Podcasts about matassa

Paddy Doyle...On this episode I'm joined by Paddy Doyle who chats about coming to Clonmel from Dublin back in the 1960's, working in the chippy Matassa's,  but also gives us details on an upcoming fundraiser for Pascal Kavanagh.  Derek Blackweir from TUS also tells us about a free innovation camp for secondary school pupils. 

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Today's episode is with Johan Meyer (also known as Stompie) from Mother Rock and J.H. Meyer Signature Wines based in the Swartland, South Africa. If you're privy to the natural wine scene in the Cape, you'll know these labels without a doubt. I often hear people say that there are three guys that really put natural wine on the map in South Africa and that is Johan Meyer, Jurgen Gouws of Intellego (there's an episode with him a few back) and Craig Hawkins of Lammershoek and Testalonga. In this episode, you'll hear how Stompie got into natural wine, and how it wasn't always what he did. At the beginning, he was working for a big commercial winery called Sutter Home – you might have heard of it – out in California. After another stint at a smaller winery in New Zealand, plus a transformative experience at Matassa in Southern France – a natural wine project started by Tom Lubbe, a New Zealander who grew up in South Africa South – Stompie returned home determined to do his own thing. He shares how the Swartland Revolution which took place around 2010 helped pave the way for newcomers like himself, and how at that time, there was a huge gap in the market for affordable natural wine made at scale. Enter: Mother Rock Wines.  That is all part 1 of my conversation with Stompie. In Part 2, we talk more about the wines, including his 'Brutal!' series, which is a natural wine “club” of sorts, to which Stompie was the first South African producer ever invited. You'll also hear about the new wine of origin appellation that he has established at his high elevation home on the Piketberg Mountain, about two and a half hours north of Cape Town. Plus, stick around for the end of part 2 where you'll hear why Stompie is called Stompie. To begin the story, we need to go all the way back to Stompie's childhood in the Garden Route, where the dominant type of farming was not of grapes, but of cows...     Hosted by Charlotte Alsaadi. Special thanks to SNACKTIME for the music!  Vine Street Imports Instagram  |  Website    

Global News B.C: B.C. prohibits illegal drugs from playgrounds, spray and wading pools, skate parks. Guest: Darrian Matassa-Fung. Online journalist, Global News, BC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jurgen Gouws from Intellego Wines is a laidback guy with a surfer's tan who makes serious natural wines. His lineup runs the gamut from pet nats to skin contact whites to chillable reds and seriously incredible Syrah. After studying at Elsenburg in Stellenbosch, he traveled the world to work at Terroir al Limit in Priorat, at Stéphane Ogier in the Rhone Valley, Matassa in the Languedoc, and even two harvests in Russia. Back in South Africa, he spent four years at Lammershoek with Craig Hawkins, who, having also spent time at Matassa, liked to play with elements of natural winemaking. Jurgen was developing his own winemaking identity as he watched Craig lean more heavily into that ethos with the launch of Testalonga. With his own brand Intellego, Jurgen adopted many of the same ideologies: organic farming, minimal intervention in the cellar, and a real focus on place more than anything.  Intellego translates to “I understand” in Latin and is aptly named, as Jurgen has really begun to understand the potential of the incredible Swartland. He has a particular affinity for some of the older Chenin Blanc bush vines in South Africa and is not afraid to push the boundaries of texture.  Jurgen came to the US recently and we were lucky enough to snag him for an hour to chat. This episode is part 1 of 2. Here we talk more about Jurgen's background and in part 2, we talk more about his wines. In this episode, Jurgen shares his experience working in Russia, Afrikaans culture, the influence that Eben Sadie had on his career, and how he decided to get into wine at 15 years old after giving up his lifelong dream of being a dentist...   Hosted by Charlotte Alsaadi. Special thanks to SNACKTIME for the music!  Vine Street Imports Instagram  |  Website 

NB! Episode in English! Lise meets with Tom Lubbe of Matassa in Roussillon, France, to discuss his new vintage and his winemaking philosophy. Want more geeky stuff? Our full lenght conversation is available for subscribers of the podcast – get access to this, and all other episodes and bonus material as well as early access to episodes, at https://plus.acast.com/s/lisevinsant Instagram handles:Lise @thatnorwegianwineladyTom @tomlubbe The wines we drank and discussed were Olla Blanc and Olla Rouge, both 2022.As always: logo by @mariusvabo and music by @hans.laache The podcast is recorded in the studios of @iterate.no ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Vil du støtte podden og få tilgang til eksklusivt ekstramateriale? Bli medlem på https://plus.acast.com/s/lisevinsant. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fondazione C.r.Tortona: Oggi in telefonica con noi, il Professor Galvan Alessandro del gruppo di ricerca filosofica Chora ci aggiorna sul ciclo di conferenze "Raccontare il mondo,storia,revisione,rimozione" che si terranno in Fondazione. Domani 30 Marzo il secondo incontro di tre sarà con Angelo D'Orsi sul tema "Revisione,Revisionismo,Rovescismo: una matassa da dipanare".

Time is confusing. Tits are distracting. Nina is immortal. And it was Carnival season but we're a month behind posting these. Happy Mardi anyway. Miss Universe pageant gets dark! (And not in a racist way...). Turns out the Hitler mustache is not off the table for K.M.  Let's get Closer through J's poetry.  Shout out to Matassa's Market! And Liz Taylor! And Hacksaw Jim Duggan! And please forgive K.M. for complimenting Oprah. He stands by his words but still thinks she is a c*nt.

Global News B.C.: Twin brothers killed in Saanich, B.C. bank shooting 'wanted to shoot and kill police': report. Guest: Darrian Matassa-Fung. Global News B.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wir trinken Matassa, Olla blanc 2021, Domaine de l'Horizon, Mar i Muntanya 2021 und Bruno Duchêne, La Luna 2020 und reden. Unter anderem über das Roussillon (nicht die Stadt). Und über die Villa Mas. Details und eine Bezugsquelle gibt'S bei Christoph und die nächste Live-Sendung gibt's am 26. Oktober 2022 um 19:30 hier (IRC-Chat: #wrint auf libera). Auch hörenswert: […]

Wir trinken Matassa, Olla blanc 2021, Domaine de l'Horizon, Mar i Muntanya 2021 und Bruno Duchêne, La Luna 2020 und reden. Unter anderem über das Roussillon (nicht die Stadt). Und über die Villa Mas. Details und eine Bezugsquelle gibt'S bei Christoph und die nächste Live-Sendung gibt's am 26. Oktober 2022 um 19:30 hier (IRC-Chat: #wrint auf libera). Auch hörenswert: […]

This week, husbands Brandon and Angel reminisce over Angel's birthday parade, reveal their all-time favorite Toni Collette performances, and welcome astrologer and Tarot reader Bess Matassa into the spirit room for a stirring conversation about the wisdom of going off road and the upcoming Jupiter+Neptune conjunction. To learn all things about Bess, go HERE To learn all things about The Spiritual Gayz, go HERE To learn more about The Spiritual Gayz Cosmic Healing Retreat, go HERE Our IG Our Twitter Our FB

I fell in love with Bess' Numinous Cosmic Year months before inviting her to come on the podcast. To me, she offers a refreshing take on Astrology, away from the rigidity and into a life-giving territory that feels fitting for the New Age whilst drawing on sacred ancient wisdom.Bess Matassa, PhD, is a New York-based astrology and tarot reader, teacher, and author who serves up mystical self-inquiry with a side of play, poetry, and pop music. When not busy combing the cosmos, she can be spotted sporting hot pink lipstick while wandering deserts and tropics.In this episode, she shares her unique personal journey, finding her way back to Astrology via a quick detour during which she may have lost her pink lipstick and enchants with musings on; Messages that are coming up for the collective this year, New and inspiring ways to decode your own birth chart Satiating your curiosity about astrology and key transits,Navigating your Saturn Return and much much more! She has generously offered a discount code for my listeners - 20% off a full astrology + tarot reading with code: STARTONIC to be enjoyed for one month, starting from the air date. More on this topic:The Numinous Cosmic GuideThe Numinous Astro DeckZodiac GuideThe Start ParlourConnect with Bess on InstagramMentions: Mary K Greer Tarot Interpretations See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Eric Moorer of Domestique wine in DC  came to talk about rocks, and boy did we realize, accidentally, that we were almost talking about *terroir.* Luckily, we are always capable of getting dumber (and how!), so what we did talk about is mostly insane.  Eric is an absolute gem and came to NYC to visit us, so I guess we have to go to DC now and get drunk and tell those clowns in congress how we really feel? Please go to and shop at Domestique, it's an incredible store, and if you tell Eric that Disgorgeous sent you, he'll show you a picture of Yuma. ////LIST///Pardas, Penedes Malvasia de Sitges,  ‘Blau Cru,'  2019//Alfredo Arribas, Priorat Blanca, "Instabile No. 5," 2018//Matassa, VDF, 'Mambo Sun,' 2020 Cellar Frisach, Terra Alta, ‘l'amit,' 2019Rim, Emporda Negre, Jan, 2018 Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/Disgorgeous)

As we dive deeper into the second month of 2022, we find ourselves in a 6 year being the year of the radiant body in tantric numerology and in Tarot, the year of the Lovers, and in Astrology, the year of Gemini. By understanding the world of mysticism, we can work alongside these archetypes to navigate these times as we go forth and courageously live out our soul's deeper mission. By embracing the ancestral wisdom of our lineage alongside the ancient mystical teachings while embracing the modern technology and blessings of the now, with the wisdom of astrologers and mystics like Bess Matassa, author of The Numinous Cosmic Year, revolutionary shifts can be experienced in our world. By implementing this expansive knowledge and awareness, we can begin to witness how our inner landscape affects our external reality. And best believe that from this space, we can begin to honor and use our power to impact the outer world for the greater good, with intention and love as we choose to navigate this human experience with more ease and grace. In this episode, we talked about... ◆ The ancestral journey of bridging the gap and the return of immediacy of magic ◆ Bess' journey from Urban Geography to becoming an astrologer and the parallels of inner emotions and the outside world ◆ Growing smaller + allowing things to come through with trust as the world does it's work around you ◆ Using astrology + the moon sign to honor our emotions + our inner child ◆ Sideral vs tropical astrology and the symbols and seasons ◆ The Numinous Cosmic Year of 2022 ◆ The Power of Mercury and your Moon Sign ...plus so much more Discover Bess Matassa Bess Matassa, PhD, is a New York-based astrologer and tarot reader who serves up mystical self-inquiry with a side of play, poetry, and pop music. She is the co-author of The Numinous Astro Deck (Sterling, 2019); the author of Zodiac Signs: Leo and Virgo (Sterling, 2020), and The Numinous Cosmic Year: Your Astrological Almanac (Aster, 2021); and has been a celestial consultant for platforms and institutions including Teen Vogue, Almay cosmetics, Ace Hotel, and the Rubin Museum of Art. When not combing the cosmos, Bess can be spotted sporting hot pink lipstick while wandering deserts and tropics.  ◆ SOCIAL LINKS ◆ WEBSITE | http://thestarparlor.com (thestarparlor.com) INSTAGRAM | http://instagram.com/bessmatassa (http://instagram.com/bessmatassa) LINKS | http://thestarparlor.com/books (http://thestarparlor.com/books)

Hey listeners, if you are feeling fit and frisky, you can book a Full Astro + Tarot Reading with Bess for 20% off anytime during the month of January with code: STREETSIGNSWhoot!This episode may be the most intimate yet! In it both Bess & Betsy share stories of strange medical issues that despite Western medical's approach (which they both value) it was only their intuition, tenacity, surrender, and patience that ultimately healed them! Bess coins the term "Intuitive Responsibility" which applies to our entire lives but is specifically spoken about in terms of their health and bodies.This is an episode not to be missed!Find out more about Bess and book a reading here: http://thestarparlor.com/Special thanks to Ben Talmi for the use of his music.More about Betsy and her work here: https://betsylefae.com/trust-yourself

It's a new year and a new season for The Light Within, so what better way to kick it all off than with a look ahead at 2022's astrological forecast.This week, New York based astrologer and tarot reader Bess Matassa shares what astrology means to her and how we can all use it to help us live our best lives in 2022. In our chat, we discuss:- the astrological outlook for 2022- astrology 101- Mercury Retrograde- and how Bess became the badass woman she is today (with the help of astrology of course). Bess's newest book, The Numinous Cosmic Year, is the perfect almanac for anyone wanting to get more tuned into astrology while also tuning into themselves.  She also does private readings and she's given all of you a discount code so you can access this information for yourself! Use the code STARLIGHT for 20% off a reading DURING THE MONTH OF JANUARY 2022! So jump on that discount and get aligned with the stars!You can find Bess on:InstagramWebsiteConnect with Leslie on Instagram @lesliedraffinConnect with the podcast @thelightwithinpodcastIf you're interested in Menstrual Cycle Coaching, send her a message or check out her new website www.lesliedraffin.comEmail us if you have questions or you know someone who'd make a great guest on this show: thelightwithinpodcast@gmail.comThe best way to support this podcast is by leaving a review & rating, downloading episodes & sharing them with someone you love! 

In questa puntata speciale di TRAPPIST, con ospiti Francesca Motta ed Elena D'Alì di Chiamando Eva e Leila Belhadj Mohamed di Matassa cerchiamo di fare il punto sulle più importanti notizie di quest'anno, dall'Italia al Sud Ovest Asiatico, dall'implosione della maggioranza sul ddl Zan alla colonscopia di Joe Bidenhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/2tfD5y16WIYUXCXUPGwRNG?si=1rlan_eBTJKiST--zKS7XQIl 2021 doveva essere l'anno di uscita dalla pandemia, e non lo è stato. In Italia, doveva essere l'anno in cui si garantiva protezioni minime per le minoranze di genere e doveva essere l'anno del rilancio grazie ai fondi del PNRR — non lo è stato. È stato invece l'anno della catastrofica uscita occidentale dall'Afghanistan, che ora invece è uscito completamente dalla cronaca italiana, nonostante la situazione, in questi mesi, sia rimasta gravissima. E la crisi in Afghanistan è solo una di quelle del Sud Ovest Asiatico che la nostra stampa ha appena sfiorato. In compenso nel 2022 andrà tutto benissimo, giusto? Forse no: i casi trainati dalla variante Omicron continuano a salire, il governo sembra sempre più disinteressato al benessere collettivo in favore del profitto delle imprese, e la responsabilità della gestione della pandemia viene ancora lasciata sulle spalle delle persone comuni. Per fortuna che presto potremo divertirci con le previsioni sull'elezione del nuovo Presidente della Repubblica, con i principali pretendenti al Quirinale che si annunciano già — come dire — densi di significato. Sostieni l'informazione indipendente di the Submarine: abbonati a Hello, World! La prima settimana è gratis In copertina, foto via Twitter @Quirinale

Bess Matassa is a modern day mystic. She uses both astrology and tarot as languages that can help bring us back to the selves we already are. Bess also has a PhD, and I mention that because you can tell she brings this same academic and inquisitive lens to her mystical work, which is one of the reasons why I think I really resonate with her message, which feels very grounded to me. You can tell she knows what she is talking about, and I didn't hold back from throwing her all my random questions. This is a deep dive into the invitations that are available to us in the years ahead, but also so much more. We touch on: – What has been happening in the stars in the last two years– What are the invitations available to us in 2022– What the moon cycles can offer us– What on earth retrogrades actually are– And the elements of fate vs. free will and how they interact with astrologyBess is running a 12-month immersive astrological experience, where she will take you through astrology and the calendar year. You can sign up for that up until Dec 21st 2021 > http://thestarparlor.com/courseBess is also generously offering all Here to Thrive listeners 20% off a Full Astro & Tarot Reading before the end of 2021! Use the code COSMICTHRIVE at checkout here >> http://thestarparlor.com/shop/birth-chart-readingWe're also talking about her new book with the Numinous: The Numinous Cosmic Year. This is part almanac and part astro planner. You can find that here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1783254335?ref=exp_kate.snowise_dp_vv_dFinally, you can work with Bess one on one. Find out more by heading to: www.thestarparlor.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

My guest today is the brilliant astrologer and author Bess Matassa. Bess is a long-time friend and collaborator of mine, and I knew she would be the perfect person to bring on for this episode on The Astrology of Addiction. Now, I know this topic might be a bit “out there” for some of you. But I am confident that whatever your interest in or thoughts about astrology, you will find plenty that you can relate to in our conversation, while having your mind blown just a little bit along the way.Ultimately, Bess and I use astrology less as a divination tool for “predicting” future events – and more as a language of symbols to describe the more numinous, or unknowable and unnamable, aspect of being human. That is, the part of being human that we are often attempting to either run towards or away from when we are reaching for alcohol and other drugs.We get into how we can use astrology for self-awareness – and as a way of looking at our addictive tendencies. We also go into some specific astrological teachings that listeners can apply to their own lives and Bess shares the details of how she came to be sober curious herself. PS: this conversation was originally recorded as part of Sober Voices Flow. In the episode we discuss:-Bess's own journey with substance abuse and her current relationship with alcohol-How astrology and alcohol have served a similar purpose in her life – but both with different outcomes-How astrology can help connect us to the concept of a “higher power” -The concepts of “fate” and “free will” and when to accept life as it is and when to take control-How knowing your astrological birth chart can help you understand who you are and what you need-Being guided by our feelings as much as our thoughts-A primer on how to read your astrological birth chart – and why we all contain all the astrological “signs”-Specific examples of how to use astrology on your sober curious path-Why life gives us friction and challenges to work with in order to help us grow-How astrology can help us understand individual differences in terms of values and needs-How current astrological transits are shaping thinking about addiction and mental healthBess Matassa is an astrologer and the author of The Numinous Cosmic Year – a total, interactive guide to the astrology of 2022. Learn more about Bess and her work HERE and use the code COSMICMOCKTAL for 20% off a personal reading with Bess. 

