Podcasts about parchman farm

Al final, lo del aficionado de un equipo, no con confundir con el aficionado al fútbol, es pura irracionalidad. ¿Por qué se es de un equipo y no de otro? En realidad no hay motivos racionales, objetivos, para elegir éste y no aquel otro. No te haces preguntas, lo eliges y ya está. Y una vez hecho, salvo algunas excepciones, crees que tu equipo va a ganar siempre. Es lo que tiene el amor incondicional y sin reserva. Y, en ocasiones, lo deseas tan fervientemente que los deseos se hacen realidad... con unos equipos más que con otros. Min. 00 Seg. 21 – Improbable, milagroso, imposible Min. 07 Seg. 49 – Intro Min. 14 Seg. 02 – Nada más que quince minutos de locura Min. 18 Seg. 34 – Jugar bien al fútbol es tener el balón Min. 23 Seg. 12 – El entrenador sindicalista Min. 29 Seg. 58 – Una vez más, no tenemos información y especulamos Min. 37 Seg. 14 – Cabeza, corazón y cojones Min. 43 Seg. 01 – Hablar de fútbol sin hablar de fútbol Min. 49 Seg. 01 – No necesita jugar bien, sí necesita jugar bien Min. 54 Seg. 29 – Creer porque no hay ningún motivo para creer Min. 61 Seg. 45 – Despedida The Allman Brothers Band - Just Ain't Easy (Passaic, NJ 05/01/1980) Van Morrison (Amberes 06/08/2017) Moondance Magic Time Gloria Help Me Roll With The Punches In The Afternoon Sometimes We Cry Baby Please Don't Go > Parchman Farm > Don't Start Crying Now The Allman Brothers Band - Crazy Love (Passaic, NJ 05/01/1980)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to replace a 100-year-old canal lock that connects the Mississippi River to the Industrial Canal in the Lower Ninth Ward. The project has an estimated timeline of 13 years and a budget of more than $1 billion. Also in the works is a plan to build a $30 million grain terminal in Holy Cross.These projects are concerning residents, who worry they could lead to flooding,pollution and other issues. Sam Bowler, organizer with The Canal Will Kill NOLA, tells us how community members are fighting back, including their upcoming 5K race to raise awareness. Since Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has made major cuts to national government agencies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is no exception. The administration has fired four senior FEMA senior officials, reduced staffing by 84 percent and declared they would, “get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.”Sarah Labowitz, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tells us how these changes could dramatically alter how Gulf states prepare for and respond to natural disasters. A new collection of essays, art and poetry by men incarcerated at the Mississippi State Penitentiary -- best known as Parchman Farm -- is shedding light on one of the country's most notorious prison units. For The Gulf States Newsroom, Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Michael McEwen tells us how this effort began shortly after the most violent period in Parchman's history. ___Today's episode of Louisiana Considered was hosted by Alana Schreiber. Our managing producer is Alana Schrieber. Matt Bloom and Aubry Procell are assistant producers. Our engineer is Garrett Pittman.You can listen to Louisiana Considered Monday through Friday at noon and 7 p.m. It's available on Spotify, Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts. Louisiana Considered wants to hear from you! Please fill out our pitch line to let us know what kinds of story ideas you have for our show. And while you're at it, fill out our listener survey! We want to keep bringing you the kinds of conversations you'd like to listen to.Louisiana Considered is made possible with support from our listeners. Thank you!

Cuando se hace referencia a discos de culto, se abusa del término “seminal”, pero en el caso del John Mayall Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton de 1966 se queda corto, porque es la obra fundamental y piedra fundacional del boom del British blues en los sesenta. Ricardo Portman nos cuenta su historia en un programa que rinde tributo al gran John Mayall (1933 / 2024). Escucharemos All Your Love, Hideaway, Little Girl, Double Crossing Time, What’d I Say, Key to Love, Parchman Farm, Have You Heard, Ramblin’ On My Mind, Steppin’ Out y It Ain't Right + Bonus tracks. Recuerden que nuestros programas los pueden escuchar también en: Nuestra web https://ecosdelvinilo.com/ Radio M7 (Córdoba) lunes 18:00 y sábados 17:00. Distancia Radio (Córdoba) jueves y sábados 19:00 Radio Free Rock (Cartagena) viernes 18:00. Radio Hierbabuena (Lima, Perú) jueves 20:00 (hora Perú)

Train of Thought is a podcast hosted by Rob Tobias focusing on culture, music, interviews and society. This show features commentary about and music by the blues legend JOHN MAYALL, who passed away this last week (July 27, 2024) Songs used include: I WANT TO GO, SEND ME DOWN TO VICKSBURG, SENSITIVE KIND, LETS WORK TOGEHTER & PARCHMAN FARM from the John Mayall / Sense of Place album. Also ROOM TO MOVE and DREAM WITH ME. Also included is a version of ROOM TO MOVE by THE TOBIASPHERE. Rob can reached by email at: rob@robtobias.com HOME PAGE: robtobias.com TRAIN OF THOUGHT podcast: @robtobias ROB TOBIAS VIDEOS: www.youtube.com/robtobiasvideos BANDCAMP: robtobias.bandcamp.com/

