Podcasts about Paramount Records

Show #1086 More Good Music 01. Dennis Spencer - Cheap Entertainment (4:00) (Bluesman From Jupiter, self-release, 2024) 02. Piney Woods - You Got Me Where You Want Me (2:34) (The Piney Woods Record, self-release, 2024) 03. Heavydrunk & Watermelon Slim - Little Bighorn (3:26) (Bluesland Theme Park, Heavydrunk Records, 2025) 04. Jennifer Porter - Stop Your Talkin' (4:12) (Sun Come And Shine Redux, Overton Music, 2025) 05. Steve Howell & the Mighty Men - One Mint Julep (2:38) (Yeah Man, Out Of The Past Music, 2025) 06. Sunny Bleau & the Moons - S-H-E-E-E W-O-M-A-N (5:21) (Passion & Regrets, Endless Blues Records, 2025) 07. Mark Muleman Massey - She's Married To The Streets (3:28) (Been A Long Long Time, MuleTone Records, 2025) 08. Giles Robson & John Primer - Let Me Explain (2:43) (Ten Chicago Blues Classics, self-release, 2024) 09. Ed Alstrom - Fruitcake (4:00) (Flee Though None Pursue, Haywire Records, 2025) 10. Ollee Owens - Solid Ground (2:47) (Nowhere To Hide, Ollee Owens Music, 2024) 11. Hitman Blues Band - Back To The Blues (3:22) (Calling Long Distance, Nerus Records, 2024) 12. Robbert Duijf - First Train Out (3:30) (Silver Spoon, Naked Productions, 2025) 13. Reckoners - Woman's Woman (3:34) (Reckoners, Vintage League Music/Uptown Sound, 2024) 14. Greg Nagy - Never Mine (2:48) (The Real You, self-release, 2024) 15. Carly Harvey - Worth Waiting For (2:55) (Kamama, self-release, 2024) 16. The Band - Chest Fever (5:15) (Music From Big Pink, Capitol Records, 1968) 17. Dinah Washington (with Eddie Chamblee Orchestra) - Trouble In Mind (2:26) (45 RPM Single, Mercury Records, 1952) 18. Thelma La Vizzo - Trouble In Mind (3:01) (78 RPM Shellac, Paramount Records, 1924) 19. Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Trouble In Mind (2:51) (78 RPM Shellac, Okeh Records, 1926) 20. Georgia White - Trouble In Mind (2:35) (78 RPM Shellac, Decca Records, 1936) 21. Richard M. Jones - Trouble In Mind (2:40) (78 RPM Shellac, Bluebird Records, 1936) 22. Nina Simone - Trouble in Mind (2:45) (Pastel Blues, Philips Records, 1965) 23. Big Bill Broonzy - Trouble In Mind [1957] (2:36) (Black Brown And White, Mercury Records, 1991) 24. Two Men From Earth - Trouble In Mind (3:30) (Walkin' To New Orleans, self-release, 2009) 25. Misses Satchmo - Trouble In Mind (2:35) (The Sun Will Shine, Disques Bros Records, 2011) 26. Mose Allison - Trouble In Mind (3:15) (Local Color, Prestige Records, 1958) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

The word hokum originated in vaudeville to mean a risqué performance laced with wordplay, euphemisms and double entendre.When it appeared on the label of a 1928 hit for Vocalion Records by a new group called Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, the term rapidly entered the jazzy lexicon of The Roarin' Twenties.When the group moved on to Paramount Records as The Famous Hokum Boys, it quickly picked up imitators at other studios, often using variations on the same word in their own names. Eventually “hokum” came to describe an entire species of novelty tunes, all those sexy, silly blues of the 1920s and '30s.About Tampa RedHokum's first star, Tampa Red, was one of the most prolific blues artists of his era, recording some 335 songs, 75 percent between 1928 and 1942. Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia, near Albany in the first decade of the 20th century. When their parents died, he and his older brother Eddie moved to Tampa, Florida, to be reared by their aunt and their grandmother. There he also adopted their surname, Whittaker.Emulating Eddie, Hudson Whittaker played guitar around the Tampa area, especially inspired by an old street musician called Piccolo Pete, who taught the youngster his first blues licks.After perfecting a slide guitar technique, he moved to Chicago in 1925 and began working as a street musician himself. He took the name "Tampa Red" to celebrate to his childhood home.Enter TomRed's big break came when he was hired to accompany established blues star Ma Rainey. There he also met pianist/composer Thomas A. Dorsey, who as working as “Georgia Tom.” Red and Tom became fast friends and music partners.Tom introduced Red to records exec J. Mayo Williams, who arranged a studio session in 1928. Their first effort was a dud, but their next song — the cheeky “It's Tight Like That” — became a national sensation, selling a million copies. Red later recalled seeing people standing outside of record stores just waiting to buy the disc. Since the song was composed by both Red and Tom, they shared $4,000 in royalties from that single song. (That would be about $75,000 today.)While his partnership with Dorsey ended in 1932, Red remained much in demand in recording studios throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was later "rediscovered" in the blues revival of the late 1950s, along with other early blues artists, like Son House and Skip James. Red made his last recordings in 1960.About the SongTampa Red recorded “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” in 1934, but unlike so many of the tunes he waxxed, he didn't write this one.Instead, the song was composed and recorded five years earlier by a curious genre-blending mandolinist named Al Miller.Starting in 1927, Miller played and sang in a style that combined elements of country, blues and jazz on sides for Black Patti records. His eclectic mix of sounds and material gave way to a heavy concentration on bawdry once he arrived at Brunswick for a series of recordings with his Market Street Boys. Miller recorded his “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” on March 8, 1929. It was his big seller. Five years later, after Tampa Red also scored with it, the song even started attracting the attention of artists in the fledgling country and western genre. In 1937, for instance, Milton Brown, called by some “the father of Western swing,” did a rendition for Decca. The following year, The Callahan Brothers (Walter and Homer) of Madison County, Ky., recorded it on the Conqueror label.Our Take on the TuneIf there's such a thing as a "standard" in jug band music, ”Somebody's Been Using That Thing” is certainly one of them. While The Flood's heroes recorded it 90 years ago, the band didn't get around to doing it until back in 2009 when Joe Dobbs recommended it. That was right after he received a recording of it by our old buddy, Ed Light, and his DC-area band with one great name: The All New Genetically Altered Jug Band. We've been Floodifying the tune ever since, as this track from a recent rehearsal demonstrates. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Sam McGee — called by some “the granddad of country guitar pickers” — got his start in April 1926 when he traveled to New York City for his first recording session, backing up the legendary Uncle Dave Macon on eight sides at the Brunswick studios.Thirty-year-old McGee met Macon two years earlier when the banjoist played a show near Sam's Franklin, Tennessee, home. Sam was a blacksmith in those days, but he had played guitar and banjo for many years.Following the show, McGee invited Macon home and, after hearing Sam pick “Missouri Waltz,” Uncle Dave invited him to play a few dates with him. By the following year, McGee was playing regularly with Macon and fiddler Sid Harkreader at Loew's Bijou Theater in Birmingham, appearing on stage in a rural outfit.Later Macon teamed with Sam and his younger brother Kirk McGee to form an act that was billed as “Uncle Dave Macon and his Sons from Billygoat Hill,” capitalizing on that same backwoods image. “I never did learn much about playing from him,” Sam said, “but I did learn a lot about handling an audience.”About the SongOne of the eight songs Dave and Sam recorded in their April 14, 1926, session in New York was “Last Night When My Willie Come Home,” a song that seemed to be making the rounds in the South at the time.About a year later in Atlanta, for instance, Frank Blevins' Tar Heel Rattlers cut the tune for Columbia. Three years after that in Knoxville, Vocalion recorded it by The Smoky Mountain Ramblers, basically a pickup group backing steel guitarist Walt McKinney.One of the more interesting early covers of the song was blues singer Skip James' rendition, which Paramount Records released in 1932 as “Drunken Spree.” Those first records, waxxed in Grafton, Wisconsin, formed the basis of James' musical reputation.Folkies Find ItAfter that, the Willie-coming-home song seems to have drifted away from music's collective memory for a few decades, until it was reborn in the folk music boom 30 years later.The extraordinary New Lost City Ramblers were the first to give “Late Last Night When Willie Came Home” new energy when the group included it on the second volume of its tunes for Folkways in 1960, inspiring other old-time outfits to follow suit.Enter Doc WatsonThe song launched higher into the folk music stratosphere two years later.That's when Doc Watson recorded it with Clint Howard and Fred Price on an influential Folkways' album of various artists called Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's.From then on, Doc more or less adopted the tune — which he famously re-dubbed “Way Downtown” — as a favorite vehicle for his virtuosity. Watson's rendition with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is one of the standout tracks on the seminal 1972 Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. Over the next few years he and his friends played it at many urban folk festivals.In the last dozen years of his life, Doc was still digging it. He played “Way Downtown” live on his 1999 An Evening with Doc Watson and David Holt album. Along the way, the song also has been covered by Tony Rice, Jody Stecher, Billy Strings and many others.Our Take on the TuneIt's funny how songs come in and out of The Flood's life. A half century ago when the band was just thinking about being born, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen would get together on weekends to pick and sing, just the two of them, and among the tunes they'd play was “Way Downtown," which they learned from that old Doc Watson record. After the band came together — as Roger Samples and Joe Dobbs, Bill Hoke and Stewart Schneider joined up — "Way Downtown" was a regular. The song has drifted in and out over the years, and whenever it rambles back in, it's just as comfortable as an old shoe. This is a take on the tune from a recent rehearsal.Audio ExtraOh, and here's a snippet from The Flood archives. Click the button below to hear Charlie at a gig urging folks to sing along on the chorus and explaining how harmonicat Sam St. Clair was promoting a special pronunciation: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