Are you looking for an astrology for beginners crash-course? In this interview with author of The Numinous Cosmic Year, Bess Matassa, you'll learn the astrology basics: the astrology elements, astrology moon sign meanings, and even astrology psychology. Bess also shares about what we should expect from the 2022 astrology. https://georgelizos.com Bess Matassa, PhD, is a New York-based astrologer and tarot reader who serves up mystical self-inquiry with a side of play, poetry, and pop music. She is the co-author of The Numinous Astro Deck (Sterling, 2019); the author of Zodiac Signs: Leo and Virgo (Sterling, 2020), and The Numinous Cosmic Year: Your Astrological Almanac (Aster, 2021); and has been a celestial consultant for platforms and institutions including Teen Vogue, Almay cosmetics, Ace Hotel, and the Rubin Museum of Art. When not combing the cosmos, Bess can be spotted sporting hot pink lipstick while wandering deserts and tropics. When you order my book Protect Your Life you'll get the Psychic Scanning Workshop (valued at £197) – a 90-minute workshop to scan for and cleanse yourself from energy attack – for FREE! Get it at www.protectyourlightbook.com RESOURCES MENTIONED: Matassa's Website: http://thestarparlor.com Matassa's Instagram Handle: https://www.instagram.com/bessmatassa/ Matassa's Books: http://thestarparlor.com/books FREE GUIDES TO GET YOU STARTED: Life Purpose Workbook: https://georgelizos.com/lifepurpose The Ultimate Intuitive Development Starter Kit: https://georgelizos.com/intuitionstarterkit Intuition Mastery Accelerator Guide: https://georgelizos.com/intuitionmastery Scanning For Psychic Attack Guide: http://georgelizos.com/psychicattack Lightworker Survival Guide: https://georgelizos.com/lightworker-survival-guide Crystals to Manifest Your Best Life: https://georgelizos.com/crystals CONNECT WITH GEORGE: Instagram: www.instagram.com/georgelizos Facebook Group: www.yourspiritualtoolkit.com Website: www.georgelizos.com YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCMLcoCVR…ub_confirmation=1

Clonmel's Wild Geese - Sheila Bowe(Hallinan)....We're of to Aus on this episode chatting to Sheila Bowe from Powerstown, Clonmel. Sheila talks about going to The Clonmel Arms for the first time, eating Matassa's chips and her first Christmas in Australia. Also this week Aoife O'Driscoll on a Charity Christmas Tree Sale, The 12 Days of Elf with Kevin Fennessy and Elaine Flanagan, Remembrance Trees back in town, The Slievenamon Christmas Climb, more jobs, bingo and lots more. #clonmel #tipperary #ireland #podcast #localareapodcast

Astrology isn't here to dictate your life. Astrology is a map.  A terrain for life.  A red carpet to possibility. This week on the podcast, I'm thrilled to be joined by Bess Matassa, PhD, a New York-based astrologer and tarot reader who serves up mystical self-inquiry with a side of play, poetry, and pop music.  … Continue reading "Episode 193: Astrology as a Texturizer with Bess Matassa"

Bess Matassa is an astrologer, tarot reader, and hot pink lipstick connoisseur. On this episode, she sits down with Taylor to discuss her latest results from our Take Care Assessment. Bess scored highest in Emotions which falls directly under our Mental and Emotional Dimension of well being. Listen as she shares ways in which you too can connect with your emotions!Links To Connect With Bess:https://www.the-numinous.com/numinous-books/the-numinous-cosmic-year/https://www.instagram.com/bessmatassahttp://thestarparlor.com/Use code EMOTIONOCEAN for 20% all one on one readings (ends November 21)12 Month Astro + Tarot ImmersionShow notes: innerworkout.co/post/what-do-you-tell-your-bodyInner Co Working: RSVP Here!           Free self-care assessmentNewsletter: innerworkout.co/self-care-sundaysInstagram: @innerworkout | @taylorelysemorrison

Il paese sta affrontando un percorso difficilissimo per rispondere alla crisi economica e politica, che vede però tutti i poteri concentrati nella figura del presidente Saied. L'11 ottobre 2021, dopo due mesi e mezzo di stallo dagli eventi dello scorso 25 luglio, ha prestato giuramento davanti al Presidente della Repubblica il nuovo governo guidato da Najla Bouden Romdhan, prima donna in assoluto a ricoprire la carica di Primo Ministro in un Paese dell'area arabofona. Un governo con il 33% di presenza femminile: dei 24 ministri, 8 sono donne. Classe 1958, ed ingegnere di formazione, la neopremier è docente di scienze geologiche alla Scuola nazionale di ingegneri di Tunisi, con alle spalle una lunga esperienza accademica e nella ricerca, in particolare nel settore della valutazione sismica, della vulnerabilità degli edifici, e della gestione delle catastrofi. Fino all'incarico da parte di Saied, è stata responsabile dell'attuazione del programma della Banca mondiale presso il ministero dell'Istruzione superiore e della ricerca scientifica, istituzione con la quale collabora da anni. Il programma finanziato dalla Banca mondiale dà sostegno alla riforma dell'istruzione superiore in corso in Tunisia. Dal 2006 al 2016 è stata la principale consigliera di sette ministri dell'Istruzione superiore e della ricerca scientifica, oltre ad essere incaricata del controllo qualità presso lo stesso ministero, a partire dal 2011, dopo essere stata presidente dell'unità di gestione degli obiettivi. Ha istituito il primo programma di finanziamento competitivo e innovatore a sostegno dei progetti che vertono sulla garanzia di qualità, il buon governo, l'innovazione e l'imprenditoria. Oltre alla sua missione accademica e ministeriale, l'ingegnere tunisina ha partecipato a diversi gruppi di lavoro e programmi nella regione del Sud Ovest Asiatico e del Nord Africa. Najla Bouden è anche co presidente del Gruppo consultivo mondiale sulla scienza e la tecnologia dell'Ufficio delle Nazioni Unite per la riduzione dei rischi di catastrofi.È quindi abbastanza evidente che la scelta di Saied sia ricaduta su una personalità con un curriculum di eccellenza nel mondo accademico e ministeriale, ma possiamo dire che una rondine non fa primavera. La scelta di una donna per il ruolo di Primo Ministro serve ad offuscare la complessità politica che c'è dietro alla crisi istituzionale tunisina che si protrae dal 25 luglio 2021. In questa puntata di Matassa cerchiamo di ripercorrere le tappe che, negli scorsi mesi, hanno portato alla situazione attuale. Show notes  25 juillet, les pleins pouvoirs aux mains de Kaïs Saied – Inkyfada What is going on in Tunisia? All you need to know | Tunisia | The Guardian Entretien téléphonique entre le président de la République et le Haut représentant de l'UE pour les Affaires étrangères Da dove arriva la crisi in Tunisia Chi è Najla Bouden Romdhane, prima premier donna della Tunisia In Tunisia altri arresti politici, la società civile ne ha abbastanza | il manifesto In Tunisia la prima donna premier non fa primavera. Tutti i poteri a Saied | il manifesto France slashes visas for Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia in migrant row - France 24 In Second of Dueling Demonstrations, President Saied's Supporters Respond - Meshkal Thousands Protest Against President Saied's “Coup” - Meshkal Tunisia, la messinscena di Saied: nomina una donna premier | Il Foglio La Francia perde terreno nel Maghreb. Russia e Turchia gongolano | Il FoglioSostieni l'informazione indipendente di the Submarine: abbonati a Hello, World! La prima settimana è gratis

It's been a watershed year. Social justice, and all that it means to us, is both in our grasp and slipping through our fingers. Seattle journalist Marcus Harrison Green, a dear friend and frequent collaborator with Town Hall Seattle, knows this well. Growing up black in South Seattle, Green has seen both the sharp rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murk of police brutality in tandem. Based on experience, Green offered sharpness and clarity about racism as it pervades all aspects of our society – from classrooms and police patrolled streets, to the newsroom. He also writes about religion, mental health, human morality, and what his beloved grandmother taught him – and now teaches us. Marcus Harrison Green is a columnist for The Seattle Times. A long-time Seattle native, he is the founder of the South Seattle Emerald, which focuses on telling the stories of South Seattle and its residents. Michele Matassa Flores is executive editor of The Seattle Times. Buy the Book: Readying to Rise: Essays (Paperback) Elliott Bay Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation online click here.

"...noi due come le due nostre vite diverse, che si incontrano e che scoprono che non possono fare a meno l'una dell'altra per raccontarti, sono parte integrante di un unica essenza vera.  Quanto sei bella Bologna..." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Per capire l'Africa e il Sud Ovest Asiatico bisogna partire dal 7 ottobre: la regione esce dalla “guerra al terrorismo” completamente distrutta, e la retorica di Stati Uniti e paesi alleati in questi anni non ha fatto altro che alimentare i movimenti islamisti localiBenvenut* a Matassa, il nuovo podcast di Leila Belhadj Mohamed e the Submarine che vuole raccontare quello che succede nei paesi e nei luoghi che la stampa mainstream italiana prende in considerazione soprattutto quando c'è da mettere in guardia sull'ennesima presunta invasione di migranti o profughi.Per affrontare l'attualità dell'Africa e del Sud Ovest Asiatico non si può non partire dal 7 ottobre, o meglio, dall'ondata di instabilità che ha colpito la regione in seguito alla “guerra al terrorismo” che George W. Bush scatenò in risposta agli attacchi contro New York e Washington. È impossibile sminuirne l'importanza storica: hanno stravolto i rapporti internazionali, scosso le fondamenta delle Nazioni Unite e della NATO, diviso l'opinione pubblica americana ed europea, modificando la vita dei cittadini del mondo intero.Proprio il fatto che gli Stati Uniti si sono sempre considerati inattaccabili sul proprio territorio continentale ha causato nelle coscienze degli americani un senso di alienazione e di annientamento morale di fronte ad un attacco inaspettato in casa propria. “Attacco all'America,” “trauma,” “lacerazione,” “vulnerabilità,” “l'Orrore”: sono solo alcune delle espressioni usate per evocare l'attentato alle Torri gemelle dai giornalisti occidentali e non solo.Bush ha l'ambizione di combattere una guerra contro un soggetto non statuale e ben definito, contro un'organizzazione terroristica, Al Qaeda, con sedi in vari Paesi del Sud Ovest Asiatico e dell'Africa. Ciò comporta alla realizzazione di un conflitto caratterizzato non solo da tempi molto lunghi, ma anche dalla possibilità per l'esercito statunitense di intervenire in Stati differenti, i cosiddetti rogue states – gli Stati canaglia  — con l'obiettivo di annientare i guerriglieri jihadisti. L'impossibilità di immaginare vittorie definitive in tempi rapidi spiega perché la guerra al terrorismo viene descritta dallo storico Vittorio Dan Segre come un “conflitto epocale.”Il Sud Ovest Asiatico è completamente distrutto in seguito a questi conflitti e il tono apertamente messianico che ricorda le crociate non ha fatto altro che alimentare i movimenti islamisti locali, al punto di riuscire a fare proseliti in tutto il mondo e a costruire organizzazioni terroristiche parallele ad Al Qaeda operanti ovunque, persino in Europa. Gli attacchi alle Twin Towers e al Pentagono, a differenza di molti altri attacchi terroristici nella storia del mondo, non sono stati solo un casus belli, ma l'inizio di un nuovo sistema internazionale.Show notes Il discorso di Bush agli Stati Uniti 11 settembre, lo storytelling sulla guerra al terrorismo resiste dal 2001: il Bene contro il Male. E Biden parla come Bush - Il Fatto Quotidiano Terrorism by the Numbers | World101 Terrorism: Facts and statistics | Statista Islamist terrorist attacks in the world 1979-2019 - Fondapol The Drone Papers: Secret documents detail the U.S. assassination program.

Matassa è il nuovo podcast di the Submarine che vuole raccontare quello che succede nei paesi e nei luoghi che la stampa mainstream italiana prende in considerazione soprattutto quando c'è da mettere in guardia sull'ennesima presunta invasione di migranti o profughi.Non è semplice avere un'idea chiara di quello che succede intorno a noi: soprattutto di questa parte del mondo — che guardiamo da lontano, superficialmente e con l'occhio della narrazione occidentale. Matassa intende raccontarla con più chiarezza, con la consapevolezza che le classi ricche dell'Occidente non sono il centro dell'universo.Leila Belhadj Mohamed è laureata in relazioni internazionali ed è un' attivista transfemminista esperta di geopolitica e diritti umani. Ha lavorato per anni nella comunicazione per il sociale e scrive di geopolitica del Medio Oriente e del continente africano.The Submarine è una testata online che fa base a Milano, che si occupa di giustizia sociale, lotta alle disuguaglianze e cultura pop.

Rilo and Garden discuss burner phones, interactive toys and red flags that just keep getting redder. Are you one of “Momma's Boys”?

Chef Tony Matassa of BBQ Guys in Louisiana, joins JT for a great hour of BBQ Nation!

One of America’s elite pitmasters is heading up a new competition BBQ sanctioning body. On Episode 98 of the Tailgate Guys BBQ Show Podcast, we visit with Fred Robles about this big project. Fred is President of the new Champions Barbecue Alliance. One of its goals is to modernize the competition by using technology to speed the scoring process, while also giving constructive feedback to teams receiving low scores. Fred, the 2019 American Royal Open Grand Champion with his Rio Valley Meats team, breaks it all down and explains how he sees the CBA fitting into the competition landscape. Also joining us is chef Tony Matassa from BBQGuys.com, the popular one-stop-shop for all things live-fire cooking. Tony tells us how he made the transition from his family’s background in Italian restaurants to live-fire and touches on the booming popularity of BBQ for the backyard cook during this time of pandemic. Co-hosts Lyndal and Steve also talk Super Bowl LV, both from football and food angles and make clear whether they’re leaning toward Young Gun Mahomes or Old Man Brady for the big game. Thanks to our listeners, both long-time and new. We are thankful for you and want to hear your input any time about potential guests or anything BBQ-related. Join the fun on our Facebook page and don’t forget to follow along on Twitter @TailgateGuys999 or Instagram @tailgateguysbbq A big shout-out to our sponsor/marketing partners: Blues Hog BBQ Sauce, Royal Oak Charcoal, The Butcher Shoppe, Affordable Income Tax & Payroll, DDR Fabrication and Arkassppi Smoke Live and The Arkassippi Combo. #SmokeEmIfYouGotEm

Chef Tony Matassa of BBQ Guys in Louisiana, joins JT in Afterhours.

Chef Tony Matassa of BBQ Guys in Louisiana, joins JT for a great hour of BBQ Nation!

I denne episoden smaker programleder Tommy Andresen og sommelier Tore Kristian Lie på en østerisk welschriesling med et funky preg. Rennersistas Welschriesling 2017Økologisk dyrket. 19 år gamle vinstokker plantet i et jordsmonn av kalk, grus og leire. 20% av drueklasene gjæres hele og 80% avstilkes. Mosten spontanfermenteres med 11 dagers skallkontakt før videre modning på bunnfallet over 8 måneder i brukte 300 liters eikefat. Vinen er ufiltrert og usvovlet. Burgenland, Østerrike 100% welschriesling kr 369,90 Tilgjengelig på polet (Varenummer 10280601) Unico Real Wines Produsenter vi nevner i episoden:Cedric Bouchard (Côte de Béchalin 2008), Christian Tschida, Claus Preisinger, Weingut Werlitsch, Veyder-Malberg, Nikolaihof, Matassa, Testalonga, Tom Shobbrook, Kracher, Heidi Schröck, For å forhåndsbestille Ambijus Clearly Confused, gå til www.leske.no/ambijus Se kabaret.no for mer! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sono di nuovo bloccato.