ALBUM FOCUS: Cactus - Temple Of Heroes-Influences & Friends www.cactusrocks.net Carmine Appice brings past and present members of the legendary band together, with multiple special guests in the worlds of rock and blues. "Parchman Farm" with Joe Bonamassa & Billy Sheehan (Mr. Big / David Lee Roth) "Bro. Bill" with Randy Jackson (Zebra), Randy Pratt (Cactus) & Bob Daisley (Ozzy Osbourne) "Guiltless Glider" with Ron 'Bumblefoot' Thal (Guns N' Roses) & Phil Soussan (Ozzy Osbourne) "Evil" with Dee Snider (Twisted Sister) & Dug Pinnick (King's X) *************************** Tiny Stills "What's The Point Of Anything" - We Really Felt Something www.tinystills.com Sharks & Minnows "Song From Under The Lampshade" https://www.sharksandminnows.band/ Eliza & The Organix "Present" - Present Future Dreams Part II www.elizaandtheorganix.com Bobby Mahoney "Empty Passenger Seats" - Another Deadbeat Summer www.bobbymahoneymusic.com Grimiss "Reflection"- Hot Lunch https://www.facebook.com/kissmygrimiss/ Scarlet View "The Chase" www.scarletviewband.com High Noon Kahuna "Parachute" - This Place Is Haunted www.facebook.com/highnoonkahuna Shotgun Funeral "Josh Won't Tell" - Nicer https://www.facebook.com/shotgunfuneralchi/ **************** These artists are part of the upcoming Blissfest Festival www.blissfestfestival.org Faux Paws "Montauk" www.thefaupawsmusic.com HuDost "Recovery" - Anthems Of Home www.hudost.com Twisted Pine "Don't Come Over Tonight" - Right Now www.twistedpineband.com Donna The Buffalo "Top Shelf" - Dance In The Street www.donnathebuffalo.com Le Vent Du Nord "Vos Amities La Belle" - 20 Printemps www.leventdunord.com ********************** Professor Louie & The Crowmatix "Work It Out" - Strike Up The Band www.professorlouie.com Colour Film "Told You So" - Half An Hour www.colourfilm.ca Cuff The Duke "Got You On The Run" - Breaking Dawn www.cufftheduke.ca Whiskey Treaty show "Rose On The Vine" - Band Together www.thewhiskeytreaty.com Cole Quest & THe City Pickers "If I Still Had You" - Self [En]Titled www.colequest.com The Denim Daddies "Grandpa Was A Carpenter" - Northern Goods www.thedenimdaddies.com The Goddamsels "Same Damn Thing" - www.thegoddamsels.com Sammy Volkov & Dana Wylie "Saw The End Before We Started" - The Day Had To Come www.sammyvolkov.com www.danawylie.net Jed & The Valentine "Left In June" - Awake! www.jedandthevalentine.com Closing music: Geoffrey Armes "Vrikshashana (The Tree)" - Spirit Dwelling www.geoffreyarmes.com Running time: 3 hours, 58 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Nous allons ouvrir un gros dossier :  "Crossroad blues ». Cet épisode va nous permettre de parler du morceau mythique et fondateur « Crossroad» ou crossroad blues et l'histoire des début discographique du blues, De Cream le premier supergroupe de l'histoire du rock, et pour finir  du mythe de Robert Johnson et du ramassis de conneries qui l'accompagnent. Cet épisode sera donc en 3 parties…. PLAYLIST The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites ?" "One O' Them Things" The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues" Ciro's Club Coon Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues" Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues", Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues" Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues" Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues" Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues" Blind Blake, "Southern Rag" Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues" Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love" Son House, Mississippi County Farm Blues" Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues" Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" Charlie Patton, "Poor Me" The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World" Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues" The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" Robert Johnson, "Crossroads" Willie Brown, "M&O Blues" Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin' Charlie Patton, "34 Blues" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right" Alexis Korner et Davey Graham, "3/4 AD" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)" Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)" " At the Jazz Band Ball" The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission" Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There" The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)" The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty" Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm" Bande Annonce : Gonks Go Beat !