The Flood rolled into Huntington's West End last Sunday to enjoy a simply perfect June afternoon, performing at a picnic to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the city's beloved Sacred Heart Catholic Church.What memories were made! Children and parents playing in the grassy field. Fun competitions for the kids, such as donut-eating contests. Old friends visiting and story-telling over hot food and cold drinks.For its part, the band wanted to augment its usual sets of rowdy party tunes with a respectable mix of religious numbers. Topping the list was one of the oldest songs in the repertoire. For this week's podcast, here from The Flood's first set of the afternoon is “Wade in the Water.”The Song's Long HistoryThis old spiritual — one of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “sorrow songs” (because they were associated with songs of the Underground Railroad) — was first published in 1901 in Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers by John Wesley Work II and his brother, Frederick J. Work, an educator at Nashville's historically black college, Fisk University.The Sunset Four Jubilee Singers made the first commercial recording of "Wade in the Water" in 1925 for Paramount Records.Since then, numerous recordings and publications of it have appeared with variations on the lyrics, including both secular and religious renderings. Even pop and jazz artists have taken turns with the tune.In 1966, for instance, “Wade in the Water” was a popular instrumental hit for The Ramsey Lewis Trio, which prompted further instrumental recordings by other artists. The Flood's favorite version, however, is that of the late, great folksinger Odetta in 1954.The Song's MeaningOver the years, much discussion has centered on the source of the lyric “God's gonna trouble the water.” Perhaps the most learned interpretation of its meaning comes from professor Howard Thurman of Howard and Boston universities, who said he believed the line refers to a Bible story about a healing by Jesus (Book of John, chapter 5, verses 1-9). In that story, a sick man tells Jesus he is unable to get cured in the pool of Bethesda because he cannot get into the water quickly enough when it is "troubled," that is, stirred up or agitated. Verse 4 tells of an angel going down into the pool and stirring the water, adding, “Whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had."Said Thurman, “This is the message of the spiritual. Do not shrink from moving confidently out into choppy seas. Wade in the water, because God is troubling the water."Okay, but what about the Underground Railroad's connection with “Wade in the Water”?Civil War freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, who made 13 trips to the South and helped free more than 70 people, used the song, Thurman said, to tell escaping slaves “to get off the trail and into the water to make sure the dogs slave catchers used couldn't sniff out their trail.”In the FloodisphereAs reported earlier in Flood Watch, The Flood's connection to the song starts with the band's fourth studio album, on which “Wade in the Water” is the title track.As noted recently, the song also led in 2012 to the band's debut on Canadian television. Click here to read that story.Finally, playing the song over the years sometimes has led to rare bits of religious reflections. Here's a favorite chunk of Flood chatter from a 2011 jam session. Click the button below to hear the late Dave Peyton tell how his Methodist mother was persuaded to cover all her bases with a little secret wading in the water of her own:You Want More Church-y Tunes?By the way, The Flood's eclectic repertoire includes a right reverent set of religious songs, as you can hear in the “Gospel Hour” show in the “Special Blends” playlists built into the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to read all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Show #1052 Moonshine 01. Ma Rainey - Moonshine Blues (3:05) (78 RPM Shellac, Paramount Records, 1924) 02. DownTown Mystic - Night Time Girl (4:09) (Rock'n'Roll 4 The Soul Acoustic Sessions, Sha-La Music, 2024) 03. Southside Denny - A Woman Like That (3:47) (Heal It, self-release, 2024) 04. Gerald McClendon - She's Tryin' To Drive Me Crazy (3:09) (Down At The Juke Joint, Delta Roots Records, 2024) 05. Black Cat Bones - Soul To Save (3:46) (Troublemaker, self-release, 2024) 06. Dimitris Loizos - Make Up Your Mind (6:31) (Back To The Blues EP, self-release, 2024) 07. Goodnight Texas - The Ghost of DB Cooper (2:56) (Signals, 2 Cent Bank Check Records, 2024) 08. Rivherside - Last Thrill (2:48) (Instrumental Cheap Fuzz Blues EP, Black And Tan Records, 2024) 09. Name Droppers - Whiskey (3:43) (Starshine, Horizon Music Group, 2024) 10. Con Brio - Don't Mind Me (2:49) (Single, self-release, 2024) 11. Sam Joyner - Teddy's Juke Joint (5:06) (Come What May, self-release, 2024) 12. Reverend Freakchild - Skyflower (4:29) (Bare Bones, Treated & Released Records, 2024) 13. Iron Butterfly - To Be Alone (3:05) (45 RPM Single, Atco Records, 1969) 14. Bywater Call - As If (3:45) (Shepherd, self-release, 2024) 15. Christopher Wyze & the Tellers - Stuck In The Mud (3:54) (Stuck In The Mud, Big Radio Records, 2024) 16. Jeff Pitchell - Keep My Head Up (5:18) (Brown Eyed Blues, Deguello Records, 2024) 17. Türker Ozer & Orhun Keskinbiçak - Stale Bread Blues (3:56) (Turkish Back Porch Scene EP Vol. 1, Bone Union Records, 2024) 18. Robert Jon & the Wreck - Trouble (3:28) (Red Moon Rising, Journeyman Records, 2024) 19. Rusty Apollo - Slippery People (5:14) (Apollo III, Big Records, 2024) 20. Jeffrey Halford & the Healers - Rhythm Of The Rails (2:48) (Single, Shoeless Records, 2024) 21. Left Lane Cruiser - Ophelia (2:43) (Bayport BBQ Blues, Alive Naturalsound Records, 2024) 22. Jubu Smith - McLeansville Blues (5:56) (Jubu, Little Village Records, 2024) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Show #1051 What A Shame 01. The Rolling Stones - What A Shame (3:06) (The Rolling Stones No. 2, Decca Records, 1965) 02. Curtis Salgado - Low Down Dirty Shame (3:18) (The Beautiful Lowdown, Alligator Records, 2016) 03. Mighty Reapers - It's A Shame (7:00) (Trouble People, Terra Nova Records, 1996) 04. Billy T. Band - Shame Shame (3:33) (Reckoning, Big H Records, 2016) 05. Teskey Brothers - Crying Shame (3:52) (Half Mile Harvest, Decca Records, 2018) 06. Stinky Lou & the Goon Mat - It's A Shame (2:26) (Fat Sausage For Dinner, Voodoo Rhythm Records, 2004) 07. Bridget Kelly Band - It's A Shame (3:58) (Blues Warrior, Alpha Sun Records, 2018) 08. Veldman Brothers - Cryin' Shame (4:32) (Livin' By The Dat, self-release, 2014) 09. Billy Jones - Ain't That A Shame (3:50) (Tha' Bluez, Black And Tan Records, 2005) 10. Nick Curran & the Nitelifes - Low Down Dirty Shame (2:30) (Nitelife Boogie, Texas Jamboree Records, 2001) 11. Sugar Ray Norcia - It's A Low Down Dirty Shame (4:17) (Sweet & Swingin', Bullseye Blues, 1998) 12. Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five - It's A Low Down Dirty Shame (2:49) (78 RPM Shellac, Decca Records, 1942) 13. Ollie Shepard & His Kentucky Boys - It's A Low Down Dirty Shame (3:18) (78 RPM Shellac, Decca Records, 1937) 14. Moanin' Bernice Edwards - Low Down Dirty Shame Blues (2:57) (78 RPM Shellac, Paramount Records, 1929) 15. Big Bill Broonzy - It's A Low Down Dirty Shame (2:56) (78 RPM Shellac, Vocalion Records, 1938) 16. George Barnes - I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me (2:58) (78 RPM Shellac, Okeh Records, 1940) 17. Shari Puorto - It's A Damn Shame (4:08) (My Obsession, Blues Rock Music, 2015) 18. Dyer Davis - Cryin' Shame (4:47) (Dog Bites Back, Wildroots Records, 2023) 19. Phantom Blues Band - Shame Shame (4:16) (Inside Out, VizzTone Records, 2012) 20. Omar & the Howlers - Shame Shame Shame (3:44) (Too Much Is Not Enough, Big Guitar Music, 2012) 21. Screamin' John & TD Lind - Shame Shame Shame (3:11) (Mr Little Big Man, Down In The Alley Records, 2019) 22. Sunday Wilde - Crying Shame (5:20) (He Digs Me, self-release, 2014) 23. R&B Caravan - What A Shame (3:53) (Completely Locked In, Styx Records, 2006) 24. George Barnes - I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles (2:54) (78 RPM Shellac, Okeh Records, 1940) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