SeconDario► https://dariomatassa.com/podcast/Space Valley► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WJ32r35demIRvxV-xDU2g## INFO I nostri podcast ► https://www.officine.me/ Backstage ed extra su Telegram ► https://www.officine.me/telegram Scrivimi ► https://www.officine.me/scrivimi La guida definitiva per fare podcasting ► https://youtu.be/t-urq_hZFCk Crea un podcast che spacca, con Audacity ► https://www.officine.me/audacity Fai l'upgrade al tuo progetto ► https://www.officine.me/upgrade ## UN GRANDISSIMO GRAZIE AI PATRONS (In ordine casuale) Alessandro Tovani (Fotoradio), Teresa Piliego (I luoghi della comunicazione), Eolo Perfido (Eolo Perfido Studio), Cristina Dal Farra (Puzzle), Nicolò Francesco Bernardi (Coaching & Consulting), Marco Caponera (BodyMind Training), Chiara Lorenzi (Denti bianchi e sani), Vincenzo Dileo, Massimo Manoni (Nui Aku - Discovery Wedding Italia), Salvatore Gaziano (Radio Borsa), Marco Leasi (Psicologia Positiva), Marco Tola, Paolo Corradeghini (3DMetrica), Ettore Bartoccetti (MenteFresca), Andrea Piattino (Storie di' Marte), Giovanni Aricò (Crescere con tuo figlio), Annalisa Ghiglia (Iter), Gianluigi Leoni (Radio Vacanze), Manuel Rosini (Juice Radio Italia), Sandro Ghini (Leggere a voce alta), Emilio Cascio, Croce Di Michele (Facile BI), Massimiliano Saggia (tennisMySelf), Matteo Scandolin (Audio // Podcast), Don Domenico Bruno (Letto Tra Le Righe), Attilio Figus (Alziamo la Testa), Stefano 2.0 (Ascoltare Podcast), Giorgio Donadini (La Trattativa), Giacomo Lanzi (Piano B), Sirio Negri (Capre Bipedi), Orlanda Chiarella, Sara Bortolozzo (Sane Abitudini Alimentari), Alfredo Guerra (Chimica Quotidiana), Paola Biondi (Psicologia), Simone Capomolla (Esperienze Digitali), Daniele Di Mauro (DDMfotografia), Antonello Zedda (Libertà di Pensiero), Pietro Capozzi (Tutto quello che mi passa per la mente), Elena Bizzotto (La Salute Sorride), Igor Bernasconi (Studio Legale Bernasconi), Maurizio Palese (Otherbook), Renato Ligas (Around The Game), Dario Grigollo, Patrizia Sica, Barbara Reverberi (News per freelance), Rolando Mucciarelli (The Digital Wine), Dan Stilo (Insighted), Riccardo Mancinelli (Refacturing), Ester Memeo (La Gabbia), Enrico Seu (Intrappolati nel Retrogaming), Matteo Piazzalunga (Passione Sceneggiatura), Francesco Pezzino (Banca del Tempo InfoVisus), Edoardo Facchini (Privacy4PMI), Franco Attanasio (El Puma), Ilario Sabbadini (Briciole di Previdenza), Geri Cuffaro, Giorgio Garzaniti (Filosofia per il nuovo mondo), Maurizio Chiarotto, Antonello Carideo (Federazione Italiana Gioco Freccette), Fabio D'Isanto (Il bicchiere vuoto), Jacopo Pellarin (Tre Generazioni in Cucina), Francesco Richichi (Viaggiando), Spad (Mercurio Podcast), Tara Leigh Walker, Silvia Megazzini, Daniele Besana (WP-OK), Leonarda Vanicelli (Leonarda Vanicelli), Francesco Maggioni (Francesco Maggioni), Priel Korenfeld (Inventarsi un Lavoro), Ricardo Fabbro (Logica Lavoro), Claudio Menzani (Blockchain Italia), Alessandro Bari (Elettricista Felice), Ivan Ferrero (Psicologia del Digitale e delle Nuove Tecnologie), Mauro Murru (Gitbar- Italian developer podcast), Alessio Bottiroli (On The Nature Of Light).

SeconDario► https://dariomatassa.com/podcast/Space Valley► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WJ32r35demIRvxV-xDU2g## INFO I nostri podcast ► https://www.officine.me/ Backstage ed extra su Telegram ► https://www.officine.me/telegram Scrivimi ► https://www.officine.me/scrivimi La guida definitiva per fare podcasting ► https://youtu.be/t-urq_hZFCk Crea un podcast che spacca, con Audacity ► https://www.officine.me/audacity Fai l'upgrade al tuo progetto ► https://www.officine.me/upgrade ## UN GRANDISSIMO GRAZIE AI PATRONS (In ordine casuale) Alessandro Tovani (Fotoradio), Teresa Piliego (I luoghi della comunicazione), Eolo Perfido (Eolo Perfido Studio), Cristina Dal Farra (Puzzle), Nicolò Francesco Bernardi (Coaching & Consulting), Marco Caponera (BodyMind Training), Chiara Lorenzi (Denti bianchi e sani), Vincenzo Dileo, Massimo Manoni (Nui Aku - Discovery Wedding Italia), Salvatore Gaziano (Radio Borsa), Marco Leasi (Psicologia Positiva), Marco Tola, Paolo Corradeghini (3DMetrica), Ettore Bartoccetti (MenteFresca), Andrea Piattino (Storie di' Marte), Giovanni Aricò (Crescere con tuo figlio), Annalisa Ghiglia (Iter), Gianluigi Leoni (Radio Vacanze), Manuel Rosini (Juice Radio Italia), Sandro Ghini (Leggere a voce alta), Emilio Cascio, Croce Di Michele (Facile BI), Massimiliano Saggia (tennisMySelf), Matteo Scandolin (Audio // Podcast), Don Domenico Bruno (Letto Tra Le Righe), Attilio Figus (Alziamo la Testa), Stefano 2.0 (Ascoltare Podcast), Giorgio Donadini (La Trattativa), Giacomo Lanzi (Piano B), Sirio Negri (Capre Bipedi), Orlanda Chiarella, Sara Bortolozzo (Sane Abitudini Alimentari), Alfredo Guerra (Chimica Quotidiana), Paola Biondi (Psicologia), Simone Capomolla (Esperienze Digitali), Daniele Di Mauro (DDMfotografia), Antonello Zedda (Libertà di Pensiero), Pietro Capozzi (Tutto quello che mi passa per la mente), Elena Bizzotto (La Salute Sorride), Igor Bernasconi (Studio Legale Bernasconi), Maurizio Palese (Otherbook), Renato Ligas (Around The Game), Dario Grigollo, Patrizia Sica, Barbara Reverberi (News per freelance), Rolando Mucciarelli (The Digital Wine), Dan Stilo (Insighted), Riccardo Mancinelli (Refacturing), Ester Memeo (La Gabbia), Enrico Seu (Intrappolati nel Retrogaming), Matteo Piazzalunga (Passione Sceneggiatura), Francesco Pezzino (Banca del Tempo InfoVisus), Edoardo Facchini (Privacy4PMI), Franco Attanasio (El Puma), Ilario Sabbadini (Briciole di Previdenza), Geri Cuffaro, Giorgio Garzaniti (Filosofia per il nuovo mondo), Maurizio Chiarotto, Antonello Carideo (Federazione Italiana Gioco Freccette), Fabio D'Isanto (Il bicchiere vuoto), Jacopo Pellarin (Tre Generazioni in Cucina), Francesco Richichi (Viaggiando), Spad (Mercurio Podcast), Tara Leigh Walker, Silvia Megazzini, Daniele Besana (WP-OK), Leonarda Vanicelli (Leonarda Vanicelli), Francesco Maggioni (Francesco Maggioni), Priel Korenfeld (Inventarsi un Lavoro), Ricardo Fabbro (Logica Lavoro), Claudio Menzani (Blockchain Italia), Alessandro Bari (Elettricista Felice), Ivan Ferrero (Psicologia del Digitale e delle Nuove Tecnologie), Mauro Murru (Gitbar- Italian developer podcast), Alessio Bottiroli (On The Nature Of Light).

Luca è un mio caro amico con il quale ho condiviso tante cose, se non tutte. Guida gli aerei ed è molto abituato a spostarsi.

Esprimere tutto quello che si è.

John “Pudgy” Matassa, Jr is reportedly connected to the Outfit’s Northside/Rush Street crew. He is the son of retired Chicago Police officer.   Northside/Rush Street crew history Covered Rush Street, which was the entertainment district... The post John “Pudge” Matassa appeared first on Gangland Wire.

This is a short bonus episode containing the opinion of a Wiretapper who is a member of the Chicago Laborers’ District Council LiUNA. This is a real deal strong Chicago union who looks out for... The post Bonus John “Pudge” Matassa – One Man’s Opinion appeared first on Gangland Wire.

As the Sun moves into Cancer it's time for our monthly Astrocast , with resident Numinous astrologers Bess and Sandy. Key themes that we'll be swimming through in the coming weeks, include: How to move more deeply into our feelings, "stay with" the sensations, and use our feelings as a navigational force; Learning to disarm ourselves and "come undone," and when and how to self protect; Feeling into the rhythms that are unfolding in our lives and learning to "go with" instead of against; How our self-image is a reflection of our internal landscape; Family patterning; and finding the balance between structure and flow. Dates for your diary: 6/21 - Sun Enters Cancer + Neptune retrograde 6/26 - Mercury Enters Leo 7/7 - Mercury Retrograde in Leo, 7/19 Mercury Retrograde Enters Cancer 7/1 - Mars Enters Leo 7/2 - Cancer New Moon Total Solar Eclipse 7/3 - Venus Enters Cancer 7/8 - Chiron Retrograde in Aries 7/16 - Capricorn Full Moon Discover more about Bess and book a reading HERE and learn about Sandy's upcoming offerings HERE.

Numinous resident astrologers Bess and Sandy are back, with a deep dive into the astrological transits for Gemini Season 2019. Themes discussed in this episode cover: -Cultivating a beginner's mind and being satisfied with knowing what you know, without needing to grasp beyond that in an attempt to have all the answers. -Letting what wants to reveal itself do so in its own time. Being available to synchronicity and learning to cultivate faith that you cannot "miss" anything that is truly meant for you. The Gemini New Moon period -What kind of witch are you?! Being open to your personal flavor of magic, working as a channel to let what wants to come through you come through you. What can you shift and transmute—what kind of alchemist are you? Sagittarius Full Moon period -What is this quest that you're on? Working with your past without having to purge or "fix" it. Understanding the relationship between where you've been and where you're heading. Consciously integrating your stories and letting all your feelings inform your future choices. Key dates for your diary: 5/21 - Sun and Mercury move into Gemini 6/3 - Gemini New Moon 6/4 - Mercury moves into Cancer 6/17 - Sagittarius Full Moon 6/21 - Neptune moves retrograde

Our monthly Astrocast is back, with a look ahead at the astrology of Taurus Season 2019. Numinous resident astrologers Bess Matassa and Sandy Sitron go deep into the themes and flavors of the month to come, which are all about helping us focus on the resources we have on had as we find new sources of sustenance. Taurus season is always about our relationship to our bodies - what feels good, how it feels to remember we are part of nature, and what we can "fill up" on. Key transits Bess and Sandy discuss in this episode are: -Sun in Taurus + Venus in Aries: a time for rethinking the influence of Venus beyond relationship as a reflection of our own desires and tastes. -Pluto and Saturn retrograde: themes of power and control, becoming your own authority, and any generational healing we need to do around this. -New Moon in Taurus: clearing the way for new growth, and treating any "losses" like finds that help us uncover hidden layers. -Mercury in Taurus, Venus in Taurus, and Mars in Cancer: helping us lean back into supports and find safety at a soul level. -Full Moon in Scorpio: more clearing space and learning what truly fills us before we grasp for the first thing in front of us. Keep following us on Instagram @The_Numinous for daily astro oracles, and subscribe to our newsletter for weekly horoscopes and astro mantras direct to your inbox!

  Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “Ain’t That A Shame”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. I’ve leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it’s the only biography of Domino I know of, and we’re looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we’ve looked at so far. I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, for the third time, we’re going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It’s been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on “The Fat Man”, and episode twelve, on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and the two of them resumed their collaboration. The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called “Dreaming”, featuring members of both Domino’s touring band and of Bartholomew’s studio band. It’s credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino: [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Dreaming”] Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino’s manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade’s car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries. While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino’s benefit — Domino’s contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest — which might often be several times as much money. With Cade’s death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew’s partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino’s career. One of the things we’ve touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership — although this is using “strained” in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks. And, of course, Domino’s piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement and production ideas were. And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example, “Going to the River”, one of the first fruits of their renewed collaboration: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Going to the River”] Dave Bartholomew called that “a nothing song” — and it’s easy to see what he means. Other than the tresilo bassline (and a reminder for those of you who don’t remember what that is, it’s that “bom, BOM bom” rhythmic figure that you get in almost every record Dave Bartholomew had a hand in) there’s not much of musical interest there — you’ve got Domino playing his usual triplets in the right hand on the piano, but rather than the drums emphasising the backbeat, they’re mostly playing the same triplets as the piano. The chord sequence is nothing special. and the lyrics were simplistic. But at the same time, the track did go to number two on the R&B charts, and probably would have gone to number one if it hadn’t been for the cover version by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “Going to the River”] That went to number four on the R&B charts. For once it wasn’t a white man having a hit with a black man’s song, but another black man, who’d heard Domino perform it live before the record was released and got in quickly with his own version. On the other hand, it wasn’t like Domino was the perfect judge of what made a hit, either. Bartholomew wrote the song “I Hear You Knocking” for Domino, but when Domino decided not to record it, Bartholomew recorded it for another artist on Imperial Records, Smiley Lewis, getting the great New Orleans piano player Huey “Piano” Smith to play in an imitation of Domino’s style: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knocking”] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and a cover version by the white singer Gale Storm went to number two on the pop charts. So both Domino and Bartholomew were capable of coming up with big hits in the style they perfected together, and both were capable of dismissing a potential hit when it wasn’t their own idea. But their partnership was so successful that Dave Bartholomew actually regarded Smiley Lewis as a “bad luck singer”, because when Bartholomew wrote and produced for him, the records would *only* sell a hundred thousand copies or so, compared to the much larger numbers of records that Domino sold. Domino was becoming huge in the R&B world — in early 1954 Billboard listed him as the biggest selling R&B star in the country — and he was managing to cope with it better than most. While he would miss the occasional gig from drinking a little too much, and he’d sleep around on the road more than a married man should, he was essentially a well-adjusted, private, man, who had five kids, phoned home to his wife every night, and never touched anything stronger than alcohol. That wasn’t true of the rest of his band, however. In the 1950s, heroin was the chic drug to be taking if you were a touring musician, and many of Domino’s touring band members were users. He would often have to pay to get his guitarist’s instrument out of the pawn shop, so they could go on tour, and once even had to pay off the guitarist’s back child support, to get him out of jail, as he would keep spending all his money on heroin. The one who came out worst, sadly, was Jimmy Gilchrist, who would sing with Domino’s backing band as the support act. Gilchrist died of an overdose during one of Domino’s tours in early 1954. Domino replaced him with a new support act, Jalacey Hawkins, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. According to Domino, he fired Jalacey for being too vulgar on stage, and screaming, but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as he would soon become known, claimed instead that it was because Domino was jealous of Hawkins’ cool leopard-skin suit. But through this turmoil, Domino and Bartholomew, with Cosimo Matassa in the control room, continued recording a whole string of hits — “Please Don’t Leave Me”, “Rose Mary”, “Something’s Wrong”, “You Done Me Wrong”, and “Don’t You Know” all went top ten on the R&B charts. For two and a half years, from September 1952 through March 1955, they would dominate the rhythm and blues charts, even though most white audiences had little idea who Fats Domino was. But slowly Domino was noticing that more and more white teenagers were starting to come to his shows — and he also started incorporating a few country songs and old standards into his otherwise R&B-dominated act, catering slightly more to a pop audience. Their first crossover hit definitely has more of Domino’s fingerprints on it than Bartholomew’s. Bartholomew was unimpressed at the session, saying that the song didn’t tell a complete story. Once it became a hit, though, Bartholomew would soften on the song, saying “‘Ain’t That a Shame’ will never die, it will be here when the world comes to an end.” He may not have been a particular fan of the song, but you’d never know it from his arrangement. Listen to the way that horn section in the intro punctuates the words, the way it doesn’t just go “You made me cry”, but “You made — BAM BAM — me cry — BAM BAM” [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Ain’t That A Shame”] That’s the kind of arrangement decision that can only be made by someone with a real feel for the material. And this is where Dave Bartholomew’s real importance to the records he was making with Fats Domino comes in. It’s all well and good Bartholomew doing great arrangements and productions for his own songs, or songs mostly written by him, but he put the same thought and attention into the arrangements even where the song was not to his taste and wasn’t his idea. Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman — to whose biography of Domino I’m extremely indebted for this episode — suggests that Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement owes a little to the old Dixieland jazz standard “Tin Roof Blues”. I can *sort of* hear it, but I’m not entirely convinced. Listen for yourself: [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, “Tin Roof Blues”] Another possible influence on “Ain’t That A Shame” is a record by Lloyd Price, who of course had worked with both Domino and Bartholomew earlier. His “Ain’t It A Shame” doesn’t sound much like “Ain’t That A Shame”, but it does have a very Fats Domino feel, and it would be very surprising if neither Bartholomew nor Domino had heard it given their previous collaborations: [excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Ain’t It A Shame”] Indeed, early pressings of “Ain’t That A Shame” mistakenly called it “Ain’t It A Shame”, presumably because of confusion with the Lloyd Price song. Bartholomew and Matassa also put more thought into the production than was normal at this time. When mastering Domino’s records, now that Matassa’s studio had finally switched to tape from cutting directly on to wax, they would speed up the tape slightly — a trick which made Domino’s voice sound younger, and which emphasised the beat more. This sort of thing is absolutely basic now, but at the time it was extraordinarily unusual for any rhythm and blues records to have any kind of production trickery at all. It also had another advantage, because as Cosimo Matassa would point out, it would change the key slightly so it wouldn’t be in a normal key at all. So when other people tried to cover Domino’s records “they couldn’t find the damn notes on the piano!” Of course, with success came problems of its own. When Domino was sent on a promotional tour of local radio stations, DJs would complain to Lew Chudd of Imperial Records that Domino didn’t speak English. He did speak English — though it was his second language, after Creole French — but he spoke English with such a thick accent that many people from outside Louisiana didn’t recognise it as English at all. Domino’s relative lack of fluency in English is possibly also why he wrote such simple lyrics — a fact that was mocked on national TV when Steve Allen, the talk show host, read out the lyrics to “Ain’t That A Shame” in a mock “poetry recital”, to laughter from the studio audience, causing Bartholomew and Domino to feel extremely upset. Of course, this is an easy trick to play, as almost all song lyrics sound puerile when recited pompously enough. For example, I can recite: Lets go to church, next Sunday morning We’ll see our friends on the way We’ll stand and sing, on Sunday morning And I’ll hold your hand as we pray That, of course, is a lyric written by Steve Allen, who despite having written 8500 songs by his own count, never wrote one as good as “Ain’t That A Shame”. As with all black hits at this time, there was a terrible white cover, in this case by Pat Boone. Boone’s cover version came out almost before Domino’s did, thanks to Bill Randle. Bill Randle was a DJ in Cleveland, a colleague of Alan Freed, who is now a much better-known DJ, but in the early fifties Randle was possibly the best-known DJ in America. While Freed only played black rhythm and blues records, Randle, whose first radio show was called “the Inter-Racial Goodtime Hour”, played records by both black and white people. As the country’s biggest DJ, he was sent an advance copy of “Ain’t That A Shame”, and he liked it immensely. According to Lew Chudd, “He liked it because it was ignorant, because he was an English professor”. That’s sort of true — Randle wasn’t a professor at the time, but in the 1960s he ended up getting degrees in law, journalism, sociology, and education, and a doctorate in American Studies, all while continuing to work as a DJ. Randle would regularly send copies of new R&B records to white record executives he knew, and it was because of Randle that the Crew Cuts and the Diamonds, among others, first heard the black recordings whose style they stole. In this case, he sent his acetate copy of “Ain’t That A Shame” to Randy Wood, the owner of Dot Records, a label set up specifically to record white cover versions of black records. Randle was an odd case, in this respect, because he *was* someone who truly loved rhythm and blues, and black music, and would play it regularly on his show — early on, he had actually been fired from one of his first radio jobs for playing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe record, though he was soon rehired. But he seems to have truly bought into the idea that the white cover versions of black records did help the black performers. There are very few examples of how little that was the case more blatant than that of Boone, a man whose attitude is best summed up by the fact that when he recorded his version, he tried to change the lyrics to “Isn’t That A Shame” because he thought “Ain’t” ungrammatical. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Ain’t That A Shame”] Boone would later go on to commit similar atrocities against “Tutti Frutti”, among other records. In a 1977 interview, Domino said of Boone’s cover “When I first heard it I didn’t like it. It took two months to write and he put it out almost the same time I did. It kind of hurt. The publishing companies don’t care if a thousand people make it.” Talking to Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, Dave Bartholomew was characteristically more forthright. “Pat Boone was a lucky white boy. He wasn’t singing” — and here he used an expletive that I’m not going to repeat because I’m not sure what makes something qualify as adult content in iTunes — “Randy Wood was doing un-Constitutional type stuff. He was successful with it, but that don’t make it right!” Bill Randle would play both versions of the record on his show, and both went to number one in Cleveland as a result. But in the rest of the country, the clean-cut white man was miles ahead of the fat black man with a flat top from New Orleans. Boone’s misunderstanding typifies the cultural ignorance that characterised white cover versions of R&B hits in this period. A few months later, a similar thing would happen again with Domino’s hit “Bo Weevil”, and here the racial dynamics were more apparent: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Bo Weevil”] That was covered by Teresa Brewer, and obviously her version did better on the charts: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “Bo Weevil”] But the thing is, that song celebrates boll weevils — pests which destroy cotton, and which have become regarded in African-American folklore as humorous trickster figures, because they bankrupted plantation owners — and while boll weevils didn’t reach the USA until after slavery had ended, you can understand how a pest that destroys the livelihood of cotton plantation owners might have a rather different reputation among black people than white. But despite these white covers, Domino continued to make inroads into the white market himself. And for all that Domino’s music seems easygoing, it was enough that even before his proper crossover into the pop market, Domino had shows canceled because the promoters or local government couldn’t handle the potential of riots breaking out at his shows. That only increased when “Ain’t That A Shame” hit, and white teenagers wanted to come to the shows. Police would try to shut them down, because white and black kids dancing together was illegal, and often shows would be canceled because of the police’s heavy-handed tactics – for example, at one show in Houston, the police tried in vain to stop the dancing, and eventually said that only whites would be allowed to dance, so Domino stopped the show, and the kids in the audience defiantly sang “Let the Good Times Roll” at the police. At another show in San Jose, someone threw a lit string of firecrackers into the audience, leading to a dozen people requiring medical treatment and another dozen being arrested. “Ain’t That A Shame” was one of two hit songs recorded on the same day. The other, “All By Myself”, would also become a number one hit on the R&B charts. While “All By Myself” was credited to Domino and Bartholomew, it was based very closely on an old Big Bill Broonzy record. Here’s Broonzy’s song: [excerpt, Big Bill Broonzy: “All By Myself”] And here’s Domino’s: [Excerpt, Fats Domino: “All By Myself”] As you can hear, while the verses are quite different, the choruses are identical. Domino here for the first time plays in his two-beat piano style, yet another of the New Orleans rhythms that Domino and Bartholomew would incorporate into Domino’s hits. A standard two-beat rhythm is the rhythm one finds in polkas, or in, say, Johnny Cash records — that boom-chick, boom-chick, walking or marching rhythm. But the New Orleans variant of it, which as far as I can tell was first recorded when Domino recorded “All By Myself”, isn’t boom-chick boom-chick, but is rather boom-boom-chick, boom-boom-chick, with quavers on the first beat, and slightly swinging the quavers. Indeed by doing it two-handed (with the bass booms in the left hand and the treble chicks in the right), Domino also sneaks in a bass quaver at the end of the “chick”, syncopating it, so it’s sort of “a-boom-boom-chick, a-boom-boom-chick”. The two-beat rhythm would become as important a factor in Domino’s future records as his rolling piano triplets and Dave Bartholomew’s tresillo rhythms already had been. Domino’s music was about rhythm and groove, and whereas most of his contemporaries were content to stick with one or two simple rhythms, Domino and Bartholomew would stack all of these different rhythmic patterns on top of each other. A lot of this is the basic musical vocabulary of anyone working in any of the musics influenced by New Orleans R&B these days, which includes all of reggae and ska as well as most African-American musical idioms, but that vocabulary was being built in these sessions. Domino and Bartholomew weren’t the only ones doing it — Professor Longhair and Huey “Piano” Smith and Mac Rebennack were all contributing, and all of these performers would take each other’s material and put their own unique spin on it — but they were vital parts of creating these building blocks that would be used by musicians to this day. “Ain’t That A Shame” was just the start of Domino’s rock and roll stardom. He would go on to have another seven R&B number ones after this, and his records would consistently chart on the R&B charts for the next seven years — he would have, in total, *forty* top ten hits on the R&B chart in his career. But what was more remarkable was the number of *pop* chart hits he would have. He had fourteen pop top twenty hits between 1955 and 1961, eleven of them going top ten, including classics like “I’m in Love Again”, “I’m Walkin'”, “Blue Monday”, “Valley of Tears”, “I Want to Walk You Home” and “Walking to New Orleans”. Almost all of his hit singles were written by the Bartholomew and Domino songwriting team, and almost all of them were extraordinarily good records — there were almost no fifties rockers who had anything like Domino’s consistent quality. So we’ll be seeing Fats Domino at least once more in this series, when he finds his thrill on Blueberry Hill…

  Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “Ain’t That A Shame”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino’s music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. I’ve leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it’s the only biography of Domino I know of, and we’re looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we’ve looked at so far. I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, for the third time, we’re going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It’s been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on “The Fat Man”, and episode twelve, on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and the two of them resumed their collaboration. The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called “Dreaming”, featuring members of both Domino’s touring band and of Bartholomew’s studio band. It’s credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino: [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Dreaming”] Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino’s manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade’s car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries. While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino’s benefit — Domino’s contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest — which might often be several times as much money. With Cade’s death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew’s partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino’s career. One of the things we’ve touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership — although this is using “strained” in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks. And, of course, Domino’s piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement and production ideas were. And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example, “Going to the River”, one of the first fruits of their renewed collaboration: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Going to the River”] Dave Bartholomew called that “a nothing song” — and it’s easy to see what he means. Other than the tresilo bassline (and a reminder for those of you who don’t remember what that is, it’s that “bom, BOM bom” rhythmic figure that you get in almost every record Dave Bartholomew had a hand in) there’s not much of musical interest there — you’ve got Domino playing his usual triplets in the right hand on the piano, but rather than the drums emphasising the backbeat, they’re mostly playing the same triplets as the piano. The chord sequence is nothing special. and the lyrics were simplistic. But at the same time, the track did go to number two on the R&B charts, and probably would have gone to number one if it hadn’t been for the cover version by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “Going to the River”] That went to number four on the R&B charts. For once it wasn’t a white man having a hit with a black man’s song, but another black man, who’d heard Domino perform it live before the record was released and got in quickly with his own version. On the other hand, it wasn’t like Domino was the perfect judge of what made a hit, either. Bartholomew wrote the song “I Hear You Knocking” for Domino, but when Domino decided not to record it, Bartholomew recorded it for another artist on Imperial Records, Smiley Lewis, getting the great New Orleans piano player Huey “Piano” Smith to play in an imitation of Domino’s style: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knocking”] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and a cover version by the white singer Gale Storm went to number two on the pop charts. So both Domino and Bartholomew were capable of coming up with big hits in the style they perfected together, and both were capable of dismissing a potential hit when it wasn’t their own idea. But their partnership was so successful that Dave Bartholomew actually regarded Smiley Lewis as a “bad luck singer”, because when Bartholomew wrote and produced for him, the records would *only* sell a hundred thousand copies or so, compared to the much larger numbers of records that Domino sold. Domino was becoming huge in the R&B world — in early 1954 Billboard listed him as the biggest selling R&B star in the country — and he was managing to cope with it better than most. While he would miss the occasional gig from drinking a little too much, and he’d sleep around on the road more than a married man should, he was essentially a well-adjusted, private, man, who had five kids, phoned home to his wife every night, and never touched anything stronger than alcohol. That wasn’t true of the rest of his band, however. In the 1950s, heroin was the chic drug to be taking if you were a touring musician, and many of Domino’s touring band members were users. He would often have to pay to get his guitarist’s instrument out of the pawn shop, so they could go on tour, and once even had to pay off the guitarist’s back child support, to get him out of jail, as he would keep spending all his money on heroin. The one who came out worst, sadly, was Jimmy Gilchrist, who would sing with Domino’s backing band as the support act. Gilchrist died of an overdose during one of Domino’s tours in early 1954. Domino replaced him with a new support act, Jalacey Hawkins, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. According to Domino, he fired Jalacey for being too vulgar on stage, and screaming, but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as he would soon become known, claimed instead that it was because Domino was jealous of Hawkins’ cool leopard-skin suit. But through this turmoil, Domino and Bartholomew, with Cosimo Matassa in the control room, continued recording a whole string of hits — “Please Don’t Leave Me”, “Rose Mary”, “Something’s Wrong”, “You Done Me Wrong”, and “Don’t You Know” all went top ten on the R&B charts. For two and a half years, from September 1952 through March 1955, they would dominate the rhythm and blues charts, even though most white audiences had little idea who Fats Domino was. But slowly Domino was noticing that more and more white teenagers were starting to come to his shows — and he also started incorporating a few country songs and old standards into his otherwise R&B-dominated act, catering slightly more to a pop audience. Their first crossover hit definitely has more of Domino’s fingerprints on it than Bartholomew’s. Bartholomew was unimpressed at the session, saying that the song didn’t tell a complete story. Once it became a hit, though, Bartholomew would soften on the song, saying “‘Ain’t That a Shame’ will never die, it will be here when the world comes to an end.” He may not have been a particular fan of the song, but you’d never know it from his arrangement. Listen to the way that horn section in the intro punctuates the words, the way it doesn’t just go “You made me cry”, but “You made — BAM BAM — me cry — BAM BAM” [excerpt: Fats Domino, “Ain’t That A Shame”] That’s the kind of arrangement decision that can only be made by someone with a real feel for the material. And this is where Dave Bartholomew’s real importance to the records he was making with Fats Domino comes in. It’s all well and good Bartholomew doing great arrangements and productions for his own songs, or songs mostly written by him, but he put the same thought and attention into the arrangements even where the song was not to his taste and wasn’t his idea. Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman — to whose biography of Domino I’m extremely indebted for this episode — suggests that Dave Bartholomew’s arrangement owes a little to the old Dixieland jazz standard “Tin Roof Blues”. I can *sort of* hear it, but I’m not entirely convinced. Listen for yourself: [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, “Tin Roof Blues”] Another possible influence on “Ain’t That A Shame” is a record by Lloyd Price, who of course had worked with both Domino and Bartholomew earlier. His “Ain’t It A Shame” doesn’t sound much like “Ain’t That A Shame”, but it does have a very Fats Domino feel, and it would be very surprising if neither Bartholomew nor Domino had heard it given their previous collaborations: [excerpt: Lloyd Price, “Ain’t It A Shame”] Indeed, early pressings of “Ain’t That A Shame” mistakenly called it “Ain’t It A Shame”, presumably because of confusion with the Lloyd Price song. Bartholomew and Matassa also put more thought into the production than was normal at this time. When mastering Domino’s records, now that Matassa’s studio had finally switched to tape from cutting directly on to wax, they would speed up the tape slightly — a trick which made Domino’s voice sound younger, and which emphasised the beat more. This sort of thing is absolutely basic now, but at the time it was extraordinarily unusual for any rhythm and blues records to have any kind of production trickery at all. It also had another advantage, because as Cosimo Matassa would point out, it would change the key slightly so it wouldn’t be in a normal key at all. So when other people tried to cover Domino’s records “they couldn’t find the damn notes on the piano!” Of course, with success came problems of its own. When Domino was sent on a promotional tour of local radio stations, DJs would complain to Lew Chudd of Imperial Records that Domino didn’t speak English. He did speak English — though it was his second language, after Creole French — but he spoke English with such a thick accent that many people from outside Louisiana didn’t recognise it as English at all. Domino’s relative lack of fluency in English is possibly also why he wrote such simple lyrics — a fact that was mocked on national TV when Steve Allen, the talk show host, read out the lyrics to “Ain’t That A Shame” in a mock “poetry recital”, to laughter from the studio audience, causing Bartholomew and Domino to feel extremely upset. Of course, this is an easy trick to play, as almost all song lyrics sound puerile when recited pompously enough. For example, I can recite: Lets go to church, next Sunday morning We’ll see our friends on the way We’ll stand and sing, on Sunday morning And I’ll hold your hand as we pray That, of course, is a lyric written by Steve Allen, who despite having written 8500 songs by his own count, never wrote one as good as “Ain’t That A Shame”. As with all black hits at this time, there was a terrible white cover, in this case by Pat Boone. Boone’s cover version came out almost before Domino’s did, thanks to Bill Randle. Bill Randle was a DJ in Cleveland, a colleague of Alan Freed, who is now a much better-known DJ, but in the early fifties Randle was possibly the best-known DJ in America. While Freed only played black rhythm and blues records, Randle, whose first radio show was called “the Inter-Racial Goodtime Hour”, played records by both black and white people. As the country’s biggest DJ, he was sent an advance copy of “Ain’t That A Shame”, and he liked it immensely. According to Lew Chudd, “He liked it because it was ignorant, because he was an English professor”. That’s sort of true — Randle wasn’t a professor at the time, but in the 1960s he ended up getting degrees in law, journalism, sociology, and education, and a doctorate in American Studies, all while continuing to work as a DJ. Randle would regularly send copies of new R&B records to white record executives he knew, and it was because of Randle that the Crew Cuts and the Diamonds, among others, first heard the black recordings whose style they stole. In this case, he sent his acetate copy of “Ain’t That A Shame” to Randy Wood, the owner of Dot Records, a label set up specifically to record white cover versions of black records. Randle was an odd case, in this respect, because he *was* someone who truly loved rhythm and blues, and black music, and would play it regularly on his show — early on, he had actually been fired from one of his first radio jobs for playing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe record, though he was soon rehired. But he seems to have truly bought into the idea that the white cover versions of black records did help the black performers. There are very few examples of how little that was the case more blatant than that of Boone, a man whose attitude is best summed up by the fact that when he recorded his version, he tried to change the lyrics to “Isn’t That A Shame” because he thought “Ain’t” ungrammatical. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Ain’t That A Shame”] Boone would later go on to commit similar atrocities against “Tutti Frutti”, among other records. In a 1977 interview, Domino said of Boone’s cover “When I first heard it I didn’t like it. It took two months to write and he put it out almost the same time I did. It kind of hurt. The publishing companies don’t care if a thousand people make it.” Talking to Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman, Dave Bartholomew was characteristically more forthright. “Pat Boone was a lucky white boy. He wasn’t singing” — and here he used an expletive that I’m not going to repeat because I’m not sure what makes something qualify as adult content in iTunes — “Randy Wood was doing un-Constitutional type stuff. He was successful with it, but that don’t make it right!” Bill Randle would play both versions of the record on his show, and both went to number one in Cleveland as a result. But in the rest of the country, the clean-cut white man was miles ahead of the fat black man with a flat top from New Orleans. Boone’s misunderstanding typifies the cultural ignorance that characterised white cover versions of R&B hits in this period. A few months later, a similar thing would happen again with Domino’s hit “Bo Weevil”, and here the racial dynamics were more apparent: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Bo Weevil”] That was covered by Teresa Brewer, and obviously her version did better on the charts: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “Bo Weevil”] But the thing is, that song celebrates boll weevils — pests which destroy cotton, and which have become regarded in African-American folklore as humorous trickster figures, because they bankrupted plantation owners — and while boll weevils didn’t reach the USA until after slavery had ended, you can understand how a pest that destroys the livelihood of cotton plantation owners might have a rather different reputation among black people than white. But despite these white covers, Domino continued to make inroads into the white market himself. And for all that Domino’s music seems easygoing, it was enough that even before his proper crossover into the pop market, Domino had shows canceled because the promoters or local government couldn’t handle the potential of riots breaking out at his shows. That only increased when “Ain’t That A Shame” hit, and white teenagers wanted to come to the shows. Police would try to shut them down, because white and black kids dancing together was illegal, and often shows would be canceled because of the police’s heavy-handed tactics – for example, at one show in Houston, the police tried in vain to stop the dancing, and eventually said that only whites would be allowed to dance, so Domino stopped the show, and the kids in the audience defiantly sang “Let the Good Times Roll” at the police. At another show in San Jose, someone threw a lit string of firecrackers into the audience, leading to a dozen people requiring medical treatment and another dozen being arrested. “Ain’t That A Shame” was one of two hit songs recorded on the same day. The other, “All By Myself”, would also become a number one hit on the R&B charts. While “All By Myself” was credited to Domino and Bartholomew, it was based very closely on an old Big Bill Broonzy record. Here’s Broonzy’s song: [excerpt, Big Bill Broonzy: “All By Myself”] And here’s Domino’s: [Excerpt, Fats Domino: “All By Myself”] As you can hear, while the verses are quite different, the choruses are identical. Domino here for the first time plays in his two-beat piano style, yet another of the New Orleans rhythms that Domino and Bartholomew would incorporate into Domino’s hits. A standard two-beat rhythm is the rhythm one finds in polkas, or in, say, Johnny Cash records — that boom-chick, boom-chick, walking or marching rhythm. But the New Orleans variant of it, which as far as I can tell was first recorded when Domino recorded “All By Myself”, isn’t boom-chick boom-chick, but is rather boom-boom-chick, boom-boom-chick, with quavers on the first beat, and slightly swinging the quavers. Indeed by doing it two-handed (with the bass booms in the left hand and the treble chicks in the right), Domino also sneaks in a bass quaver at the end of the “chick”, syncopating it, so it’s sort of “a-boom-boom-chick, a-boom-boom-chick”. The two-beat rhythm would become as important a factor in Domino’s future records as his rolling piano triplets and Dave Bartholomew’s tresillo rhythms already had been. Domino’s music was about rhythm and groove, and whereas most of his contemporaries were content to stick with one or two simple rhythms, Domino and Bartholomew would stack all of these different rhythmic patterns on top of each other. A lot of this is the basic musical vocabulary of anyone working in any of the musics influenced by New Orleans R&B these days, which includes all of reggae and ska as well as most African-American musical idioms, but that vocabulary was being built in these sessions. Domino and Bartholomew weren’t the only ones doing it — Professor Longhair and Huey “Piano” Smith and Mac Rebennack were all contributing, and all of these performers would take each other’s material and put their own unique spin on it — but they were vital parts of creating these building blocks that would be used by musicians to this day. “Ain’t That A Shame” was just the start of Domino’s rock and roll stardom. He would go on to have another seven R&B number ones after this, and his records would consistently chart on the R&B charts for the next seven years — he would have, in total, *forty* top ten hits on the R&B chart in his career. But what was more remarkable was the number of *pop* chart hits he would have. He had fourteen pop top twenty hits between 1955 and 1961, eleven of them going top ten, including classics like “I’m in Love Again”, “I’m Walkin'”, “Blue Monday”, “Valley of Tears”, “I Want to Walk You Home” and “Walking to New Orleans”. Almost all of his hit singles were written by the Bartholomew and Domino songwriting team, and almost all of them were extraordinarily good records — there were almost no fifties rockers who had anything like Domino’s consistent quality. So we’ll be seeing Fats Domino at least once more in this series, when he finds his thrill on Blueberry Hill…

  Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Fats Domino and "Ain't That A Shame". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The best compilation of Fats Domino's music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. I've leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it's the only biography of Domino I know of, and we're looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we've looked at so far. I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, for the third time, we're going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It's been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on "The Fat Man", and episode twelve, on "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and the two of them resumed their collaboration. The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called "Dreaming", featuring members of both Domino's touring band and of Bartholomew's studio band. It's credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino: [excerpt: Fats Domino, "Dreaming"] Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino's manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade's car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries. While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino's benefit -- Domino's contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest -- which might often be several times as much money. With Cade's death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew's partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino's career. One of the things we've touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership -- although this is using "strained" in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks. And, of course, Domino's piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew's arrangement and production ideas were. And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example, "Going to the River", one of the first fruits of their renewed collaboration: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Going to the River"] Dave Bartholomew called that "a nothing song" -- and it's easy to see what he means. Other than the tresilo bassline (and a reminder for those of you who don't remember what that is, it's that "bom, BOM bom" rhythmic figure that you get in almost every record Dave Bartholomew had a hand in) there's not much of musical interest there -- you've got Domino playing his usual triplets in the right hand on the piano, but rather than the drums emphasising the backbeat, they're mostly playing the same triplets as the piano. The chord sequence is nothing special. and the lyrics were simplistic. But at the same time, the track did go to number two on the R&B charts, and probably would have gone to number one if it hadn't been for the cover version by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, "Going to the River"] That went to number four on the R&B charts. For once it wasn't a white man having a hit with a black man's song, but another black man, who'd heard Domino perform it live before the record was released and got in quickly with his own version. On the other hand, it wasn't like Domino was the perfect judge of what made a hit, either. Bartholomew wrote the song "I Hear You Knocking" for Domino, but when Domino decided not to record it, Bartholomew recorded it for another artist on Imperial Records, Smiley Lewis, getting the great New Orleans piano player Huey "Piano" Smith to play in an imitation of Domino's style: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knocking"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and a cover version by the white singer Gale Storm went to number two on the pop charts. So both Domino and Bartholomew were capable of coming up with big hits in the style they perfected together, and both were capable of dismissing a potential hit when it wasn't their own idea. But their partnership was so successful that Dave Bartholomew actually regarded Smiley Lewis as a "bad luck singer", because when Bartholomew wrote and produced for him, the records would *only* sell a hundred thousand copies or so, compared to the much larger numbers of records that Domino sold. Domino was becoming huge in the R&B world -- in early 1954 Billboard listed him as the biggest selling R&B star in the country -- and he was managing to cope with it better than most. While he would miss the occasional gig from drinking a little too much, and he'd sleep around on the road more than a married man should, he was essentially a well-adjusted, private, man, who had five kids, phoned home to his wife every night, and never touched anything stronger than alcohol. That wasn't true of the rest of his band, however. In the 1950s, heroin was the chic drug to be taking if you were a touring musician, and many of Domino's touring band members were users. He would often have to pay to get his guitarist's instrument out of the pawn shop, so they could go on tour, and once even had to pay off the guitarist's back child support, to get him out of jail, as he would keep spending all his money on heroin. The one who came out worst, sadly, was Jimmy Gilchrist, who would sing with Domino's backing band as the support act. Gilchrist died of an overdose during one of Domino's tours in early 1954. Domino replaced him with a new support act, Jalacey Hawkins, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. According to Domino, he fired Jalacey for being too vulgar on stage, and screaming, but Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as he would soon become known, claimed instead that it was because Domino was jealous of Hawkins' cool leopard-skin suit. But through this turmoil, Domino and Bartholomew, with Cosimo Matassa in the control room, continued recording a whole string of hits -- "Please Don't Leave Me", "Rose Mary", "Something's Wrong", "You Done Me Wrong", and "Don't You Know" all went top ten on the R&B charts. For two and a half years, from September 1952 through March 1955, they would dominate the rhythm and blues charts, even though most white audiences had little idea who Fats Domino was. But slowly Domino was noticing that more and more white teenagers were starting to come to his shows -- and he also started incorporating a few country songs and old standards into his otherwise R&B-dominated act, catering slightly more to a pop audience. Their first crossover hit definitely has more of Domino's fingerprints on it than Bartholomew's. Bartholomew was unimpressed at the session, saying that the song didn't tell a complete story. Once it became a hit, though, Bartholomew would soften on the song, saying “‘Ain’t That a Shame’ will never die, it will be here when the world comes to an end.” He may not have been a particular fan of the song, but you'd never know it from his arrangement. Listen to the way that horn section in the intro punctuates the words, the way it doesn't just go "You made me cry", but "You made -- BAM BAM -- me cry -- BAM BAM" [excerpt: Fats Domino, "Ain't That A Shame"] That's the kind of arrangement decision that can only be made by someone with a real feel for the material. And this is where Dave Bartholomew's real importance to the records he was making with Fats Domino comes in. It's all well and good Bartholomew doing great arrangements and productions for his own songs, or songs mostly written by him, but he put the same thought and attention into the arrangements even where the song was not to his taste and wasn't his idea. Domino's biographer Rick Coleman -- to whose biography of Domino I'm extremely indebted for this episode -- suggests that Dave Bartholomew's arrangement owes a little to the old Dixieland jazz standard "Tin Roof Blues". I can *sort of* hear it, but I'm not entirely convinced. Listen for yourself: [Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, "Tin Roof Blues"] Another possible influence on "Ain't That A Shame" is a record by Lloyd Price, who of course had worked with both Domino and Bartholomew earlier. His "Ain't It A Shame" doesn't sound much like "Ain't That A Shame", but it does have a very Fats Domino feel, and it would be very surprising if neither Bartholomew nor Domino had heard it given their previous collaborations: [excerpt: Lloyd Price, "Ain't It A Shame"] Indeed, early pressings of "Ain't That A Shame" mistakenly called it "Ain't It A Shame", presumably because of confusion with the Lloyd Price song. Bartholomew and Matassa also put more thought into the production than was normal at this time. When mastering Domino's records, now that Matassa's studio had finally switched to tape from cutting directly on to wax, they would speed up the tape slightly -- a trick which made Domino's voice sound younger, and which emphasised the beat more. This sort of thing is absolutely basic now, but at the time it was extraordinarily unusual for any rhythm and blues records to have any kind of production trickery at all. It also had another advantage, because as Cosimo Matassa would point out, it would change the key slightly so it wouldn't be in a normal key at all. So when other people tried to cover Domino's records "they couldn't find the damn notes on the piano!" Of course, with success came problems of its own. When Domino was sent on a promotional tour of local radio stations, DJs would complain to Lew Chudd of Imperial Records that Domino didn't speak English. He did speak English -- though it was his second language, after Creole French -- but he spoke English with such a thick accent that many people from outside Louisiana didn't recognise it as English at all. Domino's relative lack of fluency in English is possibly also why he wrote such simple lyrics -- a fact that was mocked on national TV when Steve Allen, the talk show host, read out the lyrics to "Ain't That A Shame" in a mock "poetry recital", to laughter from the studio audience, causing Bartholomew and Domino to feel extremely upset. Of course, this is an easy trick to play, as almost all song lyrics sound puerile when recited pompously enough. For example, I can recite: Lets go to church, next Sunday morning We'll see our friends on the way We'll stand and sing, on Sunday morning And I'll hold your hand as we pray That, of course, is a lyric written by Steve Allen, who despite having written 8500 songs by his own count, never wrote one as good as "Ain't That A Shame". As with all black hits at this time, there was a terrible white cover, in this case by Pat Boone. Boone's cover version came out almost before Domino's did, thanks to Bill Randle. Bill Randle was a DJ in Cleveland, a colleague of Alan Freed, who is now a much better-known DJ, but in the early fifties Randle was possibly the best-known DJ in America. While Freed only played black rhythm and blues records, Randle, whose first radio show was called "the Inter-Racial Goodtime Hour", played records by both black and white people. As the country's biggest DJ, he was sent an advance copy of "Ain't That A Shame", and he liked it immensely. According to Lew Chudd, "He liked it because it was ignorant, because he was an English professor". That's sort of true -- Randle wasn't a professor at the time, but in the 1960s he ended up getting degrees in law, journalism, sociology, and education, and a doctorate in American Studies, all while continuing to work as a DJ. Randle would regularly send copies of new R&B records to white record executives he knew, and it was because of Randle that the Crew Cuts and the Diamonds, among others, first heard the black recordings whose style they stole. In this case, he sent his acetate copy of "Ain't That A Shame" to Randy Wood, the owner of Dot Records, a label set up specifically to record white cover versions of black records. Randle was an odd case, in this respect, because he *was* someone who truly loved rhythm and blues, and black music, and would play it regularly on his show -- early on, he had actually been fired from one of his first radio jobs for playing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe record, though he was soon rehired. But he seems to have truly bought into the idea that the white cover versions of black records did help the black performers. There are very few examples of how little that was the case more blatant than that of Boone, a man whose attitude is best summed up by the fact that when he recorded his version, he tried to change the lyrics to "Isn't That A Shame" because he thought "Ain't" ungrammatical. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Ain't That A Shame”] Boone would later go on to commit similar atrocities against "Tutti Frutti", among other records. In a 1977 interview, Domino said of Boone's cover "When I first heard it I didn't like it. It took two months to write and he put it out almost the same time I did. It kind of hurt. The publishing companies don't care if a thousand people make it." Talking to Domino's biographer Rick Coleman, Dave Bartholomew was characteristically more forthright. "Pat Boone was a lucky white boy. He wasn't singing" -- and here he used an expletive that I'm not going to repeat because I'm not sure what makes something qualify as adult content in iTunes -- "Randy Wood was doing un-Constitutional type stuff. He was successful with it, but that don't make it right!" Bill Randle would play both versions of the record on his show, and both went to number one in Cleveland as a result. But in the rest of the country, the clean-cut white man was miles ahead of the fat black man with a flat top from New Orleans. Boone's misunderstanding typifies the cultural ignorance that characterised white cover versions of R&B hits in this period. A few months later, a similar thing would happen again with Domino's hit "Bo Weevil", and here the racial dynamics were more apparent: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Bo Weevil"] That was covered by Teresa Brewer, and obviously her version did better on the charts: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, "Bo Weevil"] But the thing is, that song celebrates boll weevils -- pests which destroy cotton, and which have become regarded in African-American folklore as humorous trickster figures, because they bankrupted plantation owners -- and while boll weevils didn't reach the USA until after slavery had ended, you can understand how a pest that destroys the livelihood of cotton plantation owners might have a rather different reputation among black people than white. But despite these white covers, Domino continued to make inroads into the white market himself. And for all that Domino's music seems easygoing, it was enough that even before his proper crossover into the pop market, Domino had shows canceled because the promoters or local government couldn't handle the potential of riots breaking out at his shows. That only increased when “Ain't That A Shame” hit, and white teenagers wanted to come to the shows. Police would try to shut them down, because white and black kids dancing together was illegal, and often shows would be canceled because of the police's heavy-handed tactics – for example, at one show in Houston, the police tried in vain to stop the dancing, and eventually said that only whites would be allowed to dance, so Domino stopped the show, and the kids in the audience defiantly sang “Let the Good Times Roll” at the police. At another show in San Jose, someone threw a lit string of firecrackers into the audience, leading to a dozen people requiring medical treatment and another dozen being arrested. "Ain't That A Shame" was one of two hit songs recorded on the same day. The other, "All By Myself", would also become a number one hit on the R&B charts. While "All By Myself" was credited to Domino and Bartholomew, it was based very closely on an old Big Bill Broonzy record. Here's Broonzy's song: [excerpt, Big Bill Broonzy: "All By Myself"] And here's Domino's: [Excerpt, Fats Domino: "All By Myself"] As you can hear, while the verses are quite different, the choruses are identical. Domino here for the first time plays in his two-beat piano style, yet another of the New Orleans rhythms that Domino and Bartholomew would incorporate into Domino's hits. A standard two-beat rhythm is the rhythm one finds in polkas, or in, say, Johnny Cash records -- that boom-chick, boom-chick, walking or marching rhythm. But the New Orleans variant of it, which as far as I can tell was first recorded when Domino recorded "All By Myself", isn't boom-chick boom-chick, but is rather boom-boom-chick, boom-boom-chick, with quavers on the first beat, and slightly swinging the quavers. Indeed by doing it two-handed (with the bass booms in the left hand and the treble chicks in the right), Domino also sneaks in a bass quaver at the end of the "chick", syncopating it, so it's sort of "a-boom-boom-chick, a-boom-boom-chick". The two-beat rhythm would become as important a factor in Domino's future records as his rolling piano triplets and Dave Bartholomew's tresillo rhythms already had been. Domino's music was about rhythm and groove, and whereas most of his contemporaries were content to stick with one or two simple rhythms, Domino and Bartholomew would stack all of these different rhythmic patterns on top of each other. A lot of this is the basic musical vocabulary of anyone working in any of the musics influenced by New Orleans R&B these days, which includes all of reggae and ska as well as most African-American musical idioms, but that vocabulary was being built in these sessions. Domino and Bartholomew weren't the only ones doing it -- Professor Longhair and Huey "Piano" Smith and Mac Rebennack were all contributing, and all of these performers would take each other's material and put their own unique spin on it -- but they were vital parts of creating these building blocks that would be used by musicians to this day. "Ain't That A Shame" was just the start of Domino's rock and roll stardom. He would go on to have another seven R&B number ones after this, and his records would consistently chart on the R&B charts for the next seven years -- he would have, in total, *forty* top ten hits on the R&B chart in his career. But what was more remarkable was the number of *pop* chart hits he would have. He had fourteen pop top twenty hits between 1955 and 1961, eleven of them going top ten, including classics like "I'm in Love Again", "I'm Walkin'", "Blue Monday", "Valley of Tears", "I Want to Walk You Home" and "Walking to New Orleans". Almost all of his hit singles were written by the Bartholomew and Domino songwriting team, and almost all of them were extraordinarily good records -- there were almost no fifties rockers who had anything like Domino's consistent quality. So we'll be seeing Fats Domino at least once more in this series, when he finds his thrill on Blueberry Hill...