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 --

When Joel and Ethan Coen needed help with the soundtrack for their fabulous 2000 film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? they turned to respected artist/producer T-Bone Burnett, a famous champion of long-forgotten folk music. Thinking about how the film was to be set in Depression-era Mississippi and to open with a scene of an escape from a prison chain-gang, Burnett studied some legendary field recordings by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. There he found a gem.From the Library of Congress archives, Burnett unearthed Lomax's September 1959 recordings at Mississippi's Parchman Farm State Penitentiary. Among them was a work song called “Po' Lazarus” led by convict James Carter. It perfectly fit the opening moments of the movie.Later, after the great box office success of O Brother and then rocketing sales of the resulting soundtrack album, The New York Times told the story of how Lomax's daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis helped Burnett locate James Carter. Their search led them to an apartment in Chicago, where they presented Carter with a $20,000 royalty check. He was astonished. He said he couldn't even remember making the recording for Lomax 43 years earlier.About the SongOn that autumn day in 1959, Carter and his fellow inmates performed a typical work song for Lomax, meaning it was sung at a tempo that matched the task, such as breaking rocks in the hot sun. Its plodding rhythm perfectly suited Carter's bluesy treatment of the tune.In the following decades, his melancholy rendering was echoed in dozens of new versions, from those recorded by Dave van Ronk and Bob Dylan, by Ian & Sylvia and Buffy Sainte Marie, by Sparky Rucker and the Carolina Chocolate Drops.Understandably, most of those versions presented the story of Lazarus as a tragic tale of a man who escapes a prison farm, only to be hunted, caught and gunned down by a sheriff with a .45.Our Take on the TuneBut the song can be done in a diametrically different way. It can be turned from a sad tale of loss into a defiant — ultimately almost triumphant — story of rebellion and resistance. This is the Lazarus we like. The inspiration for The Flood's take on this tune comes from a seminal 1961 Folkways album by Rolf Cahn and Eric von Schmidt.On that record — made just three years after Lomax's visit to Parchman Farm — von Schmidt sings “Lazarus” to his own melody (he didn't remember the original tune). Also he starts the story, not at the usual point — with the high sheriff searching for the escapee — but rather with the angry protest that led to Lazarus' flight in the first place. (“Lazarus, my old partner, walked on the commissary counter, then he walked away.”) But what's going on here?“When prison food and other conditions became too much for a man,” Rolf Cahn wrote in the liner notes for their album, “he would literally walk on the counter, kicking the food onto the floor. Since this resulted in violent objections from other convicts, as well as thorough preventative measures from the guards, only a very tough and very angry man would ‘walk on the commissary counter.'”The Flood's “Lazarus” uses von Schmidt's melody as well as his faster, more insistent rhythm and most of his lyrics. Then we also stir in a little something of our own. We opt to end the song by returning to Lazarus' overriding spirit of defiance. We offer a flashback to his counter-walking protest, then we depart with a prediction of an uprising by his old partners “next sunny day.”More Folk Music, PleaseBy the way, if folk music is your thing, you might like to tune in the Folk Channel in The Flood free music streaming service, Radio Floodango.Something like six or seven dozen song are waiting for you on the playlist there; if you'd like it can be a day-long soundtrack. Click here to turn us on! 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 part four of our episode on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation we review the causes of the Civil War, and the momentous events of the 1850s, especially the Fugutive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, which rallied northern opinion against the expansion of slavery, and the southerners who insisted on that expansion--even into the North. Part 4: The War to Expand Slavery Audio Clips: Richard Blackett, “The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law,” talk given to the The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkzMFXlyjqo&t=164s   Musical Clips: “Early in the Mornin',” Prisoners of Parchman Farm, Louisiana (1947): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsiYfk5RV_Q Bibliography: David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (Harper, 1976) Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford, 1970) Richard Blackett, The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and Politics of Slavery (Cambridge Press, 2018) Andrew Delbanco,The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin, 2018)

American slavery may have been the most successful totalitarian system in history, lasting ten generations, far longer than comparable 20th century totalitarian regimes. In some ways, slavery's success as an economic and socio-political system was that it was just brutal enough to generate effective rates of return on investment. But it became even more brutal from the beginning of the 19th century to the Civil War, in part in response to slave rebellions, and to the attacks on the institution made by abolitionists. In part three of our six part episode on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, we analyze the economic institution of slavery as practiced in the Antebellum South, and its consequences for the black and white people that lived in it. And borrowing from the American writer James Baldwin, we try and understand why this institution led to so many racial attitudes that informed Lincoln's time--and our own. Part 3: Slavery and Human Rights Audio Clips: James Baldwin, “You're the Nigger” (1963): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My5FLO50hNM Music Clips: “Long John,” Prisoners of Darrington State Prison Farm, Texas (1933/34?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G5KtQynWvc “St. Louis Blues,” Bessie Smith (1929): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bo3f_9hLkQ “I Be So Happy When The Sun Goes Down,” Ed Lewis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-zlSq4mWiE “CC Rider Blues,” Ma Rainey (1924): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trtxZgF3Dns “Early in the Mornin',” Prisoners of Parchman Farm, Louisiana (1947): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsiYfk5RV_Q “Berta, Berta,” Prisoners of Parchman Farm, Louisiana (1947):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWWgN7837Tk “Stackolee,” Woody Guthrie (1944): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccgyJQJEMsM Bibliography: Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Vintage, 1976) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Slavery in Black and White: Race and Class in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (Cambridge, 2008) Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations On Cotton And Slavery In The American Slave States, 1853-1861 (1861; Bedford/St. Martin's 2014) Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (Yale, 2015) George Fitzhugh, Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters (1857; Kindle, 2015) Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981; edited by C. Vann Woodward) J.H. Ingraham, The South-West By a Yankee. In Two Volumes. (1835; Kindle, 2017) Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001) Richard Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Singles Going Around-  Sunshine IcecreamJimi Hendrix- "Record Plant 2X"The Rolling Stones- "I'm A King Bee"Jerry Lee Lewis- "Crazy Arms"Smokey Hogg- "Good Morning Little School Girl"Captain Beefheart- "Clear Spot" (Instrumental)The Byrds- "Bad Night At The Whiskey"Chris Norman & Suzi Quatro- "Stumblin In"The White Stripes- "Ball and Biscuit"The Beach Boys- "Surf's Up"Charlie Feathers- "Bottle To The Baby"AC/DC- "Problem Child"The Doors with Albert King - "Who Do You Love"John Mayall's Blues Breakers- "Parchman Farm"The Rolling Stones- "I Just Wanna Make Love To You"The Beatles- "Day Tripper"Jimi Hendrix- "My Friend"Jose Feliciano- "California Dreamin"*All selecions taken from vinyl.