We know precious little about pioneer bluesman James “Boodle It” Wiggins. We don't know when or where he was born, or even precisely when in the 1930s that he died. No pictures of him are known to exist.Some folks say he was “discovered” in Dallas by R. L. Ashford, a scout for Paramount Records. Fellow blues artist Big Bill Broonzy always said his friend Wiggins came from Louisiana.We do know that Wiggins ended up in Chicago, where he recorded for Paramount between 1928 and 1929, including some pretty influential tracks. A whole new generation of music fans would hear Wiggins songs, albeit usually from somebody else's lips.For instance, if you like Little Richard's 1957 recording of "Keep A-Knockin'“ (and who the hell doesn't?!), give props to Wiggins, because he recorded that song five years before Little Richard was even born.And about that nickname, "Boodle It" appears to come from the singer's association with a style of dance (though a coy Wikipedia entry adds, “there was also an assumed sexual connotation.” Oh? You think?)Anyway, if you also love all those rockin' rendition of “Corrina, Corrina” that we talked about in an earlier article, thank Wiggins. He recorded that tune too. His 1929 pressing featured a powerful boogie-woogie piano accompaniment (though precisely who was pounding those keys is disputed. It was probably Bob Call, who later accompanied Broonzy and others).That Other SongBoodle It's last session was in Grafton, WI, in October 1929, the fateful month when the stock market crash was fixing to sink so many recording companies. The session produced “Corrina, Corrina,” and one other song, which would be the flip side when Paramount released the disc the following spring.Now, anyone who studies the blues and other music of the night knows that in some of its incarnations over the years, “Shave ‘Em Dry” is a pretty risqué number.The phrase shave ‘em dry can be interpreted, as Wikipedia notes, as referring to “any aggressive action, alternatively (as here) as meaning sexual intercourse without any preliminary 'love-making'.”Broonzy believed that. He once explained to an interviewer, “‘Shave 'em dry' is what you call makin' it with a woman; you ain't doin' nothin', just makin' it."However, the first recordings of the song — Ma Rainey's original in 1924, Papa Charlie Jackson's take on it the following year, Wiggins' in 1929 — made no specific reference to the phrase's meaning or content. Getting Down and DirtyIt was not until 1935, in fact, that “Shave ‘Em Dry” turned X-rated. That is when blues singer Lucille Bogan — one of the “big three of blues,” along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith — took the tune on a wild ride. Her original recording of it (with Walter Roland on piano and Josh White on guitar) was a cleaned-up version, but a more explicit alternative cut was issued 40 years after Bogan's death, on a compilation album called Raunchy Business: Hot Nuts & Lollypops (1991).That unexpurgated version “has explicit sexual references, a unique record of the lyrics sung in after-hours adult clubs,” Wikipedia observes. It may have been recorded either for the amusement of the recording engineers or for clandestine distribution as a “party record.” “Bogan seems to be unfamiliar with the lyrics,” the encyclopedia says, “reading them as she sings them, potentially surprised by them herself.”Ever since then, most mentions of “Shave ‘Em Dry” have made winking references to the raunchier Bogan version, rather than its PG- and R-rated predecessors. Interestingly, a year after Bogan's recording, Lil Johnson recorded "New Shave 'Em Dry,” in which “her lightness in voice and melodic sympathy did not disguise the relation to (the) Wiggins-styled tune,” Wikipedia comments.Our Take on the TuneOur own love for Wiggins' version dates back to the 1990s. That is when the late Joe Dobbs gave Charlie Bowen a set of cassette tapes with a whole slew of roots music, including lots of country and urban blues recordings from the 1920s and '30s.Standing out in the bunch was Wiggins' “Gotta Shave ‘Em Dry,” which has rattled around Bowen's brain for, oh, a quarter of a century or so. But only recently did he work up an arrangement for the band.We guess he was just waiting for the recent arrival of that raucous new resonator guitar.More Song Histories?By the way, if you enjoy these backgrounders on the songs we sing and want more, there's a whole mess of ‘em in “Song Stories” archives. Click here to go browsing. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Show #1035 Blues Time 01. Tom Hambridge - Blues Don't Care (2:54) (Blu Ja Vu, Quarto Valley Records, 2023) 02. Eddie 9V - Are We Through (3:34) (Capricorn, Ruf Records, 2023) 03. André Bisson - Tail Wags The Dog (4:33) (Latchford, ThinkTank Music, 2023) 04. Teresa James & the Rhythm Tramps - Brand New Flame (4:14) (Rose-Colored Glasses Vol. 2, Blue Heart Records, 2023) 05. Charley Patton - Pony Blues (2:57) (78 RPM Shellac, Paramount Records, 1929) 06. Son House - Pony Blues [1964 or 1965] (4:05) (The Real Delta Blues, Blue Goose Records, 1975) 07. Big Shoes - That's What I Get (For Lovin' You) (4:12) (Fresh Tracks, Qualified Records, 2023) 08. Chicago Mike Beck - Blues Of The World (4:29) (Single, Coast To Coast, 2024) 09. Chickenforce - Blues About You Baby (3:00) (2, Coast To Coast, 2023) 10. Cary Morin - Montana Sky (3:30) (Innocent Allies, Maple Street Music, 2024) 11. Rare Union - Stone Strong (4:55) (Times They Always Change, self-release, 2023) 12. Count Basie Orchestra - Rock Candy (5:26) (Basie Swings The Blues, Candid Records, 2023) 13. Skip James - Worried Blues (5:55) (Devil Got My Woman, Vanguard Records, 1968) 14. Rory Block - Special Rider Blues (4:59) (Hard Luck Child - A Tribute To Skip James, Stony Plain Records, 2014) 15. Sunnysiders - 27 Stitches (3:20) (27 Stitches, Dancing Bear Records, 2023) 16. Albert Cummings - I'm Free (5:00) (Working Man, Blind Pig Records, 2006) 17. Sandy Mack - Never Enuff Rockin' (3:16) (Still Going Strong, Blues Leaf Records, 2009) 18. Christine Santelli - Good Day For A Hangin' (3:46) (Any Better Time, SwingNation/VizzTone Records, 2009) 19. Chris Yakopcic - The Hangover (4:26) (Live At The Hidden Gem, Yako Records, 2023) 20. Dave Keller - Full Measure Of Pleasure (3:05) (It's Time To Shine, Tastee Tone Records, 2023) 21. Bywater Call - Remain (5:42) (Remain, Gypsy Soul Records, 2022) 22. Julien Kasper Band - 8 To 11 (3:43) (The New Imperial, Nugene Records, 2006) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Eighty-nine years ago today, one of America's greatest — though least-known — blues artists died after months of illness. Gaunt and frail, Arthur Blake — known to blues aficionados by his stage name, “Blind Blake” — must have looked much older at the end than his 38 years.It had been a wild and sometimes wonderful decade for him. Starting in mid-1920s, he was celebrated as Paramount Records' sensational guitarist, whose distinctive playing often was compared to the sound and style of a ragtime piano.InfluencesHis intricate finger-picking was to inspire generations of guitarists, from Rev. Gary Davis to Ralph McTell, from Leon Redbone to Ry Cooder and John Fahey.Famously, blues great Big Bill Broonzy, who heard Blake in person in the early 1920s, said Arthur made his guitar “sound like every instrument in the band — saxophone, trombone, clarinets, bass fiddles, pianos, everything. I never had seen then and I haven't to this day yet seen no one that could take his natural fingers and pick as much guitar as Blind Blake."The CrashBlake recorded about 80 tracks between 1926 and 1932. His future looked bright. With his records selling well, he felt he could settle down, so he married Beatrice McGee around 1931. But then the next year it all went bad. Paramount went bankrupt in 1932 under the weight of the Great Depression. In the remaining two years of his life, Arthur Blake was plagued by poverty and by illness. A coroner's autopsy confirmed that his Dec. 1, 1934, death came because of complications from tuberculosis.The SongToday Blind Blake's legacy lives on in his recordings and through their impact on nearly a century of blues, folk and jazz musicians who travel in his shadow. In 1992, for instance, Bob Dylan honored Blake in the title of his Good as I Been to You album, on which he performed a cover of "You Gonna Quit Me Blues.”Our Take on the TuneAnd that's where The Flood comes in. We started doing the song in the mid-'90s, right after hearing Dylan's version on that album.We were looking for an easy, happy tune that we could warm up with, one that would let everybody in the room just stretch out a little. Nowadays it is just as likely to turn up as a last song of the night — as it does here — putting a bow on a great evening of music. Enjoy.Meanwhile, in Other News…By the way, we're now one month away from our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash on New Year's Eve, and the good folks at Alchemy Theatre who are hosting it have created a Facebook Event page for the do, with all kinds of additional goodies. Click the graphic below to reach it on Facebook:In addition, our dear friend Shane Ward at Eve.NET has helped us get a dedicated website for the event up and running. Visit us there at Floodat50.com! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Welcome to Funky Pearls Radio, where today we're spotlighting the illustrious career of Linda Clifford, a versatile vocalist whose journey from beauty pageants to the R and B charts is as captivating as her music.  Born on August 20, 1948, in New York City, Linda's musical talents were evident from a young age. By seven, she was already performing professionally, showcasing her talents on various television variety shows in the early Fifties.  Her early exposure to the limelight paved the way for her success in the Miss New York State beauty pageant at the age of 17. In the 1960s, Linda's passion for music led her to the vibrant nightclub scene, where she performed diverse musical styles.  She sang with the Jerico Jazz Singers and later formed her own jazz trio, 'Linda and the Trade Winds', touring across the U.S. and refining her musical prowess.  Linda's recording career began to gain momentum in 1974 with her single 'A Long, Long Winter', released under Paramount Records. This track, a soulful expression of Linda's vocal range, marked her entry into the R and B charts.  Her subsequent move to Curtom Records, an offshoot of Curtis Mayfield's label, was a significant step in her career. The late 1970s saw Linda Clifford's emergence as a disco sensation.  Her first album, 'Linda', and the single 'From Now On' set the stage for her breakthrough. The album 'If My Friends Could See Me Now' in 1978 was a chart success, with the title track and 'Runaway Love' becoming disco anthems.  Her rendition of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' in 1979 under RSO Records showcased her ability to reinvent and bring soulful depth to classic songs. Linda's collaboration with Curtis Mayfield on the album 'The Right Combination' and other projects further highlighted her versatility and artistic range.  During the 1980s, Linda continued to make her mark in the R and B scene with albums like 'I'm Yours' and 'I'll Keep On Loving You', released under Capitol Records and Red Label. Her journey took an international turn in 2001 with a remake of Lamont Dozier's 'Going Back To My Roots' alongside Chris Bangs in the U.K. This project showcased Linda's ability to blend and innovate across genres, appealing to soul purists and disco lovers alike.  Linda Clifford's rare soul song 'Only The Angels Sing' remains a highlight for her fans, particularly in the U.K., where her unique blend of soul, jazz, and disco continues to resonate. Her albums, from 'Linda' to 'My Heart's On Fire', are a testament to her enduring talent and versatility.  As we celebrate Linda Clifford on Funky Pearls Radio, we honor a singer whose journey through music is a story of evolution, resilience, and sheer talent.  From beauty pageants to jazz clubs, and from soulful ballads to disco hits, Linda Clifford's voice has captivated audiences worldwide, leaving a lasting legacy in the world of R and B and beyond.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

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

It was April 1927 when a pair of blues singers from Mississippi named Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed walked into a Chicago studio to record the first of a half dozen tunes they'd leave there over the next few weeks.Joining them for the session was guitarist Sunny Wilson, whose song "Hey! Lawdy Mama/France Blues" was among their first. The trio was billed on the label as “The Down Home Boys” when the disc was released the following month by Black Patti Records, a new short-lived company created by a fascinating historical character named J. Mayo “Ink” Williams.Ink WilliamsA Brown University graduate, Ink Williams is the only man we know of who was inducted into both the National Football Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame. Besides being one of the first African American pro-football players (as part of a Chicago team in the first season of the NFL), Williams also is remembered as an important recording industry pioneer.Starting his career producing for the fledgling Paramount Records, Williams earned his nickname because of his persuasive way of inking contracts with a wide range of original talent. Over the years, he was to work with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ma Rainey, with Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, with Blind Blake and Ida Cox (not to mention Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roosevelt Sykes, Sleepy John Estes and so many more). In 1924, Williams also earned an early entry in blues annals by producing the legendary Papa Charlie Jackson's “Lawdy, Lawdy Blues,” the first successful blues record made by an African American man.In 1927, Williams left Paramount to go out on his own by starting Black Patti Records, named after the opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, who was called “Black Patti” because some thought she resembled the Italian opera singer Adelina Patti. While Williams' label lasted only seven months, it produced 55 records in a variety of styles, including blues, jazz and spirituals, as well as hell-fire sermons by “straining preachers” and comedy routines and popular ditties from vaudeville stars. When the enterprise was not immediately profitable, Williams moved on to greener pastures by the end of 1927, but not before discovering a few stand-out blues acts that had moved to Chicago from the South as part of “The Great Migration.”Among his finds in those early days was The Down Home Boys, whose two-guitar accompaniment was a blend of parlor guitar and ragtime. The trio sang blues, but much of its repertoire was from the turn of the century — before blues had become a dominant musical genre — and included ballads and medicine show material.Back to the SongSunny Wilson's “Hey! Mama” tune didn't have the same cachet of some of the group's other numbers — notably the guys' “Original Stack O'Lee Blues,” which probably was a response to Ma Rainey's version of the number, which had the young Louis Armstrong on cornet — but it did have a long shelf life. For instance, right after its Black Patti debut, it was brought out as "France Blues" on Gennett (credited to "Sunny Boy & His Pals") and again on Champion by "The Original Louisiana Entertainers.”Then 40 years later, the song was reborn in the folk revival of the 1960s. The Flood learned the song from the January 1964 album recorded by Stefan Grossman and Peter Siegel's Even Dozen Jug Band. This seminal ‘60s group also featured John Sebastian, Steve Katz, David Grisman and Maria Muldaur, all friends who got to know each other during legendary jam sessions in New York's Washington Square Park.Later that same year, the song made another notable folk revival appearance, this time performed by Mark Spoelstra (with Fritz Richmond on washtub bass and Doug Pomeroy on washboard and kazoo) on a landmark Elektra album called The Blues Project. Our Take on the TuneIf you hang out much with The Flood, it seems like everything we do is carefully planned …. uh, right… but actually, accident and happenstance are a couple of our good friends. Earlier this week, for example, we got together to plan for our show tonight at Sal's Speakeasy. As you'll hear in this track, between songs Charlie starts singing a bit of this old 1920s song. Immediately, Randy jumps in with some great harmony. Then Sam brightens it up with his harmonica and Danny puts a bow on the whole thing with a cookin' guitar part. And just like that the tune has inserted itself into the set list. All that's missing now is you. Come on down to Sal's Italian Eatery & Speakeasy tonight, 1624 Carter Avenue in beautiful downtown Ashland, Ky., and we'll getting you singing along on that hey-lawdy-mama-mama / hey-lawdy-papa-papa part! We play from 6 to 9. Come on out and party with us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