We're back with the latest installment of The Astrocast, with Numinous resident astrologers Bess Matassa and Sandy Sitron. Aries Season (3/20—4/19) marks the beginning of the astrological year, and is infused with the energy of new beginnings. There's a "clean slate" vibe in the air, and Bess and Sandy dive deep into the key theme for the coming weeks: Showing up for yourself; learning through friction; breaking cycles; simplifying things; and a commitment to backing yourself 100%. It is a JUICY month with tons of cosmic action. In this episode you will also hear about the key transits + diary dates for the coming weeks, including: The Spring Equinox and the Sun's move into Aries (3/20): A time to commit to beginning again, picking a direction to move forward in, and letting any discomfort just be. This month's two Libra Full Moons (3/20 and 4/19): A time for becoming your own champion, and for clearing yourself of painful dramas that are ready to go. The Aries New Moon (4/5): A time for discovering what is essential, sloughing off excess, becoming emotionally “aerodynamic”; and committing with your whole body. Venus in Pisces (3/26) and Mercury moving direct in Pisces (3/28): A time for embracing and giving a voice your fantasies and true desires. Mars in Gemini (3/31): A time for speaking your goals into being while remaining open to the curious journey. For adapting and adjusting. Pluto in Capricorn opposite north node cancer (starting 3/31) and Sun square Pluto and Saturn in cap (4/10) Taking responsibility for yourself. No more messing around. Showing up to do what you came here to do. Jupiter Retrograde (4/10): A time for reconnecting to your sources of internal inspo and being your own “coach.” We hope you love this episode! I also share the very first HINT as some super exciting developments from us to help you learn astrology for yourself. Make sure you're following on Instagram and all signed up for our newsletter to be the first to hear more!

It's time for the next installment of our monthly Astrocast podcast with Bess Matassa and Sandy Sitron. The Sun moves into Pisces on Monday February 18, and Bess and Sandy begin this episode with a look back at the lessons of Aquarius Season. How have the themes of community, inspiration, and innovation been firing for you these past few weeks? With Pisces season (2/18—3/20) we move into the close of the astrological year—a time for allowing, non-judgement and increased compassion, of letting go (Bess has an amazing new way to frame this) and letting things “recede” in their own time. In this episode you will also learn about: -How Pisces season 2019 coincides with the move of 'wounded healer' Chiron in Aries on 2/18. -The themes of the Virgo full (2/19) and Pisces new moons (3/6): How to sit with challenging feelings and create space for it all. Creating a safe container for exploring sensitivity. Working with boundaries without shutting things out. -How to use Venus in Aquarius (3/1-3/26) to find freedom in relationships. -Mercury going retrograde in Pisces (3/5—3/28) as an invitation to listen to emotions in new ways; to attune to your intuition; to cultivate kinder self speech; and to find “romance” and mystery in everyday life. We also do a shout-out for feedback from YOU on what you want to learn more about in astrology. We're shaking things up in 2019, and as we craft our content going forward we want to make sure we're giving you more of the Astro content you want! Email support@the-numinous.com to let us know what you are most astrologically curious about ...

Join Emily, Guen and Thor Gudmundsson of the Wine rooms London in Emily's kitchen as they chat about, and try a couple of orange wines. Guen still manages to find a way to talk about Gewürztraminer but Emily keeps her on track. Listen in to find out about #porkiness and the #porkbooster. This week's wines: 2015 Blossoms,Matassa - Côtes du Roussillon, France 2009 Ribolla Gialla, Franco Terpin - Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy Don't forget to follow us on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/JUICE.PODCAST/) and Like us on [Facebook!](https://www.facebook.com/Juice.Podcast/)

We're three weeks into 2019, which means it's time for our Aquarius season Astrocast with Numinous resident astrologers Bess Matassa and Sandy Sitron. The themes of the coming astrological season are finding ease in self-expression; cultivating creative visualization and clear “seeing;” and refreshing our perspective to pave the way for new possibilities. Bess and Sandy also discuss how this is the time of year to close the gap between being and doing—and for us to hone in on the soul work we are doing in the world, and the impact our actions can have on the collective. Specific transits we'll be discussing include: -The final Full Moon of the Leo/Aquarius Eclipse cycle on January 21 -The Feb 4 Aquarius New Moon -Mercury's journey through Aquarius and into Pisces -Venus' shift into Capricorn, and Mars' shift into Taurus -The beginning of Chiron's transit through Aries

3rd and final part of my chat with Tom Lubbe of Matassa on the morning of his presentation at the Swartland Heritage Festival in Paternoster on 02.Nov.2018.. I wanted principally to talk to him about his time in wine in South Africa and in particular setting up The Observatory. We touched many subjects and we chatted for longer than planned, so I have split it up. Tom is a mentor of some of the most exciting (young and old) producers in South Africa, worked under Charles Back along side Eben Sadie before setting up The Observatory in the Paardeberg in early 2000s. He then fell in love and moved to France and started Matassa I was very hungover for this chat having enjoyed a dinner at Wolfgat in Paternoster the night before, so apologies if I sound a bit slow. Tom and I covered many topics in the chat – some of them (and the mm:ss) are below: 0.00 Support by other winemakers in making natural in South Africa in early 2000s 1.01 What are the biggest markets for Matassa? 1.35 South African wine more welcomed in London than Roussillon wine 2.24 Didn’t realise I had to sell the stuff as well as make it. Importance of repeat customers. 3.36 The shift of consciousness started in 2007-2008 3.57 Noma/Nordic cuisine and natural wine 4.20 The Japanese market 5.44 Kenjiro Kagami, Domaine des Miroirs (Jura) 7.48 Rise of concern about production of food in Japan and China 8.48 More on Japan 9.32 If I never moved to France… 9.51 You can’t farm via proxy 10.19 Comparing The Observatory and Matassa 10.40 What is the best compost? 11.02 Bosgaasfontein (farm where The Observatory was based) 11.20 Jurgen Gouws at Bosgaasfontein 11.36 Tom chats about South African winemakers 12.07 Craig Hawkins, TESTALONGA (Swartland) 12.45 Eben warned me… 13.17 The effects of working with others 13.27 Orange wine – first one made in 2008 12.13 White vs Orange wine 14.24 Filtering and sulphuring orange wine 14.53 Jancis and Cuvee Marguerite 15.41 Comparison to Radikon (Fruili), not competition 17.21 Are you bound to the traditional wine styles of your area? 17.42 Benefits of a skin contact fermentation for muscat d’alexandrie (Hanepoot) 18.18 Pricing philosophy 18.37 La Revue du Vin de France orange wine tasting 19.51 Matassa and Noma – serve it by the glass 21.11 I don’t want to fuck a boudin 21.39 Serious business and natural wine. Thank you very much to Tom Lubbe.

Part 2 of 3 of my chat with Tom Lubbe of Matassa on the morning of his presentation at the Swartland Heritage Festival in Paternoster on 02.Nov.2018.. I wanted principally to talk to him about his time in wine in South Africa and in particular setting up The Observatory. We touched many subjects and we chatted for longer than planned, so I have split it up. Tom is a mentor of some of the most exciting (young and old) producers in South Africa, worked under Charles Back along side Eben Sadie before setting up The Observatory in the Paardeberg in early 2000s. He then fell in love and moved to France and started Matassa I was very hungover for this chat having enjoyed a dinner at Wolfgat in Paternoster the night before, so apologies if I sound a bit slow. Tom and I covered many topics in the chat – some of them (and the mm:ss) are below: 00.02 More on Louise at Welgemeend 00.49 Henri Jayer, Cros Parantoux 02.13 Lalou Bize-Leroy 03.44 Tom hates most Burgundy 04.07 Tom rather drinks… 04.44 Honest wine vs natural wine 05.53 Georges Descombes 06.26 Henri Jayer’s winemaking 06.47 Denis Mortet 07.42 Inheritance Law 07.54 Premature oxidation in Burgundy 08.29 Claude and Lydia Bourguignon 09.45 Ending up at Domaine Gauby 10.18 Going further with organic farming 10.42 What Tom found at Domaine Gauby 11.44 Meeting Eben Sadie in 1999 13.06 Charles Back and Spice Route 15.16 First vintage of Observatory (2000) 17.21 Old vines 18.14 Converting old vines to organics 19.27 Brilliant wines from young vines (1961 Chateau Palmer) 21.28 Matassa Rouge (100+yo vines) 22.10 Working with old vines 22.41 Elevage vessels and journalists and worms 23.26 Organic matter levels in soils – a visit to Alsace, Domaine Julien Meyer & Domaine Ostertag 26.28 Domaine Leon Barral in Faugeres 27.24 Cover cropping 28.03 Picking early at Observatory 28.34 Buying the farm in Swartland (2003) 29.19 Why the Paardeberg? 30.17 Shoot thinning, leaf plucking and malic acid levels 31.54 Lowering pH through farming – reducing the need for SO2 32.39 Oidium (Powdery Mildew) 35.44 More on Observatory 37.55 What is a winemaker? What is a vigneron? 39.16 Working in the Matassa vineyards 40.46 Importance of organics outside the vineyard 41.42 Tom is a dirty, lazy foreigner 42.37 Local cooperatives 43.17 Challenges of a dry climate (water and organic matter in soil) 44.05 Why aren’t more farmers increasing the organic matter in their soil? 45.20 Entropy and rain 46.26 Presence of the farmer 47.34 Philosophy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery 48.04 Respect for Didier Barral and Patrick Meyer 48.26 Patrick Meyer should be shot – dinner in Stockholm 50.36 Respect your neighbour 51.16 Physical challenges of farming 52.19 Farming equipment manufacturers 53.20 The end of The Observatory 54.05 The market for natural wines in early 2000s 54.50 Tom on his 2002 Carignan/Syrah 55.19 Problems with storage vs badly made wine – a case study.