In 1940, bluesman Bukka White recorded "Parchman Farm Blues," a lament about being imprisoned in the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary (2:30). Insightful lyrics, impassioned vocals, great slide guitar, and some nice accompaniment from Washboard Sam to boot! Even though he denied it, jazzman Mose Allison adapted White's song in 1958, titling it "Parchman Farm" and giving the song a controversial punchline (43:43). His version was an unlikely dance hit amongst the British Mods, with an insistent piano riff, solid rhythm section backing, and lots of hipster irony. In 1966, The Blues Breakers took the song on, with John Mayall's harmonica in place of the piano, another great rhythm section (including future Fleetwood Mac-er John McVie on bass), and Eric Clapton in the back, reading his Beano comic book. Finally, back to the States to hear The Traits,  with Johnny Winter, who shreds on guitar and vocals mere months before he finds fame at Woodstock (1:38:59).  Drink some wine, sit on Number 9, and open your textbooks ...

Jack is invited to talk with a group of inmates at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. An experience that leads to deep reflections about family, and life's twisted paths. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hiram Johnson is a former policeman who decided to use his investigative skills on his own family. He grew up knowing nothing about this father's ancestry. In his quest for answers, he uncovered a murder case and an incarceration in the notorious Parchman Farm prison that would change the course of his family's future. Hiram's written a book about his journey called: Reason to Fight: A Search for Truth. This interview was first broadcast on 5th December 2019. Presenter: Emily Webb Producer: Maryam Maruf Picture: Hiram Johnson holding a photo of his father Credit: Courtesy of Hiram Johnson

Hiram Johnson is a former policeman who decided to use his investigative skills on his own family. He grew up knowing nothing about this father's ancestry. In his quest for answers, he uncovered a murder case and an incarceration in the notorious Parchman Farm prison that would change the course of his family's future. Hiram's written a book about his journey called: Reason to Fight: A Search for Truth. This interview was first broadcast on 5th December 2019. Presenter: Emily Webb Producer: Maryam Maruf Picture: Hiram Johnson holding a photo of his father Credit: Courtesy of Hiram Johnson

Tune into Chalkboard Chat during the month of July for “Mississippi Prison Education & Reentry”, 3-part episode series, as we discuss education and re-entry programs for incarcerated individuals. On this episode, we chat with Dr. Linda Keena, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Mississippi about her implementation of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative curriculum at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP), also known as Parchman Farm, as part of a pre-release program. We also sit down with Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative Founder and CEO Gary Schoeniger, to discuss his entrepreneurial mindset education. For more information about MPB Education visit: education.mpbonline.org. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tune into Chalkboard Chat during the month of July for “Mississippi Prison Education & Reentry”, 3-part episode series, as we discuss education and re-entry programs for incarcerated individuals. On the next episode, we chat with Dr. Linda Keena, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Mississippi about her implementation of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative curriculum at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP), also known as Parchman Farm, as part of a pre-release program. We also sit down with Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative Founder and CEO Gary Schoeniger, to discuss his entrepreneurial mindset education. Episode airing Friday, July 16, 2021. For more information about MPB Education visit: education.mpbonline.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tune into Chalkboard Chat during the month of July for “Mississippi Prison Education & Reentry”, 3-part episode series, as we discuss education and re-entry programs for incarcerated individuals. On this episode, we chat with Mississippi Humanities Council's Assistant Director, Carol Andersen and Project Coordinator for Prison Education, Carla Falkner about the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award to support Community College Education in Mississippi Prisons. We also sit down with Dr. Ben Cloyd, Vice President for Effectiveness and Enrollment at Mississippi Delta Community College, to discuss his administrative role implementing and monitoring the HEP (Higher Education in Prison) program at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. For more information about MPB Education visit: https://education.mpbonline.org/. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cuando se hace referencia a discos de culto, se abusa del término “seminal”, pero en el caso del John Mayall Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton de 1966 se queda corto, porque es la obra fundamental y piedra fundacional del boom del british blues en los sesenta. Ricardo Portmán nos cuenta su historia. Escucharemos All Your Love, Hideaway, Little Girl, Double Crossing Time, What’d I Say, Key to Love, Parchman Farm, Have You Heard, Ramblin’ On My Mind, Steppin’ Out y It Ain't Right + Bonus tracks.