When Merle Travis recorded his beloved (and never-out-of-print) Folk Songs from the Hills album in 1947, he included a version of “I Am a Pilgrim” that would inspire decades of loving imitations by artists such as Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Johnny Cash and The Byrds.Some people figured Travis must have written the song himself — after all, the same album included two of his best-known originals, “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Ton” — but actually “I Am a Pilgrim” is a traditional gospel tune that has deep roots among white and African-American musicians alike.From Camp Meetings … and, well, from jail …In an introduction on his recording 75 years ago, Travis can be heard saying, “When I first got big enough to start running around by myself at night, the first place I wanted to go was to the camp meetings and to the brush arbor meetings and hear them sing the good old songs. I learned a lot of the old songs, but there was one specially that I liked better than all the rest, and I remember it today just as well as I did the day I learned it.”Nice story. Actually, though, Kentucky-born Travis had a mentor: legendary fingerpicking stylist Mose Rager of Muhlenberg County. Legend has it that Mose's brother Lyman learned "I Am a Pilgrim" while in jail in Russellville, Ky, when he heard it being sung by a black prisoner in a nearby cell. Another version of the yarn places the jailhouse in Elkton, Ky. Wherever lockup actually was, Lyman was said to have later taught the song to his brother, Mose, who in turn taught it to their young neighbor, Merle Travis.Mose Rager RemembersIn a early 1960s film, Mose Rager is heard telling folklorist D.K. Wilgus about the tune's origin. “We sang that old song around here years ago,” he said. “It's just an old brush arbor song. Everybody sang it; Merle Travis and my two brothers, we'd all get together out here … out to the edge of town and just sit out there till about 12 o'clock and sing old hymns.”We don't know the name of the black singer whom Lyman Rager heard in that Kentucky jail, but as Asheville, NC, musician/author Wayne Erbsen has noted, “I Am A Pilgrim” was recorded “by 14 African-American groups before it was even a gleam in Merle Travis' eyes."  Pre-Merle RenditionsThe first of those groups was the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette, which recorded the song in 1924 for Paramount Records. The Tidewater Virginia group released dozens of records between 1921 and 1940 — much of it gospel, but also blues and jazz numbers — and in their hands, “I Am a Pilgrim” has a bit of the kick that would come down to Travis two decades later.Among other little known groups to record it were The Good Will Male Chorus (1927), South Carolina Quartette (1928), Mound City Jubilee Quartette (1935), Heavenly Gospel Singers (1936), Golden Gate Quartet (1939) and Southern Wonder Quartet (1940).Bluegrass AttachmentsOf course, the song also has strong bluegrass attachments. Carl Story, considered the father of bluegrass gospel sound starting in the 1940s, said he knew the song from the repertoire of Georgia country music pioneer Riley Puckett.Story learned it as a little boy when his father took him to hear Puckett play in Lenoir, NC. Puckett's recordings were to inspire everyone from Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs on. Many bluegrass lovers also came to know the tune as strictly an instrumental, because of guitarist Clarence White's picking on the Kentucky Colonels' iconic 1964 album, Appalachian Swing!A Possible Origin StoryBut how did the song come about in the first place? A good question, that. Our research has turned up no definitive author, but it does find this to be an excellent example of how folk songs evolve.A connection to classic Christian hymn writing seems obvious, because the lyrics cite some rather esoteric New Testament verses. The title, for instance, seems to refer to The Epistle to the Hebrews (11:13), which reads in part, “…and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” Also, one verse says, "If I could just touch the hem of his garment" which appears to allude to a story in the Book of Matthew (9:20) in which a woman is healed after touching Jesus' robe.All this might mean we should look for an origin in an 1841 composition by South Carolina poet Mary Dana Shindler, whose hymn “I Am a Pilgrim and I Am a Stranger” contained such Bible references. A rendering of that song actually was one of the first records ever released, specifically a 1917 disc pressed on Victor by The Imperial Quartet.However, the melody there is absolutely nothing like what's come down to us from Merle Travis. In other words, it is highly unlikely that any of those 14 African-American groups recording “I Am a Pilgrim” between 1924 and 1947 were listening to that thing. A better theory is that concurrent with white churchified rendering were more soulful African-American versions. We do know that in 1925 — just one year after the Norfolk Quartette's Paramount recording — the song showed up in a book called, The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. In addition, folklorists John and Ruby Lomax also collected a version of it during their 1939 Southern states recording trip.Our Take on the TuneFor The Flood, it all began a few weeks ago when Charlie took his first stumbling steps — slipping and a-sliding, as it were — in learning some bottleneck technique on his new resonator guitar. Right away, what came out reminded him of the old gospel tune from his youth — he even recalled Grandma Robertson humming it while she washed dishes — but he just couldn't seem to get the song down. Then Danny came along, took one listen and started just naturally channeling an old Doc-Watson-cum-Chet-Atkins vibe, laying down an absolutely rock solid foundation. Sam grabbed his “E” harp and found his groove, Randy jumped in with some beautiful harmony for the choruses, and suddenly “I Am a Pilgrim” landed righteously in the repertoire. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for April 26.Gertrude Ma Rainey was born.She was a singer who was known as the “mother of the blues” and who was recognized as the first great professional blues vocalist.She began her career as a performer at a talent show in Columbus, Georgia, when she was approximately 12 years old. As a member of the First African Baptist Church, she began performing in black minstrel shows.In 1923, Rainey was discovered by Paramount Records producer J. Mayo Williams. She signed a recording contract with that company, and in December she made her first eight recordings in Chicago.Rainey recorded with Thomas Dorsey and Louis Armstrong, and with the Georgia Jazz Band. She toured until 1935 when she largely retired from performing.After her mother and sister died, Rainey retired completely from the music business in 1935, returning to her hometown of Columbus, Georgia. There, she reportedly owned two theaters, the Lyric and the Airdome. Learn black history, teach black history at blackfacts.com

Résumé Nous sommes au tout début du 20ème siècle lorsque des travailleurs afro-américains parcourent les chemins de fer à travers les champs du Mississippi. Menant une vie particulièrement rude, ces hommes doivent accepter des contrats précaires et voguer à travers les propriétés agricoles selon l'activité et la saison. Cet endroit est appelé Delta du Coton, entre Memphis au nord et Jackson au sud. Le nom n'a rien d'anecdotique puisque c'est la plus grande zone de culture de coton des Etats-Unis et aussi la zone la plus sudiste du pays, connue pour son conservatisme exacerbant. Afin d'accompagner ces voyages dans le train ou sur les chemins du Mississippi, ces travailleurs se tournent naturellement vers la musique. Ce sont d'abord des chants qui expriment leurs conditions de vie. Les paroles sont directement dérivés des murmures esclavagiste, transmis grâce à une tradition orale. Avec les années, ces chants sont accompagnés d'instruments. Bien que tous les types d'instruments soient utilisés, on retrouve surtout la guitare, le piano, l'harmonica et la washboard (planche à laver) comme un instrument de percussion. Ce style se rapproche du Fife and Drums et donne naissance au blues. Ce terme est une abréviation de l'expression “blue devils” (“diables bleus”) qui signifie plutôt “idées noires”. Il se rapporte aussi à l'ancien français, où il est question cette fois-ci “d'histoires personnelles”. Et c'est en cela que l'on retrouve le coeur de ce style musical, qui est très particulier puisque le chanteur y exprime sa tristesse et ses déboires. C'est un outil d'expression de sa condition et de son ressenti, miroir aussi sublime que terrible de la société américaine durant l'entre deux-guerres ... Playlist Henry Sloan - I'm Going Where The Southern Cross - 1903 William Christopher Handy - The Memphies Blues - 1912 Charley Patton - Moon Going Down - 1929 Robert Johnson - Crossroad - 1937 Big Bill Broonzy - Just a Dream On My Mind - 1939 Leadbelly - Black Girl - 1939 BB King - Everyday I Have The Blues - 1955 Muddy Waters - Feel Like Goin' Home - 1948 Pour aller plus loin Malgré une fermeture trop précosse, le célébrissime label Paramount Records est un trésor pour les amateurs de blues. Il resselle d'albums et autres enregistrements très anciens, datant des années 1920 et 1930, avec des artistes féminines renommées tel qu'Ida Cox et Ma Rainey ou encore Big Bill Broonzy et Papa Charlie Jackson. Evidemment, Discogs est le meilleur moyen pour acquérir ces vinyles Pour les curieux, un article sur l'intérêt de Kurt Cobain, chanteur de Nirvana, pour le blues et notamment Leadbelly. Faute de temps et de moyens, l'épisode n'a pas parlé en profondeur de la période des female blues singers tel que Bessie Smith, Gertrude Raney ou encore Ida Cox. Elles méritent largement leur part du gâteau. Il existe un petit article wikipédia à ce propos. L'image d'illustration est une peinture de Carroll Cloar datant de 1965. Elle est intitulée Where The Southern Cross The Dog, en hommage à ce croisement de chemin de fer où la ligne Chicago-La Nouvelle Orléans (Southern Rail Line) et celle de Yazoo (appelé familièrement The Yellow Dog) se rencontrent ici, à Moorhead, dans le Mississippi. La première ligne permet de voguer entre deux grandes métropoles, où richesse et confort sont légions, tandis que la seconde permet de passer de plantation en plantation, pour que les plus démunis puissent travailler durement dans les champs. Cette ambivalence a donné lieu à une chanson, connu dans le folklore sudiste, intitulée Where The Southern Cross The Dog. C'est aujourd'hui un lieu de mémoire pour ces travailleurs et autres bluesmans qui ont tentés l'aventure urbaine. Bibliographie Magazine Soul Bag N°219 : Delta Blues PALMER R., Deep blues : du Delta du Mississippi à Chicago, des États-Unis au reste du monde, une histoire culturelle et musicale du blues, Éditions Allia, 2020 Sitographie Article Wikipédia sur le blues traditionnel Article Wikipédia sur le Delta Blues Article Guide du Routard Route Chicago - La Nouvelle Orléans

Show #916 Late Again Yes this show is really late... but it is goooooood! 01. Willie Mabon - Late Again (2:38) (78 RPM Single, Chess Records, 1954) 02. Carolyn Wonderland - The Laws Must Change (5:00) (Tempting Fate, Alligator Records, 2021) 03. The Reverend Shawn Amos - Little Anna Mae (2:25) (The Cause Of It All, Put Together Music, 2021) 04. David Vest - Genevieve (4:52) (Live In Calgary, Cordova Bay Records, 2021) 05. David Vest - Infirmaratin' (6:56) (Live At Hermann's, Cordova Bay Records, 2021) 06. Sue Foley - Someday (4:06) (Pinky's Blues, Stony Plain Records, 2021) 07. Mick Pini - Shadows (4:24) (Backtrack, self-release, 2021) 08. David Gogo - Old Enough To Know Better (2:36) (Silver Cup, Cordova Bay Records, 2021) 09. Tom Craig - You Made A Good Man Go Bad (2:44) (Good Man Gone Bad, 8th Train Records, 2021) 10. Soulful Femme - Set You Free (3:56) (It Is Well With My Soul, MTS Records, 2021) 11. The Cold Stares - Prosecution Blues (3:49) (Heavy Shoes, Mascot Records, 2021) 12. Tiffany Pollack & Co. - Sassy Bitch (3:51) (Bayou Liberty, Nola Blue Records, 2021) 13. Jonathon Long - Dangerous (3:07) (Parables Of A Southern Man, Wild Heart Records, 2021) 14. Chris Gill - I Fell In Love With The Blues (4:05) (Between Midnight And Louise, Endless Blues Records, 2021) 15. Tia Carroll - Leaving Again (4:37) (You Gotta Have It, Little Village Foundation, 2021) 16. Colin James - There's A Fire (4:41) (Open Road, Stony Plain Records, 2021) 17. Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen - Hot Rod Lincoln (2:43) (Lost In The Ozone, Paramount Records, 1971) 18. Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen - The Shadow Knows (2:29) (Tales From The Ozone, Warner Bros Records, 1975) 19. Commander Cody Band - Go To Hell (3:11) (Lose It Tonight, Line Records, 1980) 20. ElectroBluesSociety - Feel (4:40) (Single, Black & Tan Records, 2021) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Mark Radice is an American singer, musician, songwriter, and producer. Since the early 1970s he has worked with a variety of different artists while also achieving success with his own material. He is a multi-instrumentalist and is credited with writing more than 5,500 songs.Mark Radice was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1957, and from 1968 to 1982 he lived in nearby Nutley, where he was inducted into the Nutley Hall of Fame in 2019. His father Gene Radice was a well-known recording engineer who worked with Jimi Hendrix, Velvet Underground, Lovin' Spoonful, Janis Ian, the Four Seasons, Cowsills, Mamas & the Papas, The Tokens, Vanilla Fudge, and many more. Mark Radice began writing songs, after teaching himself guitar while listening to Beatles albums, at the age of seven.In 1964, at age of seven, Radice was signed to RCA Records. His single "Natural Morning" was later covered by Frankie Valli. In 1967 while signed to Decca Records he released "10,000 Year Old Blues", which featured the 20-year-old Steven Tyler. His first full-length self-titled LP was released in 1971 on Paramount Records. The song "Hey, My Love" was later covered by Dion and Mark Holden.In 1973 Radice was invited by Donovan to move to England, where he would contribute to Donovan's album 7-Tease album and the associated tour. In 1976, Radice released his second solo album Ain't Nothin' But A Party, featuring Brass Construction. The album included the hit single "If You Can't Beat 'Em Join 'Em."As a writer for EMI Publishing in the 1970s, he collaborated with artists such as Michael Bolton, Eddie Money, Dave Edmunds, Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, Johnny Mathis, Helix, Cheap Trick, Aldo Nova, Deodato, Phyllis Hyman, Jetboy, Box of Frogs, Gene Simmons, Shark Island, Jennifer Rush, and The Muppets. In a chance encounter in a Los Angeles hotel lobby, Radice ran into Steven Tyler who asked him to tour with Aerosmith on keyboards and backing vocals. Radice appeared on Aerosmith's 1978 live album Live! Bootleg. In the mid-1980s Radice toured with Cheap Trick and appeared on their album Standing on the Edge. In the 1990s he toured with blues musician Matt "Guitar" Murphy.Radice was introduced to Jim Henson by Phil Ramone and wrote 50-plus songs for The Muppets franchise over eight years, and for Sesame Street including the film Elmo's Christmas Countdown. From 2005 to 2011 Radice wrote 160 songs for Sesame Street, including rearranging the original theme in 2008. Radice was nominated for three Emmy Awards for his work on Sesame Street.In 2012 he moved to Tennessee where he became involved with the Children's Media Studio and wrote 27 songs, one for each letter of the alphabet plus a "new" alphabet song, for the Sing and Spell Learning Letters project. In 2019, that project became an animated television show currently showing regionally in various test areas. Radice has also been employed DigiTrax Entertainment in Knoxville since 2013. In 2016 Radice released the limited-edition Audio Quicksand compilation spanning his songwriting career. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Paramount Records, Devon Huckstep, Rock County Brewing, 3 Sheeps Brewing Co.