  Welcome to episode twelve of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. 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 information on Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino here largely comes from Blue Monday by Rick Coleman. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 while the Fats Domino tracks are on They Call Me the Fat Man Erratum I used the wrong version of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” when editing this podcast. The version used here is a soundalike remake from 1958, rather than the 1952 original. Apologies for the error.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   This is a rather special episode in some ways. The topic of this episode is “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price, and I’ll be frank — I was not originally going to give “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” its own episode. Not because it’s not a great record — it is — but because I was going to deal with it in passing when I cover one of the other records made by its vocalist, Lloyd Price. But that was before I noticed an odd coincidence of timing. I needed to prerecord this episode, because it’s Christmas and I’m visiting my in-laws, and so I was looking at what records came next in the history on my timeline, and I noticed two things: The first was that “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was the next important record to be released in the timeline I’d put together. And the second was that Dave Bartholomew, that record’s producer, was born one hundred years ago exactly, on December 24th, 1918. I simply couldn’t pass up an opportunity to do an episode celebrating the hundredth birthday of one of the great pioneers of rock and roll music, and one who is happily still alive. We talked about Bartholomew a bit a couple of weeks ago, in the episode about “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino, but he needs to be discussed in more detail, as he was one of the most important musicians of the fifties. As we heard, he brought the “Spanish tinge” to rhythm and blues records and collaborated with Fats Domino on all of Domino’s big hits — and we’ll be hearing more about him in that context in a few weeks — but he did a lot more. Not only did he produce classic records by Frankie Ford and T-Bone Walker, not only did he write “One Night”, which became a big hit for Smiley Lewis and a bigger one for Elvis, but he also wrote Chuck Berry’s only number one hit: [excerpt “My Ding-A-Ling” by Chuck Berry] OK, that may not be Berry’s finest moment as a performer, but it shows just how wide Bartholomew’s influence was. Despite that, rather astonishingly, there’s never been a biography written of Bartholomew, and even “Honkers and Shouters”, the classic book on the history of rhythm and blues which contains almost the only in-depth interviews with many of the musicians and record producers who made this music, only devotes a handful of paragraphs to Bartholomew’s work. I’ve barely been able to even find any in-depth interviews with Bartholomew, and so my knowledge of him is built up from lots of offhand mentions and casual connections in books on other people. But he worked with so *many* other people that that still amounts to quite a lot. So let’s talk about “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and let’s do it by picking up the story of Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino after “The Fat Man”. “The Fat Man” was a massive hit, but it caused some strain between its producer and its performer. Domino had gone on tour to support the record, as part of a larger package with Bartholomew’s band as the headliners. Domino would only perform a few songs at a time, and most of the show was Bartholomew’s band. Domino resented Bartholomew for getting most of the money, while Bartholomew resented Domino for his popularity — Domino was starting to overshadow the nominal star of the show. But more than that, Domino just didn’t seem to be getting on well with the rest of the band. This wasn’t because he was unfriendly — although Domino was always someone who seemed a little socially awkward — just that Domino was a homebody who absolutely resented ever having to go away from home, and especially as he had a newborn baby son he wanted to be home for. Indeed, when the tour had started, Domino had missed the first few days by the simple expedient of hiding for several days, and it was only when a union official had come knocking at his door explaining what happened to people who broke their contracts that he relented and went on the tour. And even then, he packed a suitcase full of foods like pickled pig’s feet, in case he couldn’t get his favourite foods anywhere else. Domino was a sheltered, nervous, shy, person — someone who had been so unworldly that when his first record came out he didn’t have a record player to play it on and had to listen to it on jukeboxes — and this exasperated Bartholomew, who was a far more well-travelled and socially aware person. But the two of them still continued to collaborate, and to make records together, including some great ones like this version of the traditional New Orleans song “Eh La Bas!”, which Bartholomew rewrote with the great boogie pianist Professor Longhair and titled “Hey! La Bas Boogie” [excerpt “Hey! La Bas Boogie” by Fats Domino] The collaborations caused other problems, too — both Bartholomew and Domino thought, with good reason, of themselves as the true talent in their collaborations. Domino believed that his piano playing and singing were the important things on the records, and that since he was bringing in most of the ideas fully-formed Bartholomew wasn’t doing much to make the records successful. Bartholomew, on the other hand, thought that the song ideas Domino was bringing in were basically nursery rhymes, while his own songs were more sophisticated — Domino had little formal musical knowledge and usually used only a couple of chords, while Bartholomew was far more musically knowledgeable; and Domino wasn’t a native English speaker, and tended to use very simple lyrics while when Bartholomew brought in ideas he would come up with strong narratives and punning lyrics. Bartholomew thought that when the songs Domino brought in became successful, it was because of Bartholomew’s patching up of them and his arrangements. Bartholomew resented that Domino was becoming a big star, and Domino resented that Bartholomew patronised him in the studio, treating him as an employee, not an equal partner. Of course, both were right — Bartholomew was by far the better songwriter, but Domino had great instincts for a hook. Bartholomew was a great arranger, and Domino was a great performer. As so often in musical collaborations, the sum was much greater than its parts, and it was the tension between the two of them that drove the collaboration. But while Bartholomew had problems with Fats, his real problems were with Al Young, a white New Orleans record store owner who was an associate of Lew Chudd, Imperial Records’ owner. He didn’t like Young’s habit of trying to make it look like it was him, rather than Bartholomew, who was producing the records, and he especially didn’t like when Young cut himself in on the songwriting royalties for songs Bartholomew wrote. This problem came to a head when Bartholomew got back home from a particularly stressful tour with Domino over Thanksgiving. It had been far too cold for the Louisiana musicians in the Midwest, and they’d been ripped off by the tour promoters — they’d received only something like two hundred dollars between them, rather than the two thousand they’d been promised. Domino actually had to call home and ask his family to wire him his bus fare back from Missouri to New Orleans. And when Bartholomew got back, he popped into Al Young’s record shop — and Young showed him the fifteen hundred dollar Christmas bonus cheque he’d just received from Imperial Records for all his hard work that year. Bartholomew had received no bonus, despite having done far more for the company than Young had, and he assumed that the reason was because Bartholomew was black and Young was white. He decided right then to quit Imperial, and to become a freelancer working for whoever had work. Domino continued making records in the same style, and even continued to have hits with songs that followed the formula he’d established with Bartholomew, some of them even bigger than the ones they’d made together, like “Goin’ Home”. But Al Young was the producer on that record, and while Domino did his usual great performance and it had that tresillo rhythm, Young knew nothing about music, and so the arrangement was haphazard and the sax solo was off-key at points: [excerpt: solo from “Goin’ Home”, Fats Domino] But it was still a big hit, and Al Young got his name stuck on the credits as a co-writer, which is what mattered to him at least, even if everyone was unhappy with the recordings. That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and made its way into the top thirty on the pop charts, and you can hear its influence all over the place, for example in this other classic track: [excerpt “Shake a Hand”, Faye Adams] It also influenced a young piano player and arranger named Ray Charles, and we’ll talk more about him later. But the fact remains, it’s not as good as the stuff Domino was doing with Bartholomew. It has the power and the catchiness, but it doesn’t have the depth and the sophistication. Lew Chudd, around this time, tried to get Art Young to get Dave Bartholomew back working with Domino again, but Bartholomew just slammed the phone down on Young. He didn’t need Imperial Records, he didn’t need Fats Domino, and he *certainly* didn’t need Art Young. He was working with other people now. In particular, he was working with Specialty Records. Specialty Records was an LA-based record label, like most of the labels that worked with New Orleans musicians were — for whatever reason, even though LA and New Orleans are thousands of miles away from each other, it was the Los Angeles companies rather than anywhere closer that seemed to pick up on the sound coming from New Orleans. Specialty was run by Art Rupe. Art Rupe is, amazingly, still alive and even older than Dave Bartholomew — he turned 101 a few months back — and he’s one of the most important figures in the development of rhythm and blues in the 1950s. Indeed, he was the producer of yet another record occasionally labelled “the first rock and roll record”, “R.M.’s Blues” by Roy Milton, which was one of the early records to combine a boogie piano and a backbeat. [excerpt: “R.M.’s Blues” by Roy Milton] And in his case, it’s no coincidence that he ended up working with New Orleans musicians — he was impressed by Fats Domino’s Imperial Records releases, Imperial being another Los Angeles based label, and so he came to New Orleans to see if there were other people like Domino about. Rupe put out an ad for people to come to Cosimo Mattassa’s studio to audition, but it wasn’t until he was packing up to leave and fly back to Los Angeles without any success, that a singer called Lloyd Price walked into the studio and sang his song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. Rupe cancelled his flight — this was someone worth recording. Price was, at the time, a jingle creator for a local radio station, providing music for the DJs to use while they were advertising various products. At the time, radio advertising in the US was much like podcast advertising is now, and in the same way that a podcast host might interrupt what they’re doing and try to tell you about the benefits of a new mattress, so, then, might DJs — and in the same way that some podcast hosts will vary their set texts, so would the DJs, and one of the DJs for whom Lloyd Price created jingles had a catchphrase — “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. Price had come up with a melody to go along with those words — or, rather, he’d adapted a pre-existing melody to it — and the result had been popular enough that he had decided to turn it into a full song. And Price had sat in with Dave Bartholomew and his band in Kenner, his hometown, singing a few songs with them. Bartholomew had told him “I’m not working with Lew Chudd any more, I’m just hanging around Cosimo Matassa’s studio catching the odd bit of arrangement work there — why don’t you come down and see if we can get you recorded?” But Price was so unfamiliar with New Orleans that he didn’t even know how to get to Rampart Street, which is why he’d arrived so late. Luckily for everyone concerned, he managed to find the most famous street in New Orleans eventually. When they started recording the song, Bartholomew started to get annoyed with the guitarist on the session, Ernest McLean . “I wanted to get some sort of a rhythm going and he de dum de dum, de dum de dum [Laurel and Hardy rhythm]. I say, man, that’s, that’s, that ain’t nothing. What the hell you get that thing from?” That’s from one of the few interviews I’ve seen with Bartholomew — other sources say it was his piano player, Salvador Doucette, who was the problem. Whichever musician it was was apparently a jazz musician who had no real love or feel for rhythm and blues, and Bartholomew was getting exasperated, but at the same time he had no option but to go with what he had. But then fate intervened. Fats Domino happened to be passing the studio, and he decided to just call in and say hello, since it was the studio he recorded in regularly — and he found Dave Bartholomew there. Domino and Bartholomew hadn’t worked together in over a year at this point — March 1952 — and things were tense at first, but Bartholomew decided he’d be the one to ease the tension, and asked Domino to sit in. At first Domino refused, saying “Man, you know I can’t sit in! I’m under contract!”, but he sat around in the session, having a few drinks and watching the band work. Eventually, he said “Well, I’m gonna have me some fun, I’m gonna sit in anyway!” The resulting record was the one that knocked “Goin’ Home” off the top of the R&B charts, and it would become one of the defining records of the rock and roll era. “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” is, in many ways, an attempt to recapture the success of “The Fat Man”. It has many of the same musicians, the same arranger, and the same basic melody that the earlier record did. But being recorded three years later on meant it was also recorded after three years more advancement in the rock and roll style, and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” is notably more rhythmically complex than the earlier record — and that’s largely down to Dave Bartholemew’s arrangement. Let’s have a look at the individual elements of the track — starting with Fats Domino’s piano playing. Domino is mostly playing triplets, which is the way that he played most of the time: [excerpt: piano part from “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”] You’ve got the drums, by the great Earl Palmer, where he’s making the transition between his early shuffle style and his later backbeat emphasis — you can hear he’s trying to do two things at once on the drums, he’s trying to swing it *and* produce a backbeat, so you’ve essentially got him doing polyrhythms. You’ve got the bass, a different rhythm again, and then you’ve got those horns, just doing long, sustained, “blaaaat” parts. And then over that you’ve got Lloyd Price, singing in a Roy Brown imitation, but with a teenager’s style — Price had just turned nineteen — it’s a song about unrequited love or lust, a teenager’s song of yearning. And then to top it off there’s the sax solo by Herb Hardesty — the prototype for the solos he would provide for all Domino’s hits from this point on. It’s an amazing combination; this is the record that crystallised the New Orleans sound and became the template all the others would follow. “The Fat Man” had been the prototype, with some rough edges still there. This was a slicker, more assured, version of the same thing. Art Rupe was certainly pleased, but they were lucky to have been working with Rupe himself — soon after this recording, Rupe decided to expand his operations in New Orleans, and put Johnny Vincent in charge. While Rupe has a reputation as a decent businessman by 1950s record company standards, Johnny Vincent does *not*. When Vincent later owned his own record company, Ace, he was so bad at paying the musicians that Huey “Piano” Smith and Mac Rebbennack had to go and hold Vincent at gunpoint while they searched his office — and his person — for the money he owed them. And then, a few months later, they had to do the same thing again, because being held up at gunpoint just the once wasn’t enough for him to think better of ripping them off. Vincent was also not a particularly skilled record producer, at least according to Rebennack. I can’t repeat his comments about Vincent’s approach in full, because if I use some of the words he used iTunes will restrict this podcast to adults only, but the gist is that Vincent was a con-man who knew nothing about record production. It’s probably not a massive coincidence that Dave Bartholomew stopped working for Specialty very shortly after the recording of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. I’ve not seen a precise enough timeline to know for sure that it was Johnny Vincent’s arrival at the label that persuaded Bartholomew he didn’t want to work for them any more, but it seems likely to me. What I *do* know, though is that Lew Chudd heard “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, compared it to the records Art Young was producing for Fats Domino, and realised that he could be doing a hell of a lot better than he was. He eventually, through an intermediary, managed to persuade Bartholomew to talk to him again, and Bartholomew was hired back to work at Imperial. The same month, April 1952, that “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” came out, Domino and Bartholomew were back in Matassa’s studio, working together again, and recording a collaboration which sounds like a true combination of both men’s styles: [excerpt: “Poor Me” — Fats Domino] UPTO PART 7 Domino and Bartholomew would work together regularly in the studio until at least 1967, and live off and on for decades after that. And we’ll hear more of their collaborations later. But Lloyd Price wasn’t hampered by the fact that his producer had gone off to another label either. His follow-up single, cut at the same session as “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” with the same musicians, was a double-sided hit, both sides making the top ten on the R&B charts. And the same happened with the single after that, cut with different musicians — a song called “Ain’t it a Shame”, which may just have given Domino and Bartholomew an idea. After that he hit a bit of a dry spell in his career, and by 1956 he was reduced to recording a sequel to “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” — “Forgive me Clawdy”: [excerpt “Forgive Me Clawdy”: Lloyd Price] But then “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” itself got a second wind, and was covered in 1956 by both Elvis and Little Richard. This seems to have jump-started Price’s career, and we’ll pick up his story with his later big hits. “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” had a long life — it’s been recorded over the years by everyone from Paul McCartney to the Replacements — and happily most of the major figures involved in the record did too, which makes a very pleasant change from the bit of the episode where I usually tell you that the singer died in poverty and obscurity of alcoholism. Lloyd Price is still going strong, still performing aged 85, and he released his most recent album in 2016. Art Rupe is still alive aged 101, and while I’m sad to say Fats Domino is now dead, he died only last year, aged 89, an extremely wealthy man who had received every award his peers could bestow and had been given medals by multiple Presidents. And, as I said at the start, this episode will go up at one minute past midnight on the twenty-fourth of December 2018, which means it’s Dave Bartholomew’s hundredth birthday, It’s unlikely he’ll ever hear it but I’d like to wish him a happy birthday anyway, and many more of them. So to finish off… here’s a record Bartholomew played on seven years ago, when he was ninety-three: [Excerpt: Alia Fleury “Christmas in the Quarters”] And for those of you who celebrate it, a merry Christmas to all of you at home.