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’ve used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks’ Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don’t want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a record that has often been called “the first heavy metal record”, one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We’re going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We’re going to look at the Kinks, and at “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older — their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray’s thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she’d had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it’s possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing “Apache”, Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins’ version of “Malaguena”: [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Malaguena”] Ray’s newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them — and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things. And it wasn’t just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy’s tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Did You Leave Heaven?”] Like Broonzy’s earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians — you’ll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton — but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation’s taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy’s performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him — even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet — though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing “No Trespassing” by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, “No Trespassing”] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin’ Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start’s mother thought the young lad’s raspy voice was so awful she wouldn’t let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn’t like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children’s parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn’t see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave’s songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling — he was kicked out for “Teddy Boy behaviour”, but his main problem was that he didn’t feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people. Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society’s showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones’ early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band’s repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece “Honky Tonk Train Blues”, which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby’s Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] But while the group were extremely good musicians — their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies — Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Ramrod”] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”, which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as “Big Bill Broonzy with drums”: [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make. But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods — who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils — John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn’t like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and “manager” Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett’s friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils. Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal — he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn’t exactly a success — Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn’t want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn’t singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d’Abo’s band A Band of Angels — d’Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren’t. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren’t already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal — Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group’s earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song “I’m A Hog For You Baby”: [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, “I’m A Hog For You Baby”] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, “I Believed You”: [Excerpt: The Ravens, “I Believed You”] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names — at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn’t to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group’s self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage” — a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer’s insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, “That’ll be the Day”] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He’d teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for “Rock Around the Clock” for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York. Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page’s management income, Kassner would give Page’s acts songs, and any song Page’s acts wrote would be published by Kassner. Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements — independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he’d produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and one of “Music in the Air” by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe’s office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like “Charmaine” by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, “Charmaine”] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and “kinky” had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as “kinky boots”. Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, “Kinky Boots”, in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, “Kinky Boots”] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group “the Kinks”, as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks’ bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles’ gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles’ reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school — though he still didn’t think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”, and that they hadn’t yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Long Tall Sally”] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him “Congratulations, you just made a flop”, and they were correct — the Kinks’ version had none of the power of Little Richard’s original or of the Beatles’ version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as “Bits and Pieces”: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, “Bits and Pieces”] It’s also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies’ rhythm parts for him on most of the group’s early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What’s definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn’t available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn’t want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in. Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available. Avory wouldn’t play on the next few records — Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity — but he was available for the group’s first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks’ stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn’t get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were “OK as they are”. Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave’s “One Fine Day”, a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, “One Fine Day”] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray’s “I’ve Got That Feeling”: [Excerpt: The Orchids, “I’ve Got That Feeling”] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting — at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write — he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words “I”, “Me”, and “You” in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible. This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group’s next single, “You Still Want Me”, a Merseybeat pastiche that didn’t even do as well as the group’s first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Still Want Me”] The group were now in trouble. They’d had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for “You Really Got Me” many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, “As Catch Can”] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like “Parchman Farm”: [Excerpt: Mose Allison, “Parchman Farm”] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song’s final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the “you” and “me” based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn’t a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he’d pointed Ray to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] Ray was instantly inspired by “Louie Louie”, which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line “Yeah, you really got me going,” Page suggested that instead he sing “Girl, you really got me going”, partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group’s sexuality was already coming in for some question — Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word “girl” might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We’ve heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course — on “Rocket ’88”, and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich’s demo of “Do-Wah-Diddy”, but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies’ reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox — but it’s very rarely been done as well as it was on “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of “You Really Got Me” has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that’s not the case — that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song. Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn’t want it released. Pye were insistent — they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group’s management had faith in their singer’s vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn’t come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled “Oh no!” with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he’d distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] “You Really Got Me” was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option — so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, “Stop Your Sobbing”, showed a giant leap forward in Ray’s songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Stop Your Sobbing”] There may be a reason for that. “Stop Your Sobbing” features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks’ circle, Ray’s new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group’s records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we’ll see some of the influence she had on the group.

Featured in this Episode: Traditional - “Midnight Special” (:39) Memphis Jug Band - “Stealin', Stealin'” (13:30) Etta Baker - “Railroad Bill” (26:13) Big Bill Broonzy - “Glory of Love” (40:55) Charley Pride - “Roll on Mississippi” (1:01:32) Teaser: When the light of the train hits the cell windows of inmates at Mississippi's infamous Parchman Farm prison, they feel a release and comfort from their captors. Find out what made jug bands so popular in the 1930's, and the Tennessee natives at the helm of that movement. Yet another fingerpicking legend, left in obscurity until later in life, though she still managed to inspire generations of guitar players. The Ambassador of the Blues left behind a life cloaked in mystery, but this Chicago legend by way of the South left a massive mark as he carried old styles of blues through the 1950's. For far too long country music has cast aside its African American roots, but one musician blended the color lines and became one of the most decorated country musicians of the century.⁠ Follow AS: Instagram Support Independent Programming: Join the Patreon, or send a one-time donation through Venmo or PayPal "Shine A Light": Dust to Digital Source Credits: #1: Vera | NAACP | WordsMusic&Stories | Smithsonian Folkways | Songfacts #2: Jugstore | Memphis Music HOF | UCSB Library | American Blues Scene | NPS #3: Story by Glen C Herbert - The Bluegrass Situation | Music Maker | Blue Ridge Heritage Center | OurState.com #4: Cultural Equity | Broonzy.com | NPR | People's World | MS Writers & Music #5: Story by Cody Uhls - Official Website | NPR | Rolling Stone | Country Music Hall of Fame --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