Down Home Cajun Music- Cajun Recordings on Paramount RecordsParamount Records was well known for their recordings of country, blues and jazz. But they also recorded Cajun music at three sessions. This episode features recordings from those three sessions.By 1929, Paramount Records had taken notice of the success of Cajun artists on Columbia, RCA and ARC. Soon, they too were scouting musicians from south Louisiana to record. The first session was in January on 1929 and featured accordionist John Bertrand and  guitarist Milton Pitre. By the time the records had come out Milton Pitre had been shot and killed in a dispute over a woman. So for his second session in March of 1929, he brought along a guitarist from Acadia Parish, named Roy Gonzales and his son Anthony.For the third session in July of 1929, Roy Gonzales returned along with the duo of Leo Soieau and Moise Robin. Fiddler Leo Soileau had lost his original accordion player, Mayuse LeFleur, when he too was killed. He returned to recording with Moise on this session for Paramount.After these sessions, the label didn't pursue any more Cajun artists. Soon after after the Depression the label would be folding up. John Bertrand along with Roy Gonzales would not record again. Leo Soileau would keep busy recording well into the late thirties. Leo Soileau and Moise Robin- Easy Rider Blues (Paramount 12808) John Bertrand and Milton Pitre- Valse De Gueydan (Paramount 12748)Roy Gonzales- Anuiont Et Bleue (Paramount 12832)Leo Soileau and Moise Robin- Ma Chere Tite Fille (Paramount 12808)John Bertrand and Milton Pitre- The Rabbit Stole the Pumpkin (Paramount 12730)Leo Soileau and Moise Robin- Ce Pas La Pienne Tu Pleur (Paramount 12908)Roy Gonzales- Un Fussi Qui Brille (Paramount 12807)John Bertrand and Milton Pitre- Cousinne Lilly (Paramount 12725)Leo Soileau and Moise Robin- Ma Mauvaus Fille (Paramount 12830)John Bertrand and Roy Gonzales- Choctaw Beer Blues (unissued Paramount)Leo Soileau and Moise Robin- Je Te Recontrais De La Brulier (Parmount 12908)Roy Gonzales- Attendre Pour Un Train (Paramount 12807)All selections taken from The Rise and Fall Of Paramount Records Volume 2with the exception of Paramount 12807 (thanks to Wade Falcon)

Label: Paramount 0238 djYear: 1973Condition: MPrice: $250.00Here's a beautiful promo copy of this rare Soul single with an A side that's just to-die-for! Have a listen to the mp3 "snippet" in our "online jukebox" (click the blue play button!). Christopher wasn't really a Soul singer, but this song and production put her squarely in that genre. Note: This 45 record comes in a vintage Paramount Records factory sleeve. It has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio).

How do you recover from DAMAGING your guitar? Do you cry? Mourn? Instead, check out this video to see how you can incorporate your guitar into your journey to fuel hours of practice and fun! ★ What kind of guitar player are you? How should you practice? Take our quiz today: https://tonypolecastro.com/ ★ View the show notes at https://acousticlife.tv/atah5/★ Get the show: https://tonypolecastro.com/get-acoustic-tuesday Getting the motivation to practice can be extremely difficult. One of the best ways to help you find inspiration is to incorporate your guitar into your guitar journey. I know it sounds confusing, but bear with me… Your acoustic guitar is a powerful instrument. Even if you've damaged, dinged, or dented it, your guitar tells a story. If you can incorporate that story into your guitar journey, your drive to create, play, and have fun will be so much higher! There's no better guitar I could think of to talk about this concept than my Martin 0M28 Marquis. I've banged it up quite a few times, but this Martin Guitar so intricately tied to my guitar journey that I'd never let those dents and dings tarnish my view of this beauty! In addition to talking about my Martin Marquis, I'll also let you in on my D'Addario Nickel Bronze review — and how those strings stack up with the Santa Cruz Parabolic Tension strings… Finally, we'll take a look at Third Man Records' new release of vinyl titled "The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records." It's an incredible box set, and I'm so excited to share it with you!

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry's challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bandana Blues Special Spinner's Funhouse #7 It's been 3 years since the last Funhouse show, but now here's Spinner's Funhouse #7. With every track taken from an old-fashioned 12" vinyl platter. 01. Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen - Too Much Fun (3:22) (Live From Deep In The Heart Of Texas, Paramount Records, 1974) 02. Alan Price Set - The House That Jack Built (3:09) (Priceless Hits, Decca Records, 1967) 03. Humblebums - Harry (2:58) (Open Up The Door, Transatlantic Records, 1970) 04. Ian Gomm - She'll Never Take The Place Of You (2:41) (The Village Voice, Albion Records, 1983) 05. Dave Edmunds - Never Take The Place Of You (3:22) (Closer To The Flame, Capitol Records, 1989) 06. Style Council - Me Ship Came In! (3:05) (Café Bleu, Polydor Records, 1984) 07. Jackson Heights - Long Necked Lady (3:42) (Bump 'n' Grind, Vertigo Records, 1973) 08. Mickey Jupp - Claggin' On (2:49) (X, Waterfront Records, 1988) 09. Lighthouse - What Gives You The Right (3:26) (Thoughts Of Movin' On, Evolution Records, 1971) 10.Super Sister - Radio (4:00) (Pudding & Gisteren, Polydor Records, 1972) 11. Charlie Daniels - No Place To Go (10:16) (Honey In The Rock, Kama Sutra Records, 1973) 12. Jive Bombers - Bad Boy [1957] (2:48) (Bad Boy, Savoy Jazz Records , 1984) 13. Mink DeVille - Bad Boy (2:46) (Le Chat Bleu, Capitol Records, 1979) 14. Janne Schaffer - Happy Feet (4:10) (Earmeal, Columbia Records, 1978)

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * John * Biker Chicks Tier List. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1591151119 * Jesse * https://twitter.com/thefringthing Topics: * Canadian Heritage Minutes * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm * YouTube playlist of Heritage Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCWANopglXI&list=PL1848FF9428CA9A4A * List of Heritage Minutes on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Minutes * What are your tips for collaborating with people with a higher or lower skill level than you? * Are we allowed to talk yet about how for decades all 3D games were incredibly ugly * https://twitter.com/BlazeHedgehog/status/1247200134057717760 * The website I build in high school & college is lost to the ages, or: how to reconstruct memories of your past without external records * The lost Willie Brown records * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellac * Willie Brown - Future Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An9rC8olaVY * "Grandma Blues" cover (prank?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9xhKLJbXs * PBS History Detectives episode about Paramount Records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKQbZV4lQk4 Microtopics: * Being a playable character in Frog Fractions 2. * Ranking every Biker Chick from worst to best. * Regretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show. * Still making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more. * The big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles. * That time Quebec was going to quit Canada. * A group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration. * Reenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman. * Canada's revolting safety PSAs. * Hanging maple syrup for treason. * The biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons. * Celebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country. * Trading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity. * Taking a 45 minute break to worship the military. * Deciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people. * Doing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session. * The high pressure world of game jamming. * The anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team. * Trusting your collaborators. * Not being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions. * Feeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine. * The ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers. * Making your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax. * The smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool. * Goldeneye slappy hands. * The difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period. * Playing old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself. * Using modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games. * Conditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism. * An epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes. * The old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting. * Making a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios. * Moving your web site from Geocities to a cooler hosting provider in France who then stops hosting web sites because of a change in French law. * A gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet. * Letting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support. * A government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years. * The threshold for memory sticking. * What we would do with our missing histories if we had them. * Allowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage. * The object as a record of a moment. * Dredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records. * Old blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers. * Writing and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors. * Recording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things. * Your record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs. * Training a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found. * Finding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up. * Digitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner. * That time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it. * Cutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window. * Recovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery. * Breaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers. * Putting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.

