm afraid it's goodbye to the greedy major labels....who needs 'em. 4.It is nice to see my pales The Krankies on the Marigold Hotel programme....they really are a lovely couple whom I have known for around 20 years and have written many songs for them which they have used in their many pantomimes over the years............also Donald Campbell's Bluebird has been restored and put back on the water....I actually have a connection to this....back in 1958 I saw a skiffle group called The Atlantics on our local cinema which was the first time I heard an electric guitar on stage....the leader of the group was called John Lomax and he went on to make a cine film of Cambell's last tragic attempt at the world water speed record in the Lake District....the film won several awards and his story was featured in a programme called "Days That Changed The World" a while back...with an actor playing John.....in the mid nineties I met John and we became very good friends....we even formed a skiffle group in 2001 and played at the International Skiffle Convention in Finland.....he was a great guy and a good friend but is sadly no longer with us...as a small tribute I wrote a song for him called "The Story of Skiffle" which we recorded and got quite a bit of airplay. 5.Skiffle was the beginning of it all in tis country so the song this week is in memory of my pal ......."The Story of Skiffle" by Skiffle John Lomax.....a great friend who I still miss.
This week, we talk to Skip Hollandsworth about his cover profile of country singer Kacey Musgraves, Abby Johnston and Doyin Oyeniyi offer the newest installment of In Case You Missed It, and Tim Taliaferro gets directional with John Lomax.
ROGER McGUINN gained fame for his work with the Limelighters, the Chad Mitchell Trio and ultimately as the founding member of The Bryds. Because of massive global hits like Turn, Turn Turn and Mr. Tambourine Man, he was soon inducted into the Rock�n�Roll Hall of Fame. In the mid-1990�s Roger pioneered one of the first streaming websites called FolkDen. To this day it is one of the most extensive archives of America�s folk legacy. We are honored and excited Roger will help us celebrate WoodSongs 900th broadcast! JOHN LOMAX III is a legacy descendant of the folk archivist pioneers, the Lomax Family. They are responsible for seeking out and cataloging America�s folk and mountain music, later absorbed by the Smithsonian Institute. John and Alan Lomax are responsible for discovering and promotion Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and many other icons of America�s musical history. John will be a special guest on this broadcast.
John Lomax tells the story of a Texas guitar legend who blew every opportunity and burned every bridge.
Music fans have seen and heard him on stage for years with Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris and others. He's the guy with the pork pie hat (which the evidence will show he was wearing before it was a fad) playing the organ and the accordion. He's also a successful producer and songwriter. His story is fascinating. His journey of faith is personal and challenging. And he's one of Nashville's deep thinkers and understated musical heroes. Phil Madeira is my guest. Madeira grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island in a religious family. His father was a Baptist minister - albeit a moderate one he says. In his 2011 memoir God On The Rocks, Distilling Religion, Savoring Faith, Phil says he was obsessed from an early age with the blues and gospel music of the deep south. He played drums, then guitar and keyboards, and his first working band was several years on the road with Christian rocker and guitar player Phil Keaggy. In Nashville, where he's lived for more than thirty years, Madeira migrated from Christian music to Americana, sometimes in tandem with his friends and collaborators Buddy and Julie Miller. Madeira's songs have been recorded by Alison Krauss, Garth Brooks and Bruce Hornsby among many others. His highest profile achievement to date however may have been producing the 2011 anthology Mercyland: Hymns for the Rest of Us. The project included contributions from a multitude of top tier artists. Emmylou Harris, Shawn Mullins, Dan Tyminski and others took on the producer's challenge to write about God as Love and nothing more. It was hailed by critics, spawned a remarkable live event at the 2012 Americana convention in Nashville and ultimately inspired a second volume in 2016. Also this hour, a conversation with John Lomax III of Nashville, grandson of John Avery Lomax, one of America's foremost folklorists and song hunters. On the occasion of a new release of a cappella songs by John's father called FOLK, we talk about stewardship of a huge music legacy.