Stu Levitan welcomes Matthew Levin, who scores a trifecta -- he's a Ph D from the UW, and the author of “Cold War University – Madison and the New Left in the Sixties” from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press. As to the topic - in the 1960s, the university of Wisconsin Madison was one of the four or five most important campuses for both antiwar and civil rights activism. As portrayed on the cover of Cold War University, it was at the UW in May 1966 that hundreds, at times thousands, of students peacefully occupied the administration building for a week, in a popular protest against university compliance with the military draft. It was at the UW Stock Pavilion just five months later that a handful from the Committee to End the War in Vietnam heckled Sen. Edward M. Kennedy so relentlessly that he left that stage. It was at the UW in February 1967 that hundreds of students occupied the offices of the president and chancellor – while they were there. It was at the UW on October 18, 1967, the Battle of Dow, that American police for the first time used tear gas to quell an on-campus antiwar disturbance. And it was at the UW at 3:42 on the morning of August 24, 1970 that the first fatal antiwar bombing took place – the New Year Gang's attempted destruction of the Army Mathematics Research Center in Sterling Hall, which killed physics graduate student Robert Fassnacht. In fact, Madison's importance even predates the sixties. For a time in the early 1950s, the UW was the only campus in the country where the Communist Party's Youth Labor League was still allowed. It was at the UW in 1959 that a group of graduate students started the journal Studies on the Left, almost three years before the Students for a Democratic Society adopted the Port Huron Statement. And it was Studies on the Left, not the Port Huron Statement, that would successfully define the New Left's relationship with liberals. Studies on the Left even had a major impact on race relations, publishing a 1962 essay that inspired Huey P. Newton and others to form the organization that was a forerunner to the Black Panther Party. One of many examples of UW-Madison's significance in civil rights. UW students were among the nation's first in February 1960 to picket local chain stores in support of the lunch counter sit-ins at the southern franchises. In the Summer of 61, UW students joined the Freedom Riders, and some were jailed at Parchman Farm. In early 1964, UW students were part of the sit-in at Sears department store conducted by the Congress of Racial Equality. A few months later, other students participated in Freedom Summer, registering voters in Mississippi and Tennessee – and starting an extraordinary collection of documents now held by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. In March, 1965, UW students joined the march from Selma to Montgomery. And in February 1969, black students coordinated the university's most successful political protest of the decade, the strike that led to a full degree-granting Department of Afro-American Studies. It is quite a history, historic at times, and Matthew Levin lays it out with precision and perspective in Cold War University – Madison and the New Left in the Sixties. The editor of the first book about Madison and the New Left agrees. Paul Buhle, editor of History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin 1950-1970 and the journal Radical America, says Levin has done “a masterful job,” and that he has. I know that when I was researching my book Madison in the Sixties, I relied very heavily on Cold War University for insight, accuracy and really good endnotes. As to Matthew Levin, he was born and raised in Seattle, came to Madison in 1998 for graduate work in the UW's nationally renowned History Department. Which obviously worked out well because his doctoral dissertation -- "The Sixties and the Cold War University: Madison, Wisconsin and the Development of the New Left” -- essentially become the first draft of the book. His main gig is teaching history at McFarland High School, where he is also the faculty advisor to the Sign Language Club. He also volunteers at local food pantries and GSAFE, the gay straight alliance for safe schools. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Dr. Matthew Levin.