This episode of the Old, Dingy Jukebox features some of my favorite guitar records from some of my favorite guitar players. It was pretty hard to narrow it down into one show, but I figured I’d just go for it. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a second show later on down the road. The guitar records and artists I chose for the show cover a lot of different styles and genres, which is sort of what the show is all about. Hopefully it will make for an enjoyable episode for the guitarist, guitar aficionado as well as the casual, every day listener. As usual, I’ve provided a discography of the records I pulled from for the show in order for you to pursue the artists more fully on your own if you are so inclined. Enjoy.E-mail: olddingyjukebox@gmail.comWeb: https://theolddingyjukebox.buzzsprout.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/olddingyjukeboxpodcastTwitter: @OldDingyInstagram: @olddingyjukeboxpodcastContribute/Donate to the podcast: https://paypal.me/christiangallo1?locale.x=en_USBlind Blake-Southern Rag. Paramount Records. 1927Phil Baugh-Country Guitar. Longhorn Records. 1965Big Bill Broonzy-Long Tall Mama. Oriole Records. 1932Django Reinhardt & the Quintette du Hot Club de France. Stompin At Decca. 1938Joe Maphis-Guitar Rock n Roll. Columbia Records. 1956Roy Harvey and Jess Johnston-Guitar Rag. Champion Records. 1930Reverend Gary Davis-I Am The Light Of This World. Melotone Records. 1935Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant-Bryant’s Bounce. Two Guitars Country Style. Capitol Records. 1957Blind Blake-Diddie Wah Diddie. Paramount Records. 1929Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys (Feat. Junior Barnard) Fat Boy Rag. Columbia Records. 1947Big Bill Broonzy-Guitar Shuffle. Blues With Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. (interviewed by Studs Terkel) Folkways Records. 1957Doc Watson, Clint Howard & Fred Price-Crawdad Song. Old Timey Concert. Vanguard Records. 1967Kenny Sultan-Dallas Rag. Tom Ball & Kenny Sultan. Confusion. Sonyatone Records. 1981The Texas Troubadours-C-Jam Blues. Country Dance Time. Decca Records. 1965Support the show (https://paypal.me/christiangallo1?locale.x=en_US)

We’re really excited about this episode because it’s about a unique piece of Grafton’s history – the Paramount Blues. If you’ve driven in our downtown, you’ve noticed our Paramount Plaza with the Walk of Fame, honoring famous and influential Blues artists. In this episode we’ll talk about the history of the Blues in Grafton, Wisconsin with Kevin Ramsey and Angie Mack-Reilly. We’ll also talk to Cara McMullin about an exciting partnership with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater!   Kevin Ramsey is the playwright and director of Chasin’ Dem Blues. Kevin has written four plays, two of which were put on at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. He is knowledgeable of our community and the impact we had on Blues history. His love of history and music has inspired him to write Chasin’ Dem Blues. His enthusiasm for not only Chasin’ Dem Blues but also Grafton, WI! Angie Mack-Reilly is our local historian and person who literally dug up the Blues history out of the Milwaukee River. Angie has always been very active with the arts in Grafton and most importantly, instrumental in uncovering the blues history in Grafton. We were in awe of her while talking about the extent of research she did to discover the blues history in Grafton and we hope you will appreciate what she did as much as we do!   Our last guest is Cara McMullen. Cara is the Director of Marketing at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Cara spent the early years of her life living in an apartment on 12th Avenue right here in Grafton! She has worked with us to bring our vision of Grafton Night at Chasin’ Dem Blues to life! We are so excited to present this partnership to Grafton and our surrounding communities.   Grafton Night at Chasin’ Dem Blues is Saturday, February 29 5-11:00pm. Included in your $100 will be your ticket to the show, a three-course meal with a variety of options and transportation to and from the show via a coach bus. We will meet at the football field parking lot at Grafton High School at 5pm to get to the Milwaukee Reparatory Theater to enjoy dinner prior to the show. You can still purchase tickets online at www.grafton-wi.org! Contact Annalise with any questions celebrate@grafton-wi.org 262-377-1650.  

Between 1917 and 1932, a little-known activity was taking place in small-town Wisconsin: inside a chair factory, some of the earliest Blues, R&B, Jazz, and Country classics were being recorded, pressed into 78rpm records, and distributed by Paramount Records, often bringing up African-American artists from the Mississippi Delta. Today, music fans around the world are becoming aware of how monumental - and unique - these early music sessions were and how its influence still affects music today. Find out more about Paramount, and the Paramount Music Festival that celebrates this history, in this episode of the EricCast.

We’re pleased to say that all three volumes of Blues Unlimited: The Complete Radio Show Transcripts have now been published as eBooks! They’re available from Apple Books https://tinyurl.com/y4rceu7b - Barnes & Noble https://tinyurl.com/yxkvx6rl - and also available in the Kindle Store from Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/yyuwxbla (And please keep in mind that every dollar from every purchase will help keep an independent voice in blues radio alive and well! And we thank you!) “This Week in Blues History” aims the spotlight on important recordings, artists, and events from the golden era of the blues. This time, we profile Mississippi blues legend Charley Patton, who made his debut for Paramount Records, this week in 1929. “This Week in Blues History” is available commercial free to our bandcamp subscribers! More info -- including how to get instant access to more than 170 episodes of Blues Unlimited -- that’s over 340 hours worth of entertainment -- is at http://bluesunlimited.bandcamp.com/subscribe

Our second episode brings us to a small town in the Northern part of the U.S. where we, surprisingly, find a deep Blues history. We follow Paramount Records through the peak of success, recording landmark artists that changed Western popular music forever, but this music, at several times, was almost lost forever. We follow the thin thread of events and recent efforts that have gone into preserving this important musical history.   Here’s an external link to every Musical Mention in this episode: 0:50 Muddy Waters 0:51 B.B King 0:54 Blind Lemon Jefferson 0:56 Charley Patton 0:57 Skip James 1:09 Blues 1:12 Africa 1:50 Skip James 2:03 Big Bill Broonzy 2:07 Bill Big Broonzy: The Man That Brought The Blues to Britain 2:14 Paramount Records 3:44 Jazz 3:55 Johann Sebastian Bach 3:55 Ludwig Van Beethoven 3:55 Johannes Brahms 3:59 Franz Joseph Haydn 3:59 Wenzel Müller 3:59 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 4:06 Vaudevillan Performers 4:08 Dixieland Jazz 4:10 Creole Music 4:14 Military Bands 4:49 Al Jolson 6:11 Pop music 6:19 Wisconsin Chair Company 6:28 Phonographs 7:21 Alex Van Der Tuuk 7:31 Paramount’s Rise and Fall 7:55 Classical Music (Western) 8:05 Vaudeville 8:10 Country Music 8:37 Mamie Smith 8:38 Crazy Blues 9:09 Race Records 10:10 J. Mayo “Ink” Williams 10:31 Blues Music 11:15 Bessie Smith 11:17 Jelly Roll Morton 12:31 Alberta Hunter 12:32 Monette Moore 12:53 Blind Lemon Jefferson 13:48 Charley Patton 13:52 Dockery Farms 13:57 Robert Johnson 14:29 Pony Blues 14:31 Banty Rooster Blues 15:10 Swanee River 15:21 Juke Joints 15:46 Delta Blues 16:59 Metal Masters 19:25 Grafton House of Blues 19:34 Angie Mack Riley 19:56 Blues 19:56 Jazz 19:56 Country Music 22:43 PBS History Detective: Paramount Records Episode 22:59 Charley Patton 22:59 Skip James 22:59 Blind Lemon Jefferson 23:27 Louis Armstrong 23:27 Ma Rainey 23:27 Son House 24:28 Delta Blues 24:49 Elvis Presley 25:22 Paramount’s Rise and Fall 25:29 Agram Blues 25:41 Jack White Box Set 25:54 Dean Blackwood 25:55 Revenant Records 27:10 Paramount Box Set #1 27:28 Grammy Award 27:57 The World Music Foundation 28:05 World Music 29:10 Folklore Music 29:18 Zydeco 29:22 Cajun Music 29:36 Rolling Stones 29:41 Love in Vain 30:10 Elmore James 30:01 Howlin’ Wolf 30:04 Muddy Waters 30:28 The Country Blues, by Samuel Charters 30:40 Columbia Records 30:42 Okeh Records 30:43 Paramount Records

Show #788 Another King Thing The Dutch king had another birthday on April 27, so Spinner put together another King Thing show. Royal and blue, just for you. 01. Guy King - King Thing (5:42) (Truth, Delmark Records, 2016) 02. Gary Moore - King Of The Blues (4:36) (Still Got the Blues, Virgin Records, 1990) 03. Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings - Rhythm King (4:52) (Groovin', Ripple Records, 2000) 04. Vegas Strip Kings - Take It Easy (3:12) (Jackpot!, Gutbukit Records, 2019) 05. William Lee Ellis - King Of The Mountain (2:53) (Conqueroo, Yellow Dog Records, 2003) 06. The Doors - Crawling King Snake (5:00) (L.A. Woman, Elektra Records, 1971) 07. Studebaker John & the Hawks - King Of Cheap (5:30) (Born to Win, Double Trouble Records, 1991) 08. Christone "Kingfish" Ingram - Love Ain't My Favorite Word (5:25) (Kingfish, Alligator Records, 2019) 09. R.J. Mischo - King Of A Mighty Good Time (4:07) (King of a Mighty Good Time, Challis Records, 2008) 10. Swamp Train - I'm A King Bee (3:59) (Premium Selection, self-release, 2012) 11. Ian Siegal - Kingdom Come (4:34) (Broadside, Nugene Records, 2009) 12. Travellin' Blue Kings - Wired Up (2:35) (Wired Up, Naked, 2019) 13. King Biscuit Boy with Crowbar - Biscuit's Boogie (9:26) (Official Music, Paramount Records, 1970) 14. King Biscuit Boy - You Done Tore Your Playhouse Down Again (5:41) (Gooduns, Paramount Records, 1971) 15. King Biscuit Boy - The Bum Is Mine (3:04) (King Biscuit Boy, Epic Records, 1974) 16. The KingmiXers - Belgian Beer Boogie (3:26) (Riding With Mr. Blues, self-release, 2012) 17. Guy Forsyth - New Monkey King (4:41) (Can You Live Without, Antone's Records, 1999) 18. David Gogo - Kings (4:16) (Come On Down, INgrooves Records, 2013) 19. Dana Gillespie - King Size Papa (2:53) (Blues It Up, Ace Records, 1990) 20. Junior Wells - King Fish Blues (5:19) (Come On In This House, Telarc Records, 1996) 21. Luther Allison - All The King's Horses (5:37) (Blue Streak, Alligator Records, 1995) 22. Cash Box Kings - Back Off (3:02) (Hail To The Kings!, Alligator Records, 2019) 23. Chris Thomas King - Me, My Guitar And The Blues (3:17) (Along The Blues Highway, Varèse Sarabande, 2001) 24. The Kat Kings - Ridin' in Style (2:48) (Swinging in the Swamp, Kool Kat Records, 2016) 25. The Hound Kings - Recession Blues (3:16) (Unleashed, self-release, 2013) 26. Atomic Road Kings - Vibrations (3:34) (Clean Up The Blood, Bigtone Records, 2019) 27. John Scofield - King For A Day (2:32) (Electric Outlet, Gramavision Records, 1984) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

  Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast. One I haven’t talked about before is Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Defaa. The information on “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” comes in part from Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, but a word of caution — it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he’s a bit of an edgelord who’ll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh.  Much of the information I’ve used comes from interviews with Ruth Brown and Ahmet Ertegun in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Ruth Brown also wrote an autobiography. And there are many good compilations of Brown’s R&B work — this one has most of the important records on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript While I’ve often made the point that fifties rhythm and blues is not the same thing as “the blues” as most people now think of it, there was still an obvious connection (as you’d expect from the name if nothing else) and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts with a song that couldn’t have been more blues inspired. For the story of “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country-blues picker who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation — he was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount Records, notoriously the label with the worst sound quality in the 20s and thirties (which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something). One of his songs was “One Dime Blues”, which is a very typical example of his style: [excerpt “One Dime Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson] See what I mean both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality? That song was later picked up by another great blind bluesman, Blind Willie McTell. McTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved and try to turn them into something they’re not. A substantial proportion of McTell’s recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax, for the Library of Congress, but if you listen to those recordings you can hear the Lomaxes persuading McTell to play music that’s very different from the songs he normally played — while he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform traditional folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another Leadbelly (a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the twelve-string guitar). He said he didn’t know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren’t in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realise about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it — and it’s something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There’s a reason why I call this podcast “A History of Rock Music…” rather than “THE History of Rock Music…” — the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing, when they were collecting their recordings, was taking sophisticated entertainers, who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds, and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes *thought* was typical black music, rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got McTell to perform songs he knew, like “The Boll Weevil” and “Amazing Grace”, because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than having him perform his own material. To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience — imagine you’re a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You’ve been playing the clubs for several years, you’ve got a repertoire of songs you’ve written which the audiences love. You get your big break with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly like “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. You probably could perform those, but you’d be wondering why they wouldn’t let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a *lot* of black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw as unsophisticated. It’s something we’ll see particularly in the late fifties as musicians travel from the US to the UK, and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn’t want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos — they thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that’s what he gave those audiences. But McTell’s version of “One Dime Blues”, retitled “Last Dime Blues”, wasn’t like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit: [excerpt: “Last Dime Blues” by Blind Willie McTell] And that line we just heard, “Mama, don’t treat your daughter mean”, inspired one of the most important records in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was seventeen — she’d wanted to become a singer, and she eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept even though the marriage didn’t last long. She quickly joined Lucky Millinder’s band, as so many early R&B stars we’ve discussed did, but that too didn’t last long. Millinder’s band, at the time, had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night performing live with them, and apparently went down well with the audience, but that was all she was meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas on to the stage… and Millinder said “I hired a singer, not a waitress — you’re fired. And besides, you don’t sing well anyway”. She was fired that day, and she had no money — Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she’d had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything she owed him money. She had no way to make her way home from Washington. She was stuck. But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Calloway, Cab’s sister, who was running a club at the time. Well, I say Blanche Calloway was Cab’s sister, and that’s probably how most people today would think of her if they thought of her at all, but it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother. Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother’s career, and she’d recorded songs like this: [excerpt “Just a Crazy Song”: Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys] That was recorded several months *before* her brother’s breakout hit “Minnie The Moocher”, which popularised the “Hi de hi, ho de ho” chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn’t the first person to sing that song – Bill “Bojangles” Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style – but she’s clearly the one who gave Cab the idea. She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise all-male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early thirties. And that wasn’t her only achievement by any means — in later years she became prominent in the Democratic Party and as a civil rights activist, she started Afram, a cosmetic company that made makeup for black women and was one of the most popular brand names of the seventies, and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida, in 1958. But while her band was popular in the thirties, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the Mafia, who controlled live music in the thirties, decided that there wasn’t room for two bands led by a Calloway, and put their weight behind her brother, leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi, she used a public toilet that was designated whites-only, and while she was in jail for that one of the band members ran off with all the band’s money and so she couldn’t afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for a job. Calloway said that the club didn’t really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown’s plight — and impressed enough by her talent — that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she’d earned her fare home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure — he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom — a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown’s performance — impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her. Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We’ve talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race — and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on — but that was certainly true of Ahmet Ertegun. Ertegun was considered white by the then-prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default. He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Ahmet had ostensibly been studying Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop. He and his brother Neshui had over fifteen thousand jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Ahmet decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist, and took on Herb Abramson, one of the dentist’s proteges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic’s first few records — while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren’t especially successful, but then in 1949 they released “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” by Sticks McGhee: [excerpt “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] That record is another of those which people refer to as “the first rock and roll record”, and it was pure good luck for Atlantic — McGhee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier, for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different — before McGhee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing spo-de-o-dee he’d sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adults-only section on iTunes; while instead of singing “mop mop” he’d sung “goddam”. Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertegun knew McGhee’s brother, the more famous blues musician Brownie McGhee, and called him up to get in touch with Sticks. They got Sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success,and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, and many more musicians we’ve talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks McGhee never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things — firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly that if she was going to record for them, she’d have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing to something more… spo-de-o-dee. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Calloway, who had become her manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning twenty-one in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn’t meant to be a session for her, it was just a way to ease her back into her career — Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon’s band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then Ahmet Ertegun decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown, just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson — who would produce most of Brown’s early records — listed a handful of songs that she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgan’s “So Long”. The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer — one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, among others — stopped the session and said “Wait a minute. Let’s go back and do this right. The kid can *sing*!” And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test or, at best, as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for Cavalcade of Music, was instead released as a single, by “Ruth Brown as heard with Eddie Condon’s NBC Television Orchestra” “So Long” became a hit, and the followup “Teardrops From My Eyes” was a bigger hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts and staying there for eleven weeks. “Teardrops From My Eyes” was an uptempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked — she thought of herself primarily as a torch singer — but it can’t be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn’t what she’d have been singing by choice: [excerpt: Ruth Brown “Teardrops From My Eyes”] While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown’s recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertegun had always advocated — to take black musicians who played or sang the more “sophisticated” (I don’t know if you can hear those air quotes, but they’re there…) styles and to get them instead to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of “Teardrops From My Eyes”, this required a lot of work — Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toombs, the song’s writer, and working out the arrangement — and this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio or songs that had been honed by months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic’s ethos — making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren’t the best instrumentalists — the idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. “Teardrops From My Eyes” became a million seller — Atlantic’s first. Or at least, it was promoted as having sold a million copies — Herb Abramson would later claim that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then, he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate – if the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they’d want a million copies’ worth of royalties. But Brown’s biggest hit was her third number one, “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number twenty-three. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but twenty years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn’t do a show without playing it and that when she said her name people would ask “the Ruth Brown who sings ‘Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean’?” The song also made a difference to Brown because it meant she had to join the musicians’ union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn’t have to be union members. But “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. [excerpt: “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, Ruth Brown] Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lance wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly “Last Dime Blues”, and contained a line which they heard as “Mama, he treats your daughter mean”. Brown didn’t want to record the song originally — the way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues — but Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of “Teardrops From My Eyes”, turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song’s influence, for example, in “Work With Me Annie” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later: [Excerpt: “Work With Me Annie”, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters] But Brown always claimed that the reason for the song’s greater success than her other records was down to that tambourine — or more precisely because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the sixties, though she never became one of the most well-known artists — in the seventies she used to talk about adults telling their children “she was our Aretha Franklin”, and this was probably true. Certainly she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the fifties, and was popular enough that for a while Atlantic Records became known as “the house that Ruth Brown built”, but like many of the pioneers of the rock and roll era, she was largely (though far from completely) erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has prehistory start in 1954 with Elvis and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid fifties, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them, but it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed, but as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and their hit rate — at least for those who didn’t write their own material — got lower. So by the early sixties, Ruth Brown was something of a has-been. But she got a second wind from the late seventies onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again — not a pop star as she had been in her first career, but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV. And she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records — like most independent labels of the fifties, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed by the eighties it was a major label itself — it had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn’t just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money — and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who’ve fallen on hard times — often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now of course that’s not to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything — it’s very clear that Atlantic continued (and continues) to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the Foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation as anything else, but it’s still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off… Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field, She died in 2006.  

  Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a few books for this podcast. One I haven't talked about before is Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Defaa. The information on "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee" comes in part from Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, but a word of caution -- it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he's a bit of an edgelord who'll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh.  Much of the information I've used comes from interviews with Ruth Brown and Ahmet Ertegun in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Ruth Brown also wrote an autobiography. And there are many good compilations of Brown's R&B work -- this one has most of the important records on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript While I've often made the point that fifties rhythm and blues is not the same thing as "the blues" as most people now think of it, there was still an obvious connection (as you'd expect from the name if nothing else) and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts with a song that couldn't have been more blues inspired. For the story of "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country-blues picker who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation -- he was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount Records, notoriously the label with the worst sound quality in the 20s and thirties (which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something). One of his songs was "One Dime Blues", which is a very typical example of his style: [excerpt "One Dime Blues" by Blind Lemon Jefferson] See what I mean both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality? That song was later picked up by another great blind bluesman, Blind Willie McTell. McTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved and try to turn them into something they're not. A substantial proportion of McTell's recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax, for the Library of Congress, but if you listen to those recordings you can hear the Lomaxes persuading McTell to play music that's very different from the songs he normally played -- while he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform traditional folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another Leadbelly (a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the twelve-string guitar). He said he didn't know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren't in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realise about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it -- and it's something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There's a reason why I call this podcast "A History of Rock Music..." rather than "THE History of Rock Music..." -- the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing, when they were collecting their recordings, was taking sophisticated entertainers, who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds, and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes *thought* was typical black music, rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got McTell to perform songs he knew, like "The Boll Weevil" and "Amazing Grace", because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than having him perform his own material. To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience -- imagine you're a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You've been playing the clubs for several years, you've got a repertoire of songs you've written which the audiences love. You get your big break with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly like "All Things Bright and Beautiful". You probably could perform those, but you'd be wondering why they wouldn't let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a *lot* of black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw as unsophisticated. It's something we'll see particularly in the late fifties as musicians travel from the US to the UK, and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn't want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos -- they thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that's what he gave those audiences. But McTell's version of "One Dime Blues", retitled "Last Dime Blues", wasn't like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit: [excerpt: “Last Dime Blues” by Blind Willie McTell] And that line we just heard, “Mama, don't treat your daughter mean”, inspired one of the most important records in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was seventeen -- she'd wanted to become a singer, and she eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept even though the marriage didn't last long. She quickly joined Lucky Millinder's band, as so many early R&B stars we've discussed did, but that too didn't last long. Millinder's band, at the time, had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night performing live with them, and apparently went down well with the audience, but that was all she was meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas on to the stage... and Millinder said "I hired a singer, not a waitress -- you're fired. And besides, you don't sing well anyway". She was fired that day, and she had no money -- Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she'd had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything she owed him money. She had no way to make her way home from Washington. She was stuck. But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Calloway, Cab's sister, who was running a club at the time. Well, I say Blanche Calloway was Cab's sister, and that's probably how most people today would think of her if they thought of her at all, but it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother. Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother's career, and she'd recorded songs like this: [excerpt "Just a Crazy Song": Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys] That was recorded several months *before* her brother's breakout hit "Minnie The Moocher", which popularised the "Hi de hi, ho de ho" chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn't the first person to sing that song – Bill “Bojangles” Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style – but she's clearly the one who gave Cab the idea. She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise all-male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early thirties. And that wasn't her only achievement by any means -- in later years she became prominent in the Democratic Party and as a civil rights activist, she started Afram, a cosmetic company that made makeup for black women and was one of the most popular brand names of the seventies, and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida, in 1958. But while her band was popular in the thirties, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the Mafia, who controlled live music in the thirties, decided that there wasn't room for two bands led by a Calloway, and put their weight behind her brother, leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi, she used a public toilet that was designated whites-only, and while she was in jail for that one of the band members ran off with all the band's money and so she couldn't afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for a job. Calloway said that the club didn't really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown's plight -- and impressed enough by her talent -- that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she'd earned her fare home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure -- he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom -- a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown's performance -- impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her. Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We've talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race -- and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on -- but that was certainly true of Ahmet Ertegun. Ertegun was considered white by the then-prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default. He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Ahmet had ostensibly been studying Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gabler's Commodore Music Shop. He and his brother Neshui had over fifteen thousand jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Ahmet decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist, and took on Herb Abramson, one of the dentist's proteges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic's first few records -- while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren't especially successful, but then in 1949 they released "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee" by Sticks McGhee: [excerpt "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] That record is another of those which people refer to as "the first rock and roll record", and it was pure good luck for Atlantic -- McGhee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier, for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different -- before McGhee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing spo-de-o-dee he'd sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adults-only section on iTunes; while instead of singing "mop mop" he'd sung "goddam". Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertegun knew McGhee's brother, the more famous blues musician Brownie McGhee, and called him up to get in touch with Sticks. They got Sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success,and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, and many more musicians we've talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks McGhee never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things -- firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly that if she was going to record for them, she'd have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing to something more... spo-de-o-dee. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Calloway, who had become her manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning twenty-one in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn't meant to be a session for her, it was just a way to ease her back into her career -- Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon's band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then Ahmet Ertegun decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown, just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson -- who would produce most of Brown's early records -- listed a handful of songs that she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgan's "So Long". The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer -- one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, among others -- stopped the session and said "Wait a minute. Let's go back and do this right. The kid can *sing*!" And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test or, at best, as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for Cavalcade of Music, was instead released as a single, by "Ruth Brown as heard with Eddie Condon's NBC Television Orchestra" "So Long" became a hit, and the followup "Teardrops From My Eyes" was a bigger hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts and staying there for eleven weeks. "Teardrops From My Eyes" was an uptempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked -- she thought of herself primarily as a torch singer -- but it can't be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn't what she'd have been singing by choice: [excerpt: Ruth Brown "Teardrops From My Eyes"] While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown's recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertegun had always advocated -- to take black musicians who played or sang the more "sophisticated" (I don't know if you can hear those air quotes, but they're there...) styles and to get them instead to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of "Teardrops From My Eyes", this required a lot of work -- Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toombs, the song's writer, and working out the arrangement -- and this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio or songs that had been honed by months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic's ethos -- making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren't the best instrumentalists -- the idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. "Teardrops From My Eyes" became a million seller -- Atlantic's first. Or at least, it was promoted as having sold a million copies -- Herb Abramson would later claim that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then, he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate – if the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they'd want a million copies' worth of royalties. But Brown's biggest hit was her third number one, "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean", which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number twenty-three. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but twenty years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn't do a show without playing it and that when she said her name people would ask "the Ruth Brown who sings 'Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean'?" The song also made a difference to Brown because it meant she had to join the musicians' union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn't have to be union members. But "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. [excerpt: "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean", Ruth Brown] Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lance wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly “Last Dime Blues”, and contained a line which they heard as “Mama, he treats your daughter mean”. Brown didn't want to record the song originally -- the way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues -- but Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of "Teardrops From My Eyes", turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song's influence, for example, in "Work With Me Annie" by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later: [Excerpt: "Work With Me Annie", Hank Ballard and the Midnighters] But Brown always claimed that the reason for the song's greater success than her other records was down to that tambourine -- or more precisely because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the sixties, though she never became one of the most well-known artists -- in the seventies she used to talk about adults telling their children "she was our Aretha Franklin", and this was probably true. Certainly she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the fifties, and was popular enough that for a while Atlantic Records became known as "the house that Ruth Brown built", but like many of the pioneers of the rock and roll era, she was largely (though far from completely) erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has prehistory start in 1954 with Elvis and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid fifties, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them, but it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed, but as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and their hit rate -- at least for those who didn't write their own material -- got lower. So by the early sixties, Ruth Brown was something of a has-been. But she got a second wind from the late seventies onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again -- not a pop star as she had been in her first career, but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV. And she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records -- like most independent labels of the fifties, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed by the eighties it was a major label itself -- it had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn't just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money -- and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who've fallen on hard times -- often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now of course that's not to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything -- it's very clear that Atlantic continued (and continues) to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the Foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation as anything else, but it's still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off... Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field, She died in 2006.  