The song this week is one I wrote for a dear friend of mine who is sadly no longer with us...his name was John Lomax and was part of a skiffle group called The Atlantics in the 50's....he played the first electric guitar I heard live....I met John many years later and we became good friends....I recorded this song with him as a tribute...The Story of Skiffle"....as it was skiffle that kicked it all off back then....John played this to Chas McDevitt when he went to one of his shows....Chas suggested he send it to the skiffle convention in Finland (2001) which he did...this resulted in us being invited over and we forming a skiffle group and off we went...great times...I miss John very much. There has been an outcry regarding parking fines being issued in hospital car parks....this included doctors and nurses...who are busy saving lives....parking is free in Scotland but our greedy little private organisations want their money....the government say it's up to the "Trusts" how they handle parking....so another nice sidestep from our boys and girls in Parliament......it costs nurses up to a grand a year...and the parking fines don't go into the NHS it goes into the pockets of the so called trusts....they had a nurse on the news saying she was dealing with a heart attack and couldn't leave the operating theatre and got a fine...she contested it and lost which cost her another 40 quid...it's a disgrace and needs sorting. The latest thing is "no losers" in school sport....they had a woman (what else) prattling on about how losing can effect children in later life...what a load of tripe...you need to learn how to win AND more importantly lose in life if you want to survive...it's called "striving" to do your best isn't it?.....and speaking of losers how about the guy who got battered by Federer at Wimbledon and started crying....boo hoo I've got a blister...he also got 1.1 million !!!.....it's the suckers who paid thousands to watch the game on centre court I feel sorry for....mind you if you're daft enough to pay fortune for something you can see on TV there isn't a lot of hope. The PC brigade strike again....Dr.Who is now a woman...which I suppose stops them moaning for a while....I don't watch Dr.Who but it puzzles me how they are going to get a kitchen and a washing machine in the TARDIS?....oops sorry can't say that I'll have the PC brigade after me....all we hear is how hard done to women are....it gets very boring after a while....we now have women's cricket which no-one I know is remotely interested in...including my female friends....and there is about half a dozen in the crowd watching women world cup games...not to mention ladies football...which is of no interest to men or indeed women...but we MUST be gender neutral !!!! The BBC have been "forced" to publish the salaries of their top "stars"....the likes of Gary Linacre and Graham Norton on millions....and the football "pundits" raking in a fortune....and apparently Chris Evans is one of the highest paid...WHAT FOR???....they had some half wit on the news who is responsible for getting top talent for TV trying to justify where MY MONEY goes....these so called talented stars are on more than the prime minister....virtually anyone can be a chat show host or a commentator......in fact Wimbledon could do without 90% of the commentary box.....well worth the licence fee?...I don't think so.
The song this week is one I wrote for a dear friend of mine who is sadly no longer with us...his name was John Lomax and was part of a skiffle group called The Atlantics in the 50's....he played the first electric guitar I heard live....I met John many years later and we became good friends....I recorded this song with him as a tribute...The Story of Skiffle"....as it was skiffle that kicked it all off back then....John played this to Chas McDevitt when he went to one of his shows....Chas suggested he send it to the skiffle convention in Finland (2001) which he did...this resulted in us being invited over and we forming a skiffle group and off we went...great times...I miss John very much. There has been an outcry regarding parking fines being issued in hospital car parks....this included doctors and nurses...who are busy saving lives....parking is free in Scotland but our greedy little private organisations want their money....the government say it's up to the "Trusts" how they handle parking....so another nice sidestep from our boys and girls in Parliament......it costs nurses up to a grand a year...and the parking fines don't go into the NHS it goes into the pockets of the so called trusts....they had a nurse on the news saying she was dealing with a heart attack and couldn't leave the operating theatre and got a fine...she contested it and lost which cost her another 40 quid...it's a disgrace and needs sorting. The latest thing is "no losers" in school sport....they had a woman (what else) prattling on about how losing can effect children in later