  Welcome to episode twelve of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by Lloyd Price. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. 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 information on Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino here largely comes from Blue Monday by Rick Coleman. The Lloyd Price songs here can be found on The Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62 while the Fats Domino tracks are on They Call Me the Fat Man Erratum I used the wrong version of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" when editing this podcast. The version used here is a soundalike remake from 1958, rather than the 1952 original. Apologies for the error.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   This is a rather special episode in some ways. The topic of this episode is "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by Lloyd Price, and I'll be frank -- I was not originally going to give "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" its own episode. Not because it's not a great record -- it is -- but because I was going to deal with it in passing when I cover one of the other records made by its vocalist, Lloyd Price. But that was before I noticed an odd coincidence of timing. I needed to prerecord this episode, because it's Christmas and I'm visiting my in-laws, and so I was looking at what records came next in the history on my timeline, and I noticed two things: The first was that "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" was the next important record to be released in the timeline I'd put together. And the second was that Dave Bartholomew, that record's producer, was born one hundred years ago exactly, on December 24th, 1918. I simply couldn't pass up an opportunity to do an episode celebrating the hundredth birthday of one of the great pioneers of rock and roll music, and one who is happily still alive. We talked about Bartholomew a bit a couple of weeks ago, in the episode about "The Fat Man" by Fats Domino, but he needs to be discussed in more detail, as he was one of the most important musicians of the fifties. As we heard, he brought the "Spanish tinge" to rhythm and blues records and collaborated with Fats Domino on all of Domino's big hits -- and we'll be hearing more about him in that context in a few weeks -- but he did a lot more. Not only did he produce classic records by Frankie Ford and T-Bone Walker, not only did he write "One Night", which became a big hit for Smiley Lewis and a bigger one for Elvis, but he also wrote Chuck Berry's only number one hit: [excerpt "My Ding-A-Ling" by Chuck Berry] OK, that may not be Berry's finest moment as a performer, but it shows just how wide Bartholomew's influence was. Despite that, rather astonishingly, there's never been a biography written of Bartholomew, and even "Honkers and Shouters", the classic book on the history of rhythm and blues which contains almost the only in-depth interviews with many of the musicians and record producers who made this music, only devotes a handful of paragraphs to Bartholomew's work. I've barely been able to even find any in-depth interviews with Bartholomew, and so my knowledge of him is built up from lots of offhand mentions and casual connections in books on other people. But he worked with so *many* other people that that still amounts to quite a lot. So let's talk about "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and let's do it by picking up the story of Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino after "The Fat Man". "The Fat Man" was a massive hit, but it caused some strain between its producer and its performer. Domino had gone on tour to support the record, as part of a larger package with Bartholomew's band as the headliners. Domino would only perform a few songs at a time, and most of the show was Bartholomew's band. Domino resented Bartholomew for getting most of the money, while Bartholomew resented Domino for his popularity -- Domino was starting to overshadow the nominal star of the show. But more than that, Domino just didn't seem to be getting on well with the rest of the band. This wasn't because he was unfriendly -- although Domino was always someone who seemed a little socially awkward -- just that Domino was a homebody who absolutely resented ever having to go away from home, and especially as he had a newborn baby son he wanted to be home for. Indeed, when the tour had started, Domino had missed the first few days by the simple expedient of hiding for several days, and it was only when a union official had come knocking at his door explaining what happened to people who broke their contracts that he relented and went on the tour. And even then, he packed a suitcase full of foods like pickled pig's feet, in case he couldn't get his favourite foods anywhere else. Domino was a sheltered, nervous, shy, person -- someone who had been so unworldly that when his first record came out he didn't have a record player to play it on and had to listen to it on jukeboxes -- and this exasperated Bartholomew, who was a far more well-travelled and socially aware person. But the two of them still continued to collaborate, and to make records together, including some great ones like this version of the traditional New Orleans song "Eh La Bas!", which Bartholomew rewrote with the great boogie pianist Professor Longhair and titled "Hey! La Bas Boogie" [excerpt "Hey! La Bas Boogie" by Fats Domino] The collaborations caused other problems, too -- both Bartholomew and Domino thought, with good reason, of themselves as the true talent in their collaborations. Domino believed that his piano playing and singing were the important things on the records, and that since he was bringing in most of the ideas fully-formed Bartholomew wasn't doing much to make the records successful. Bartholomew, on the other hand, thought that the song ideas Domino was bringing in were basically nursery rhymes, while his own songs were more sophisticated -- Domino had little formal musical knowledge and usually used only a couple of chords, while Bartholomew was far more musically knowledgeable; and Domino wasn't a native English speaker, and tended to use very simple lyrics while when Bartholomew brought in ideas he would come up with strong narratives and punning lyrics. Bartholomew thought that when the songs Domino brought in became successful, it was because of Bartholomew's patching up of them and his arrangements. Bartholomew resented that Domino was becoming a big star, and Domino resented that Bartholomew patronised him in the studio, treating him as an employee, not an equal partner. Of course, both were right -- Bartholomew was by far the better songwriter, but Domino had great instincts for a hook. Bartholomew was a great arranger, and Domino was a great performer. As so often in musical collaborations, the sum was much greater than its parts, and it was the tension between the two of them that drove the collaboration. But while Bartholomew had problems with Fats, his real problems were with Al Young, a white New Orleans record store owner who was an associate of Lew Chudd, Imperial Records' owner. He didn't like Young's habit of trying to make it look like it was him, rather than Bartholomew, who was producing the records, and he especially didn't like when Young cut himself in on the songwriting royalties for songs Bartholomew wrote. This problem came to a head when Bartholomew got back home from a particularly stressful tour with Domino over Thanksgiving. It had been far too cold for the Louisiana musicians in the Midwest, and they'd been ripped off by the tour promoters -- they'd received only something like two hundred dollars between them, rather than the two thousand they'd been promised. Domino actually had to call home and ask his family to wire him his bus fare back from Missouri to New Orleans. And when Bartholomew got back, he popped into Al Young's record shop -- and Young showed him the fifteen hundred dollar Christmas bonus cheque he'd just received from Imperial Records for all his hard work that year. Bartholomew had received no bonus, despite having done far more for the company than Young had, and he assumed that the reason was because Bartholomew was black and Young was white. He decided right then to quit Imperial, and to become a freelancer working for whoever had work. Domino continued making records in the same style, and even continued to have hits with songs that followed the formula he'd established with Bartholomew, some of them even bigger than the ones they'd made together, like "Goin' Home". But Al Young was the producer on that record, and while Domino did his usual great performance and it had that tresillo rhythm, Young knew nothing about music, and so the arrangement was haphazard and the sax solo was off-key at points: [excerpt: solo from "Goin' Home", Fats Domino] But it was still a big hit, and Al Young got his name stuck on the credits as a co-writer, which is what mattered to him at least, even if everyone was unhappy with the recordings. That song went to number one on the R&B charts, and made its way into the top thirty on the pop charts, and you can hear its influence all over the place, for example in this other classic track: [excerpt "Shake a Hand", Faye Adams] It also influenced a young piano player and arranger named Ray Charles, and we'll talk more about him later. But the fact remains, it's not as good as the stuff Domino was doing with Bartholomew. It has the power and the catchiness, but it doesn't have the depth and the sophistication. Lew Chudd, around this time, tried to get Art Young to get Dave Bartholomew back working with Domino again, but Bartholomew just slammed the phone down on Young. He didn't need Imperial Records, he didn't need Fats Domino, and he *certainly* didn't need Art Young. He was working with other people now. In particular, he was working with Specialty Records. Specialty Records was an LA-based record label, like most of the labels that worked with New Orleans musicians were -- for whatever reason, even though LA and New Orleans are thousands of miles away from each other, it was the Los Angeles companies rather than anywhere closer that seemed to pick up on the sound coming from New Orleans. Specialty was run by Art Rupe. Art Rupe is, amazingly, still alive and even older than Dave Bartholomew -- he turned 101 a few months back -- and he's one of the most important figures in the development of rhythm and blues in the 1950s. Indeed, he was the producer of yet another record occasionally labelled "the first rock and roll record", "R.M.'s Blues" by Roy Milton, which was one of the early records to combine a boogie piano and a backbeat. [excerpt: "R.M.'s Blues" by Roy Milton] And in his case, it's no coincidence that he ended up working with New Orleans musicians -- he was impressed by Fats Domino's Imperial Records releases, Imperial being another Los Angeles based label, and so he came to New Orleans to see if there were other people like Domino about. Rupe put out an ad for people to come to Cosimo Mattassa's studio to audition, but it wasn't until he was packing up to leave and fly back to Los Angeles without any success, that a singer called Lloyd Price walked into the studio and sang his song "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". Rupe cancelled his flight -- this was someone worth recording. Price was, at the time, a jingle creator for a local radio station, providing music for the DJs to use while they were advertising various products. At the time, radio advertising in the US was much like podcast advertising is now, and in the same way that a podcast host might interrupt what they're doing and try to tell you about the benefits of a new mattress, so, then, might DJs -- and in the same way that some podcast hosts will vary their set texts, so would the DJs, and one of the DJs for whom Lloyd Price created jingles had a catchphrase -- "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". Price had come up with a melody to go along with those words -- or, rather, he'd adapted a pre-existing melody to it -- and the result had been popular enough that he had decided to turn it into a full song. And Price had sat in with Dave Bartholomew and his band in Kenner, his hometown, singing a few songs with them. Bartholomew had told him "I'm not working with Lew Chudd any more, I'm just hanging around Cosimo Matassa's studio catching the odd bit of arrangement work there -- why don't you come down and see if we can get you recorded?" But Price was so unfamiliar with New Orleans that he didn't even know how to get to Rampart Street, which is why he'd arrived so late. Luckily for everyone concerned, he managed to find the most famous street in New Orleans eventually. When they started recording the song, Bartholomew started to get annoyed with the guitarist on the session, Ernest McLean . "I wanted to get some sort of a rhythm going and he de dum de dum, de dum de dum [Laurel and Hardy rhythm]. I say, man, that's, that's, that ain't nothing. What the hell you get that thing from?" That's from one of the few interviews I've seen with Bartholomew -- other sources say it was his piano player, Salvador Doucette, who was the problem. Whichever musician it was was apparently a jazz musician who had no real love or feel for rhythm and blues, and Bartholomew was getting exasperated, but at the same time he had no option but to go with what he had. But then fate intervened. Fats Domino happened to be passing the studio, and he decided to just call in and say hello, since it was the studio he recorded in regularly -- and he found Dave Bartholomew there. Domino and Bartholomew hadn't worked together in over a year at this point -- March 1952 -- and things were tense at first, but Bartholomew decided he'd be the one to ease the tension, and asked Domino to sit in. At first Domino refused, saying "Man, you know I can't sit in! I'm under contract!", but he sat around in the session, having a few drinks and watching the band work. Eventually, he said "Well, I'm gonna have me some fun, I'm gonna sit in anyway!" The resulting record was the one that knocked "Goin' Home" off the top of the R&B charts, and it would become one of the defining records of the rock and roll era. "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" is, in many ways, an attempt to recapture the success of "The Fat Man". It has many of the same musicians, the same arranger, and the same basic melody that the earlier record did. But being recorded three years later on meant it was also recorded after three years more advancement in the rock and roll style, and "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" is notably more rhythmically complex than the earlier record -- and that's largely down to Dave Bartholemew's arrangement. Let's have a look at the individual elements of the track -- starting with Fats Domino's piano playing. Domino is mostly playing triplets, which is the way that he played most of the time: [excerpt: piano part from "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"] You've got the drums, by the great Earl Palmer, where he's making the transition between his early shuffle style and his later backbeat emphasis -- you can hear he's trying to do two things at once on the drums, he's trying to swing it *and* produce a backbeat, so you've essentially got him doing polyrhythms. You've got the bass, a different rhythm again, and then you've got those horns, just doing long, sustained, "blaaaat" parts. And then over that you've got Lloyd Price, singing in a Roy Brown imitation, but with a teenager's style -- Price had just turned nineteen -- it's a song about unrequited love or lust, a teenager's song of yearning. And then to top it off there's the sax solo by Herb Hardesty -- the prototype for the solos he would provide for all Domino's hits from this point on. It's an amazing combination; this is the record that crystallised the New Orleans sound and became the template all the others would follow. "The Fat Man" had been the prototype, with some rough edges still there. This was a slicker, more assured, version of the same thing. Art Rupe was certainly pleased, but they were lucky to have been working with Rupe himself -- soon after this recording, Rupe decided to expand his operations in New Orleans, and put Johnny Vincent in charge. While Rupe has a reputation as a decent businessman by 1950s record company standards, Johnny Vincent does *not*. When Vincent later owned his own record company, Ace, he was so bad at paying the musicians that Huey "Piano" Smith and Mac Rebbennack had to go and hold Vincent at gunpoint while they searched his office -- and his person -- for the money he owed them. And then, a few months later, they had to do the same thing again, because being held up at gunpoint just the once wasn't enough for him to think better of ripping them off. Vincent was also not a particularly skilled record producer, at least according to Rebennack. I can't repeat his comments about Vincent's approach in full, because if I use some of the words he used iTunes will restrict this podcast to adults only, but the gist is that Vincent was a con-man who knew nothing about record production. It's probably not a massive coincidence that Dave Bartholomew stopped working for Specialty very shortly after the recording of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy". I've not seen a precise enough timeline to know for sure that it was Johnny Vincent's arrival at the label that persuaded Bartholomew he didn't want to work for them any more, but it seems likely to me. What I *do* know, though is that Lew Chudd heard "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", compared it to the records Art Young was producing for Fats Domino, and realised that he could be doing a hell of a lot better than he was. He eventually, through an intermediary, managed to persuade Bartholomew to talk to him again, and Bartholomew was hired back to work at Imperial. The same month, April 1952, that "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" came out, Domino and Bartholomew were back in Matassa's studio, working together again, and recording a collaboration which sounds like a true combination of both men's styles: [excerpt: "Poor Me" -- Fats Domino] UPTO PART 7 Domino and Bartholomew would work together regularly in the studio until at least 1967, and live off and on for decades after that. And we'll hear more of their collaborations later. But Lloyd Price wasn't hampered by the fact that his producer had gone off to another label either. His follow-up single, cut at the same session as "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" with the same musicians, was a double-sided hit, both sides making the top ten on the R&B charts. And the same happened with the single after that, cut with different musicians -- a song called "Ain't it a Shame", which may just have given Domino and Bartholomew an idea. After that he hit a bit of a dry spell in his career, and by 1956 he was reduced to recording a sequel to "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" -- "Forgive me Clawdy": [excerpt "Forgive Me Clawdy": Lloyd Price] But then "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" itself got a second wind, and was covered in 1956 by both Elvis and Little Richard. This seems to have jump-started Price's career, and we'll pick up his story with his later big hits. "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" had a long life -- it's been recorded over the years by everyone from Paul McCartney to the Replacements -- and happily most of the major figures involved in the record did too, which makes a very pleasant change from the bit of the episode where I usually tell you that the singer died in poverty and obscurity of alcoholism. Lloyd Price is still going strong, still performing aged 85, and he released his most recent album in 2016. Art Rupe is still alive aged 101, and while I'm sad to say Fats Domino is now dead, he died only last year, aged 89, an extremely wealthy man who had received every award his peers could bestow and had been given medals by multiple Presidents. And, as I said at the start, this episode will go up at one minute past midnight on the twenty-fourth of December 2018, which means it's Dave Bartholomew's hundredth birthday, It's unlikely he'll ever hear it but I'd like to wish him a happy birthday anyway, and many more of them. So to finish off... here's a record Bartholomew played on seven years ago, when he was ninety-three: [Excerpt: Alia Fleury "Christmas in the Quarters"] And for those of you who celebrate it, a merry Christmas to all of you at home.

This week's episode features our monthly Astrocast with Numinous resident astrologers Bess Matassa and Sandy Sitron, in which we'll explore the key cosmic shifts of Capricorn Season 2018-19. The themes of the season are to find a balance between effort and allowing, to cultivate radical trust in what we can't yet see, and to construct boundaries and safe containers to help birth the legacies we long to create. Transits we'll be discussing include: Uranus stationing direct in Aries and Mars transiting through the sign of the ram The Lunar Cycle, including the significance of the dec 22 Cancer Full Moon and the Jan 5 Capricorn New Moon Venus moving out of Scorpio and entering Sagittarius The Tarot cards for the New Year, as we move from Justice/High Priestess year in 2018 to Hanged Man/Empress year in 2019.

We're taking it out to sea for the holidays! Join our guests from the acclaimed Pacific Marine Mammal Center (PMMC) for an informative and fun discussion on seals, sea lions and all the incredible sea mammals currently needing our help!Joining us in studio are Director of Zoological & Conservation Programs, Keith Matassa, Head Veterinarian, Dr. Kristen Sakamaki and Events & Public Relations Coordinator, Krysta Higuchi. The acclaimed Pacific Marine Mammal Center rescues marine mammals that have been found off 52 miles of Orange County Coastline, rehabilitates them and yes, the best part, releases them back into the ocean.Follow PMMC:PMMC Website:PMMC Instagram: PMMC Facebook: Follow And Justice For Animals and Host, Jennifer PetersonAJFAWebsite TwitterAJFAInstagram Jennifer Peterson WebsiteEmail: andjusticeforanimals@gmail.com

Part 1 of my chat with Tom Lubbe of Matassa on the morning of his presentation at the Swartland Heritage Festival in Paternoster on 02.Nov.2018.. I wanted principally to talk to him about his time in wine in South Africa and in particular setting up The Observatory. We touched many subjects and we chatted for longer than planned, so I have split it up. Tom is a mentor of some of the most exciting (young and old) producers in South Africa, worked under Charles Back along side Eben Sadie before setting up The Observatory in the Paardeberg in early 2000s. He then fell in love and moved to France and started Matassa.

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

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

Folk og vin får besøk av hovedrolleinnehaver Eirik del Barco Soleglad i det kommende stykket "Hotel Norge" på Den Nasjonale Scene. Vi drikker vin fra Eiriks hjemland Frankrike og prøver ut Espens oransjevin-anbefaling med to typer gris. En vinetikett med bilde av Jesus på får gjennomgå ganske kraftig.

George speaks with Dana Matassa, Owner of Royal Blue Fine Clothing, a custom-made men's clothier in the Washington, DC area. All Royal Blue suits and shirts are handmade from the highest quality fabrics for a purely custom tailored garment. Dana talks about how he found his passion for clothes and dressing well, and his almost accidental foray into business as an entrepreneur. Dana also shares his insight into understanding dress codes, the marks of quality and style in clothing, and the essential menswear accessories all men should consider wearing for a refined look. [This is the full length interview.]Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/georgeindc)

Today’s episode is meant to be a gift for all of you as a huge thank you for listening to WELL / AWARE and for making 2015 the best year ever. Astrologer Bess Matassa not

In our first episode we talk about various aspects of law pertaining to alcohol, including home brewing and home distilling, minimum drinking ages, and legal liability issues both for licensed servers and private individuals serving alcohol to social guests. Notes:Last Call by Daniel OkrentHow Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione changed Delaware brewing lawsShea v. Matassa, 918 A.2d 1070 (Del. 2007) - the Delaware Supreme Court refuses to adopt a dram shop law4 Del. C. Section 706 - on liability for licensed server4 Del. C. Section 707 - on producing beer, wine and cider for personal consumption (non-commercial)

Bu müzik ona babasından miras

Lisa Matass is putting the finishing touches on the follow up to her hugely successful album "Somebody's Baby."  In a break between recording sessions, we had a chance to catch up with Lisa to hear about that new music.  Here's Kelly with more.

Lisa Matassa's first entry into the music business came in the dance genre, where she recorded two Top-Ten dance singles before she was twenty years old.  However she eventually realized that country music was her calling, and she gave herself to it heart and soul.  Her new E.P. "Somebody's Baby" was released earlier this month, and includes a few of her own songs, plus a few popular covers.  We had a chance to check in with Lisa to hear all about that new music.