From 1917 to 1932 a record label in Grafton, Wisconsin may have captured more important American recordings than any other label or person before or since. Not a single one of those recordings feature the accordion or performers wearing lederhosen. Episode 30 of Highway Hi-Fi focuses on Paramount Records, a chair manufacturing company, and blues recording giant. Further reading: THE BALLAD OF GEESHIE AND ELVIE from New York Times Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html Paramount Records: The Label Inadvertently Crucial To The Blues http://wlrn.org/post/paramount-records-label-inadvertently-crucial-blues New York Times: They’ve Got Those Old, Hard-to-Find Blues https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/arts/music/12petr.html Jack White Rescues Paramount Records [video from CBS This Morning] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmVMzDqAMZI   Subscribe to Highway Hi-Fi: iTunes | Stitcher | TuneIn | PocketCasts | Overcast | Google Play  Twitter | Facebook | Spotify   

Paramount Records has been out of business for nearly 90 years but still influences musicians today and holds a permanent place of mystique and reverence for record collectors and music fans. Today we talk about the history and legacy of Paramount Records with world renown record collector and blues historian John Tefteller. If you like records, just starting a collection or are an uber-nerd with a house-full of vinyl, this is the podcast for you. Nate Goyer is The Vinyl Guide and discusses all things music and record-related. Web  |  Facebook  |  Instagram  |  YouTube

In this episode of Views & Brews, KUT’s Rebecca McInroy joins co-founder of Revenant Records and lawyer Dean Blackwood and Grammy-nominated author of We Agreed To Meet Just Here and See How Small and co-producer of The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records Volume 1 & 2, Scott Blackwood, to discuss music, authenticity, memory, sound, and the human voice...

In this episode of Views & Brews, KUT’s Rebecca McInroy joins co-founder of Revenant Records and lawyer Dean Blackwood and Grammy-nominated author of We Agreed To Meet Just Here and See How Small and co-producer of The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records Volume 1 & 2, Scott Blackwood, to discuss music, authenticity, memory, sound, and the human voice […]

This week, we’re excited to welcome a panel of guests including musician Jack White and cofounder of Revenant Records, Dean Blackwood. Along with author Daphne A. Brooks, these lovers of music examine the rise and fall of Paramount Records, a label that existed from 1917 to 1931, and compiled a dizzying array of performers still unrivaled to this day — from Louis Armstrong to Ma Rainey and Ethel Waters. In this captivating panel discussion, our guests talk about the music business, the Great Migration, and how the legacy of Paramount Records lives on today.

Scott Blackwood teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University and has written a two volume history of Paramount Records, a short story collection called In The Shadow of our House, and his first novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here. In this episode, we talk about his new novel, See How Small, which is published by Little, Brown. It's an impressionistic take on how a horrific crime in Austin, TX affects the lives of those left behind.

A Very Metal Xmas continues with a look at the Dawn of Metal. Before there was Metallica and Slayer, there was Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. Plus, how did one of the most famed rosters in music history end up at a chair factory in Wisconsin?

Vaudeville entertainment for black audiences began in 1909 with an organization called TOBA. Those four letters stood for Theater Owners Bookers Association. Often called by the black entertainers who worked the TOBA circuit: Tough On Black Artists. For many of the artists, trying times to be sure. However, it was an important cog in the machine which brought black entertainment to the rural areas and large cities in the early part of the century. TOBA had more than 100 theaters operating by the end of the 1920s.Blues and Jazz were an important part of black entertainment in those early years and surely both idioms grew because of the fine caliber of the performers of that era and their ability to reach large audiences throughout most of the country.Actual recordings started being made in 1914 by Victor, Columbia and Edison though the Edison company finally bowed out of the business. In 1918, the Paramount Record Company (a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company of Port Washington) came into being primarily to make recordings for folks to play on their newly purchased record players which were made by the Chair Company. Paramount is famous today for two things....they were first to record Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ma Rainey and....they made terrible quality pressings of cheap shellac. Were it not for Paramount however, many great artists would never have been heard. Business is business.The Vaudeville Years highlights some of the dynamic female vocalists of that time, women who set the mark for all other female blues shouters to follow.John Rhys/BluePower.comHere's the music:1)...."Hand Clappin' "....Red Prysock....Mercury Records2)...."St. Louis Blues"....Bessie Smith....Columbia Records3)...."Bo Weavil Blues"....Ma Rainey....Paramount Records4)...."I'm A Mighty Tight Woman"....Sippie Wallace....Okeh (Columbia) Records5)...."T.B. Blues"....Victoria Spivey....Victor Records6)...."Coffin Blues"....Ida Cox....Paramount Records7)...."Texas Moaner Blues"....Alberta Hunter....Paramount Records8)...."Hand Clappin' "....Red Prysock....Mercury RecordsClick here to listen to....In The Beginning....The Vaudeville Years!Click here to go to....Red Hot Jazz.com_________________________________________________________________

One of the finest guitarists of the century, Blind Blake's finger-picked playing evokes the jazzy, melodious rags and stomps of the period. With breathtaking skill, Blake sings and plays from blues to breakdowns to shuffles to novelty tunes. Blind" Blake (born Arthur Blake, circa 1893, Jacksonville, Florida; died: circa 1933) was an influential blues singer and guitarist. He is often called "The King Of Ragtime Guitar". There is only one photograph of him in existence. Blind Blake recorded about 80 tracks for Paramount Records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was one of the most accomplished guitarists of his genre with a surprisingly diverse range of material. His complex and intricate fingerpicking has inspired Reverend Gary Davis, Jorma Kaukonen, Ry Cooder, Ralph Mctell and many others. He is most known for his distinct guitar sound that was comparable in sound and style to a ragtime piano. Very little is known about his life. His birthplace was listed as Jacksonville, Florida by Paramount Records but even that is in dispute. Nothing is known of his death. Even his name is not certain. During recordings he was asked about his real name and he answered that his name was Blind Arthur Blake which is also listed on some of the song credits, strengthening his case on his real name, although there is a suggestion that his real name was Arthur Phelps. His first recordings were made in 1926 and his records sold well. His first solo record was "Early Morning Blues" with "West Coast Blues" on the B-side. Both are considered excellent examples of his style. Blake made his last recordings in 1932, the end of his career aided by Paramount's bankruptcy. It is often said that the later recordings have much less sparkle and, allegedly, Blind Blake was drinking heavily in his later years. It is likely that this led to his early death. African blues - British blues - Chicago blues - Detroit blues - Kansas City blues - Louisiana blues - Memphis blues - Piedmont blues - St. Louis blues - Swamp blues - Texas blues - West Coast blues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Blake

Blind" Lemon Jefferson (September 1893–December 1929) was an influential blues singer and guitarist from Texas. He was one of the most popular blues singers of the 1920s. Jefferson is believed to have been born in Couchman, Texas, near Wortham, Texas. It was long believed by most that he was born in 1897 (although some accounts varied the date by up to ten years) but research a century later revealed a census record that listed his birth record as September 1893. He was blind or nearly blind from a young age, possibly from birth; the cause is unknown, as is the reason for the name or nickname "Lemon". Where, how, and from whom he learned to play guitar and learned his songs is unknown. Around 1912, he began performing at picnics and parties. He also became a street musician, playing in East Texas towns. According to his cousin, Alec Jefferson, quoted in the notes for Blind Lemon Jefferson, Classic Sides: They was rough. Men was hustling women and selling bootleg and Lemon was singing for them all night... he'd start singing about eight and go on until four in the morning... mostly it would be just him sitting there and playing and singing all night. By 1917, Lemon had moved to Dallas, where he is reputed to have met and played with Leadbelly, as well as gotten married. [edit] The beginning of the recording career Unlike many artists who were "discovered" and recorded in their normal venues, in December 1925 or January 1926, he was taken to Chicago, Illinois, to record his first tracks. Uncharacteristically, Jefferson's first two recordings from this session were gospel songs ("I Want to be like Jesus in my Heart", and "All I Want is that Pure Religion"), released under the name Deacon L. J. Bates. This led to a second recording session in March 1926. His first release under his own name, "Booster Blues" and "Dry Southern Blues", was a hit; this led to the release of the other two songs from that session, "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues", which became a runaway success, with sales in the six figures. He recorded about 100 tracks between 1926 and 1929; 43 records were issued, all but one for Paramount Records. Unfortunately, Paramount Records' studio techniques and quality were infamously bad, and the resulting recordings sound no better than if they had been recorded in a hotel room. In fact, in May 1926, Paramount had Jefferson re-record his hit "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues" in the superior facilities at Marsh Laboratories and subsequent releases used that version. Both versions appear on compilation albums and may be compared.