life...what a load of tripe...you need to learn how to win AND more importantly lose in life if you want to survive...it's called "striving" to do your best isn't it?.....and speaking of losers how about the guy who got battered by Federer at Wimbledon and started crying....boo hoo I've got a blister...he also got 1.1 million !!!.....it's the suckers who paid thousands to watch the game on centre court I feel sorry for....mind you if you're daft enough to pay fortune for something you can see on TV there isn't a lot of hope. The PC brigade strike again....Dr.Who is now a woman...which I suppose stops them moaning for a while....I don't watch Dr.Who but it puzzles me how they are going to get a kitchen and a washing machine in the TARDIS?....oops sorry can't say that I'll have the PC brigade after me....all we hear is how hard done to women are....it gets very boring after a while....we now have women's cricket which no-one I know is remotely interested in...including my female friends....and there is about half a dozen in the crowd watching women world cup games...not to mention ladies football...which is of no interest to men or indeed women...but we MUST be gender neutral !!!! The BBC have been "forced" to publish the salaries of their top "stars"....the likes of Gary Linacre and Graham Norton on millions....and the football "pundits" raking in a fortune....and apparently Chris Evans is one of the highest paid...WHAT FOR???....they had some half wit on the news who is responsible for getting top talent for TV trying to justify where MY MONEY goes....these so called talented stars are on more than the prime minister....virtually anyone can be a chat show host or a commentator......in fact Wimbledon could do without 90% of the commentary box.....well worth the licence fee?...I don't think so.
The song I have sent you this week is called The Story of Skiffle and is a song I wrote for,and as a tribute to, John Lomax who was a dear friend of mine....I first saw his skiffle group called The Atlantics in 1958 and it was the first time I heard an electric guitar played live...40 years later I met him and we became good friends....this song got us a gig (via Chas McDevitt) at the Finland skiffle convention in 2001 and I put a group together (including John) and off we went....skiffle was the basis of rock and roll...sadly John is no longer with us and I miss him. .The Christmas countdown has begun....all the prices have 99 pence at the end £149.99.....£99.99.....purely to make the price sound cheaper...which people seem to fall for....YOU'RE GETTING A PENNY CHANGE for goodness sake....it's like the old 99 guineas...which was effectively £105........and we are bombarded again with all the old played out Xmas songs in shops and on the radio...A Child is Born...All I want For Christmas is You....and the dreadful Simply having a wonderful Christmas time...and the even worse Frog Chorus...if we must be subjected to Christmas songs PLEASE give us some new ones....yours sincerely Mr.Grumpy. Cliff has got a new single out called "Better To Dream" and it is really good....record of the week on BBC Radio 2 who are keeping in with him...I wonder why?...I'm not particularly a Cliff fan but he's done a good job on his latest album......and I became a fan of Andre Rieu after seeing him interviewed....what a great bloke and what a talent....I've always admired people who arrange parts for orchestras...to hear all the instruments in their head and to get it down on paper is a special gift...I think most people think they just stand in front of the orchestra waving a stick around. ...Football has been featured heavily on the news sadly for the wrong reasons...namely the sexual assaults by coaches on young hopefuls...it makes very uncomfortable watching...most of it seems to have been 30 years ago and has left some of the lads traumatised...what is surprising is none of them seemed to go back for revenge...but unless you have been in that situation you'll never understand...I think this is just the tip of the iceberg................also on the sporting front we have The Sports Personality of the Year coming up.... Andy Murray...despite having NO personality....tennis is possibly the most demanding sport and to achieve what he has this year sets him apart from the rest. .. finally....there has been a bit of an uproar about payouts to top executives....they get the lions share of the profits and the workers get nowt....they can complain and rise up as often as they like and it wont make a blind bit of difference....it's always been noblemen and serfs and it always will be....the bankers and the legal profession etc don't give us lot a second thought...and I doubt whether they even HEAR the moans.....locally we have to endure council cuts yet there is money available for a luxury golf course next to The Royal Liverpool which will "bring money into the area"....I wonder how much of that I'll see....I'll give you ONE guess..