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Hola amigos, una semana más a vueltas con los mejores discos que nunca hayamos podido escuchar. Hoy no será menos, vamos a repasar una grabación de 1966 que reunió a lo mejorcito del blues blanco de la época: John Mayall, The Bluesbreakers y Eric Clapton. Y el disco: Bluesbreakers With Eric Capton o también llamado The Beano Album porque en la portada aparece Eric Clapton leyendo un ejemplar de este famoso comic. Bueno, pues el disco suena así. Os acordareis que no hace mucho escuchamos otra espléndida versión de esta canción, All your love, a cargo de Gary More. Bueno, pues cuando Eric Clapton dejó a los Yardbirds fue para unirse, como invitado especial, a los Bluesbreakers, una banda con músicos de blues ya formados y liderados por John Mayall, justo el estilo y el lugar en el que Clapton buscaba seguir desarrollándose. La llegada de este guitarrista fenomenal, que se consumó con este trabajo, fue el elemento que necesitaban John Mayall y su banda para llegar a conseguir la popularidad tanto tiempo anhelada. Porque, en fin, y con todo respeto, los Bluesbreakers son, han sido, un grupo de segunda fila, dentro de la notoriedad de legendarias bandas que se puede encontrar en los sesenta. Clapton no solo proporcionó al grupo la fuerza necesaria para distinguirse del resto, sino que consiguió que los Bluesbreakers firmaran su álbum de estudio históricamente más reconocido. Por algo el disco lleva el nombre de Eric como si tuviera un cartel luminoso. Este disco ha sido catalogado como uno de los mejores discos de Blues Británico que se haya editado nunca. Lo que ocurre, como con todos los disco de blues, creo yo, es que ninguno llega a ser enteramente original. Pero lo que sí se puede decir de este The Beano Album es que es un disco que se destaca sobre el resto por lo entretenido que resulta su Blues. Entretenido porque, en primer el virtuosismo de Clapton desparrama talento en todo momento marcando su superioridad sobre el resto y acaparando la atención del oyente y porque es un trabajo accesible y diverso, y en esto se lleva todos los meritos John Mayall por ser el principal compositor de la banda y porque ninguna de sus canciones aburre. En esta diversidad, podemos encontrar temas en los que el papel protagonista lo tiene una extraordinaria armónica, a cargo de Mayall, como en este “Another Man” Hemos escuchado una armónica tremenda, vamos a escuchar ahora un no menos tremendo solo de batería en la versión de un clásico: What’d I Say, una canción que popularizó en su día Ray Charles. Ah, por cierto, reconoceréis enseguida un pequeño homenaje de Clapton a su amigo Harrison. Atentos. Clapton se unió a John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers en abril de 1965, pero ser marchó apenas unos meses después, para tocar con una banda inglesa llamada The Glands, en la que tocaba el piano un viejo amigo suyo, Ben Palmer pero volvió a la banda de John Mayall en noviembre. Fue durante esta etapa cuando se ganó el respeto unánime del circuito de clubes de Inglaterra. Y aunque, como hemos dicho, la aportación de Clapton al álbum fue determinante, el disco no se comercializó hasta después de su marcha definitiva de la banda. Vamos a escuchar ahora un excelente tema, “Double Crossin’ Time”. Aquí, el piano de Mayall se une a la guitarra ultrablusera de Eric para hacer una de sus mejores combinaciones. Por aquella época, 1967, apareció pintado un grafiti en la estación de metro de Islington, en Londres, que decía: “Clapton is God” (Clapton es dios). La frase, escrita por algún seguidor, fue captada en una famosa fotografía, en la que aparece un perro orinando en esa misma pared. Al respecto, Clapton dijo: “Nunca acepté que fuera el mejor guitarrista del mundo. Siempre quise ser el mejor guitarrista del mundo, pero eso es un ideal, y lo acepto como tal.” Bueno, como siempre, para los gustos los colores. Es difícil decir que tal o cual es el mejor guitarrista del mundo. En cualquier caso, que Clapton es uno entre los mejores no lo duda nadie. Y si no, oigámosle en este fantástico Steppin’ Out Clapton abandonó a los Bluesbreakers en julio de 1966 para formar Cream, uno de los primeros supergrupos y power tríos de la historia. Sus nuevos compañeros, Jack Bruce y Ginger Baker, bajo y batería respectivamente, venían ambos del grupo Graham Bond Organization. Antes de la creación de Cream, Clapton era prácticamente desconocido en los Estados Unidos, ya que abandonó The Yardbirds antes de que el sencillo «For Your Love» entrara en el Top Ten US, y aún no había tocado allí. En su época en Cream, Clapton empezó a evolucionar como cantante, compositor y guitarrista, aunque Jack Bruce era la voz predominante y el compositor de la gran mayoría de los temas junto con el letrista Pete Brown. Su primer concierto fue en el Twisted Wheel de Mánchester en julio de 1966, antes de hacer su debut oficial con dos noches en el National Jazz and Blues Festival en Windsor. Pero volvemos a nuestros disco favorito de hoy: Parchman Farm. The Bluesbreakers siguieron haciendo buenos discos en la década de los 60 después de la salida de Clapton. La historia que sigue la cuenta el propio propio Mayall: "Un día, teníamos un concierto y no teníamos guitarrista, entonces apareció Mick Taylor". Mayall quedó alucinado con el joven guitarrista, pero terminó el concierto y Taylor se marchó. John lo buscó por todos lados, hasta que consiguió localizar a Taylor y le ofreció el puesto de guitarra en su banda. Él y Taylor grabarían juntos el legendario Crusade, donde Taylor brilla con luz propia, y en 1969, el psicodélico Bare Wires. Taylor se marchó posteriormente a los Rolling Stones para a sustituir a Brian Jones. La banda deja definitivamente a existir en el 2008. Mayall estuvo en Zaragoza en febrero de 2017. Tocó en la sala Mozart del Auditorio de Zaragoza, acompañado por dos extraordinarios músicos: Greg Rzab, al bajo y Jay Davenport a la batería. La crítica, en general, valoró muy positivamente el concierto pero, en mi opinión, fue un fiasco. He visto a Mayall en cuatro ocasiones, tres de ellas en Zaragoza y una en Madrid. En tres ocasiones salí de los conciertos levitando, en volandas de unas bandas que me dejaron traspuesto, habiendo disfrutado en los tres casos de unas guitarras bluseras inimitables. No fue así en la última ocasión. Yo sé que, a estas alturas, el Sr. Mayall no tiene que demostrarme nada. Pero uno espera del artista una puesta en escena un poco más generosa que la que vimos en la Mozart. Baste decir que gran parte del peso del espectáculo estuvo, afortunadamente, a cargo del gran contrabajista Greg Rzab. Dicho esto, John Mayall me sigue pareciendo un artista excepcional y en particular, este disco. Nos despedimos por hoy con un blues clásico en toda regla. Una muestra más de la calidad de este álbum. “Ramblin’On My Mind” Amigas, amigos, ha sido un placer, como siempre, acompañaros un rato con buena música, blues de calidad a cargo de grandes músicos. Espero que os haya gustado y que no tengáis ningún reparo para, el próximo jueves, acudir a nuestra cita. Aquí tendréis más música, más músicos y más historias. Entre tanto… ¡¡¡BUENAS VIBRACIONES!!!