The song I have sent you this week is called The Story of Skiffle and is a song I wrote for,and as a tribute to, John Lomax who was a dear friend of mine....I first saw his skiffle group called The Atlantics in 1958 and it was the first time I heard an electric guitar played live...40 years later I met him and we became good friends....this song got us a gig (via Chas McDevitt) at the Finland skiffle convention in 2001 and I put a group together (including John) and off we went....skiffle was the basis of rock and roll...sadly John is no longer with us and I miss him. .The Christmas countdown has begun....all the prices have 99 pence at the end £149.99.....£99.99.....purely to make the price sound cheaper...which people seem to fall for....YOU'RE GETTING A PENNY CHANGE for goodness sake....it's like the old 99 guineas...which was effectively £105........and we are bombarded again with all the old played out Xmas songs in shops and on the radio...A Child is Born...All I want For Christmas is You....and the dreadful Simply having a wonderful Christmas time...and the even worse Frog Chorus...if we must be subjected to Christmas songs PLEASE give us some new ones....yours sincerely Mr.Grumpy. Cliff has got a new single out called "Better To Dream" and it is really good....record of the week on BBC Radio 2 who are keeping in with him...I wonder why?...I'm not particularly a Cliff fan but he's done a good job on his latest album......and I became a fan of Andre Rieu after seeing him interviewed....what a great bloke and what a talent....I've always admired people who arrange parts for orchestras...to hear all the instruments in their head and to get it down on paper is a special gift...I think most people think they just stand in front of the orchestra waving a stick around. ...Football has been featured heavily on the news sadly for the wrong reasons...namely the sexual assaults by coaches on young hopefuls...it makes very uncomfortable watching...most of it seems to have been 30 years ago and has left some of the lads traumatised...what is surprising is none of them seemed to go back for revenge...but unless you have been in that situation you'll never understand...I think this is just the tip of the iceberg................also on the sporting front we have The Sports Personality of the Year coming up.... Andy Murray...despite having NO personality....tennis is possibly the most demanding sport and to achieve what he has this year sets him apart from the rest. .. finally....there has been a bit of an uproar about payouts to top executives....they get the lions share of the profits and the workers get nowt....they can complain and rise up as often as they like and it wont make a blind bit of difference....it's always been noblemen and serfs and it always will be....the bankers and the legal profession etc don't give us lot a second thought...and I doubt whether they even HEAR the moans.....locally we have to endure council cuts yet there is money available for a luxury golf course next to The Royal Liverpool which will "bring money into the area"....I wonder how much of that I'll see....I'll give you ONE guess..
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle sound like they could have been recorded by John Lomax in the Appalachian hills during the '30s. Their harmonies have a heartfelt honesty born from their love and appreciation of the stories in the songs they sing, as well as the history of the people that wrote them decades ago - passing the tunes down from generation to generation in the true definition of folk music. Along with their instruments, the pair also illustrate the stories with "crankies," a hand-cranked pictorial crafted from fabric, yarn and other colorful elements. Anna & Elizabeth were recorded for Folk Alley by Beehive Productions in Saranac Lake, New York. Anna & Elizabeth began thanks to a broke down car. Elizabeth's. In town to see a concert, she ended up spending the night with Anna, but the two didn't get much sleep. They shared songs and harmonized; they talked about a shared desire to inspire people with the beautiful soul of Appalachian roots music. And then came Anna's crankies: cloth and cut-paper scrolls depicting scenes from ballads. A friendship was formed. The possibilities were seen. A unique sound was created: Elizabeth with her powerful, breath-taking voice; Anna with her sweet harmonies and mesmerizing instrumentals on fiddle, banjo and guitar. The duo started making crankies and shadow puppets together, works of art that have been heralded in folk festivals from Seattle to Chicago, from deep in the mountains of Kentucky to Uzbekistan. The pair is reviving a lost art.
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle sound like they could have been recorded by John Lomax in the Appalachian hills during the '30s. Their harmonies have a heartfelt honesty born from their love and appreciation of the stories in the songs they sing, as well as the history of the people that wrote them decades ago - passing the tunes down from generation to generation in the true definition of folk music. Along with their instruments, the pair also illustrate the stories with "crankies," a hand-cranked pictorial crafted from fabric, yarn and other colorful elements. Anna & Elizabeth were recorded for Folk Alley by Beehive Productions in Saranac Lake, New York. Anna & Elizabeth began thanks to a broke down car. Elizabeth's. In town to see a concert, she ended up spending the night with Anna, but the two didn't get much sleep. They shared songs and harmonized; they talked about a shared desire to inspire people with the beautiful soul of Appalachian roots music. And then came Anna's crankies: cloth and cut-paper scrolls depicting scenes from ballads. A friendship was formed. The possibilities were seen. A unique sound was created: Elizabeth with her powerful, breath-taking voice; Anna with her sweet harmonies and mesmerizing instrumentals on fiddle, banjo and guitar. The duo started making crankies and shadow puppets together, works of art that have been heralded in folk festivals from Seattle to Chicago, from deep in the mountains of Kentucky to Uzbekistan. The pair is reviving a lost art.
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle sound like they could have been recorded by John Lomax in the Appalachian hills during the '30s. Their harmonies have a heartfelt honesty born from their love and appreciation of the stories in the songs they sing, as well as the history of the people that wrote them decades ago - passing the tunes down from generation to generation in the true definition of folk music. Along with their instruments, the pair also illustrate the stories with "crankies," a hand-cranked pictorial crafted from fabric, yarn and other colorful elements. Anna & Elizabeth were recorded for Folk Alley by Beehive Productions in Saranac Lake, New York. Anna & Elizabeth began thanks to a broke down car. Elizabeth's. In town to see a concert, she ended up spending the night with Anna, but the two didn't get much sleep. They shared songs and harmonized; they talked about a shared desire to inspire people with the beautiful soul of Appalachian roots music. And then came Anna's crankies: cloth and cut-paper scrolls depicting scenes from ballads. A friendship was formed. The possibilities were seen. A unique sound was created: Elizabeth with her powerful, breath-taking voice; Anna with her sweet harmonies and mesmerizing instrumentals on fiddle, banjo and guitar. The duo started making crankies and shadow puppets together, works of art that have been heralded in folk festivals from Seattle to Chicago, from deep in the mountains of Kentucky to Uzbekistan. The pair is reviving a lost art.
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle sound like they could have been recorded by John Lomax in the Appalachian hills during the '30s. Their harmonies have a heartfelt honesty born from their love and appreciation of the stories in the songs they sing, as well as the history of the people that wrote them decades ago - passing the tunes down from generation to generation in the true definition of folk music. Along with their instruments, the pair also illustrate the stories with "crankies," a hand-cranked pictorial crafted from fabric, yarn and other colorful elements. Anna & Elizabeth were recorded for Folk Alley by Beehive Productions in Saranac Lake, New York. Anna & Elizabeth began thanks to a broke down car. Elizabeth's. In town to see a concert, she ended up spending the night with Anna, but the two didn't get much sleep. They shared songs and harmonized; they talked about a shared desire to inspire people with the beautiful soul of Appalachian roots music. And then came Anna's crankies: cloth and cut-paper scrolls depicting scenes from ballads. A friendship was formed. The possibilities were seen. A unique sound was created: Elizabeth with her powerful, breath-taking voice; Anna with her sweet harmonies and mesmerizing instrumentals on fiddle, banjo and guitar. The duo started making crankies and shadow puppets together, works of art that have been heralded in folk festivals from Seattle to Chicago, from deep in the mountains of Kentucky to Uzbekistan. The pair is reviving a lost art.
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle sound like they could have been recorded by John Lomax in the Appalachian hills during the '30s. Their harmonies have a heartfelt honesty born from their love and appreciation of the stories in the songs they sing, as well as the history of the people that wrote them decades ago - passing the tunes down from generation to generation in the true definition of folk music. Along with their instruments, the pair also illustrate the stories with "crankies," a hand-cranked pictorial crafted from fabric, yarn and other colorful elements. Anna & Elizabeth were recorded for Folk Alley by Beehive Productions in Saranac Lake, New York. Anna & Elizabeth began thanks to a broke down car. Elizabeth's. In town to see a concert, she ended up spending the night with Anna, but the two didn't get much sleep. They shared songs and harmonized; they talked about a shared desire to inspire people with the beautiful soul of Appalachian roots music. And then came Anna's crankies: cloth and cut-paper scrolls depicting scenes from ballads. A friendship was formed. The possibilities were seen. A unique sound was created: Elizabeth with her powerful, breath-taking voice; Anna with her sweet harmonies and mesmerizing instrumentals on fiddle, banjo and guitar. The duo started making crankies and shadow puppets together, works of art that have been heralded in folk festivals from Seattle to Chicago, from deep in the mountains of Kentucky to Uzbekistan. The pair is reviving a lost art.
John talks about his grandfather documenting cowboy songs in the late 1800s, Carl Sandburg, Studs Terkel, John Sr. and Alan Lomax recording Lead Belly in Angola Prison, discovering folk singers in churches and prisons, finding Muddy Waters at Stovall Plantation,… Continue Reading →
Dec. 11, 2013. This talk examines the songs recorded in the summer of 1934 by folklorist John Lomax, with assistance from his son Alan, who was then a teenager. While the music they recorded there has often been described as Cajun or Creole music, what they actually found was much more complex: a diverse admixture of old medieval lays, Continental pop songs, blues ballads, round dance songs, traditional ballads in French, a Scottish jig, and much more. This talk coincides with the release of the book Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana, a study of the 1934 trip. Speaker Biography: Joshua Clegg Caffery is a writer and musician. He is a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers and a longtime member of the Louisiana French band Feufollet. Caffery was nominated for a Grammy in 2010 for his work on the Feufollet album "En Couleurs." He is currently the Alan Lomax Fellow in Folklife Studies at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6272
Born in 1867, folklorist John Lomax spent his life collecting songs "around chuck wagons, up hollers and down in river bottoms, on levee and railroad, in the saloons, churches, and penitentiaries of the South and Southwest." Upon his death in 1948, the New York Times wrote, "If anybody ever did, John Lomax really heard America singing."
I stumbled coming out of the gate, but recovered to sing what was a prison song made famous by Huddie Ledbetter, a bluesman "discovered" at Louisiana State Penitentiary in July 1933 by folklorist John Lomax. After his release from prison, "Leadbelly" would make music his career until his death in 1949. The song was later popularized by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Played in G on a National Triolian.
I stumbled coming out of the gate, but recovered to sing what was a prison song made famous by Huddie Ledbetter, a bluesman "discovered" at Louisiana State Penitentiary in July 1933 by folklorist John Lomax. After his release from prison, "Leadbelly" would make music his career until his death in 1949. The song was later popularized by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Played in G on a National Triolian.
Sixty-eight years ago, Pearl Harbour naval base on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, was bombed. Over the years, several film and documentary have been produced. Many stories have been presented. However, few stories of the role of women have been shared. Today, Women's Magazine has some of those stories, like that of Lena Jamison, a California woman who was recorded two days after the bombing. by John Lomax of the Library of Congress, in Dallas, TX. Other stories include that of Ruth Baird Shaw, as well as journalist Cornelia Fort, a Pearl Harbour survivor. Hear this, and more, today, on Women's Magaine at 1pm on KPFA, 94.1FM and online at www.kpfa.org. Hosted by Jovelyn Richards and produced by Safi wa Nairobi. The post Wome's Magazine – Remembering Pearl Harbour: A Woman's Perspective appeared first on KPFA.