Hola amigos, una semana más a vueltas con los mejores discos que nunca hayamos podido escuchar. Hoy no será menos, vamos a repasar una grabación de 1966 que reunió a lo mejorcito del blues blanco de la época: John Mayall, The Bluesbreakers y Eric Clapton. Y el disco: Bluesbreakers With Eric Capton o también llamado The Beano Album porque en la portada aparece Eric Clapton leyendo un ejemplar de este famoso comic. Bueno, pues el disco suena así. Os acordareis que no hace mucho escuchamos otra espléndida versión de esta canción, All your love, a cargo de Gary More. Bueno, pues cuando Eric Clapton dejó a los Yardbirds fue para unirse, como invitado especial, a los Bluesbreakers, una banda con músicos de blues ya formados y liderados por John Mayall, justo el estilo y el lugar en el que Clapton buscaba seguir desarrollándose. La llegada de este guitarrista fenomenal, que se consumó con este trabajo, fue el elemento que necesitaban John Mayall y su banda para llegar a conseguir la popularidad tanto tiempo anhelada. Porque, en fin, y con todo respeto, los Bluesbreakers son, han sido, un grupo de segunda fila, dentro de la notoriedad de legendarias bandas que se puede encontrar en los sesenta. Clapton no solo proporcionó al grupo la fuerza necesaria para distinguirse del resto, sino que consiguió que los Bluesbreakers firmaran su álbum de estudio históricamente más reconocido. Por algo el disco lleva el nombre de Eric como si tuviera un cartel luminoso. Este disco ha sido catalogado como uno de los mejores discos de Blues Británico que se haya editado nunca. Lo que ocurre, como con todos los disco de blues, creo yo, es que ninguno llega a ser enteramente original. Pero lo que sí se puede decir de este The Beano Album es que es un disco que se destaca sobre el resto por lo entretenido que resulta su Blues. Entretenido porque, en primer el virtuosismo de Clapton desparrama talento en todo momento marcando su superioridad sobre el resto y acaparando la atención del oyente y porque es un trabajo accesible y diverso, y en esto se lleva todos los meritos John Mayall por ser el principal compositor de la banda y porque ninguna de sus canciones aburre. En esta diversidad, podemos encontrar temas en los que el papel protagonista lo tiene una extraordinaria armónica, a cargo de Mayall, como en este “Another Man” Hemos escuchado una armónica tremenda, vamos a escuchar ahora un no menos tremendo solo de batería en la versión de un clásico: What’d I Say, una canción que popularizó en su día Ray Charles. Ah, por cierto, reconoceréis enseguida un pequeño homenaje de Clapton a su amigo Harrison. Atentos. Clapton se unió a John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers en abril de 1965, pero ser marchó apenas unos meses después, para tocar con una banda inglesa llamada The Glands, en la que tocaba el piano un viejo amigo suyo, Ben Palmer pero volvió a la banda de John Mayall en noviembre. Fue durante esta etapa cuando se ganó el respeto unánime del circuito de clubes de Inglaterra. Y aunque, como hemos dicho, la aportación de Clapton al álbum fue determinante, el disco no se comercializó hasta después de su marcha definitiva de la banda. Vamos a escuchar ahora un excelente tema, “Double Crossin’ Time”. Aquí, el piano de Mayall se une a la guitarra ultrablusera de Eric para hacer una de sus mejores combinaciones. Por aquella época, 1967, apareció pintado un grafiti en la estación de metro de Islington, en Londres, que decía: “Clapton is God” (Clapton es dios). La frase, escrita por algún seguidor, fue captada en una famosa fotografía, en la que aparece un perro orinando en esa misma pared. Al respecto, Clapton dijo: “Nunca acepté que fuera el mejor guitarrista del mundo. Siempre quise ser el mejor guitarrista del mundo, pero eso es un ideal, y lo acepto como tal.” Bueno, como siempre, para los gustos los colores. Es difícil decir que tal o cual es el mejor guitarrista del mundo. En cualquier caso, que Clapton es uno entre los mejores no lo duda nadie. Y si no, oigámosle en este fantástico Steppin’ Out Clapton abandonó a los Bluesbreakers en julio de 1966 para formar Cream, uno de los primeros supergrupos y power tríos de la historia. Sus nuevos compañeros, Jack Bruce y Ginger Baker, bajo y batería respectivamente, venían ambos del grupo Graham Bond Organization. Antes de la creación de Cream, Clapton era prácticamente desconocido en los Estados Unidos, ya que abandonó The Yardbirds antes de que el sencillo «For Your Love» entrara en el Top Ten US, y aún no había tocado allí. En su época en Cream, Clapton empezó a evolucionar como cantante, compositor y guitarrista, aunque Jack Bruce era la voz predominante y el compositor de la gran mayoría de los temas junto con el letrista Pete Brown. Su primer concierto fue en el Twisted Wheel de Mánchester en julio de 1966, antes de hacer su debut oficial con dos noches en el National Jazz and Blues Festival en Windsor. Pero volvemos a nuestros disco favorito de hoy: Parchman Farm. The Bluesbreakers siguieron haciendo buenos discos en la década de los 60 después de la salida de Clapton. La historia que sigue la cuenta el propio propio Mayall: "Un día, teníamos un concierto y no teníamos guitarrista, entonces apareció Mick Taylor". Mayall quedó alucinado con el joven guitarrista, pero terminó el concierto y Taylor se marchó. John lo buscó por todos lados, hasta que consiguió localizar a Taylor y le ofreció el puesto de guitarra en su banda. Él y Taylor grabarían juntos el legendario Crusade, donde Taylor brilla con luz propia, y en 1969, el psicodélico Bare Wires. Taylor se marchó posteriormente a los Rolling Stones para a sustituir a Brian Jones. La banda deja definitivamente a existir en el 2008. Mayall estuvo en Zaragoza en febrero de 2017. Tocó en la sala Mozart del Auditorio de Zaragoza, acompañado por dos extraordinarios músicos: Greg Rzab, al bajo y Jay Davenport a la batería. La crítica, en general, valoró muy positivamente el concierto pero, en mi opinión, fue un fiasco. He visto a Mayall en cuatro ocasiones, tres de ellas en Zaragoza y una en Madrid. En tres ocasiones salí de los conciertos levitando, en volandas de unas bandas que me dejaron traspuesto, habiendo disfrutado en los tres casos de unas guitarras bluseras inimitables. No fue así en la última ocasión. Yo sé que, a estas alturas, el Sr. Mayall no tiene que demostrarme nada. Pero uno espera del artista una puesta en escena un poco más generosa que la que vimos en la Mozart. Baste decir que gran parte del peso del espectáculo estuvo, afortunadamente, a cargo del gran contrabajista Greg Rzab. Dicho esto, John Mayall me sigue pareciendo un artista excepcional y en particular, este disco. Nos despedimos por hoy con un blues clásico en toda regla. Una muestra más de la calidad de este álbum. “Ramblin’On My Mind” Amigas, amigos, ha sido un placer, como siempre, acompañaros un rato con buena música, blues de calidad a cargo de grandes músicos. Espero que os haya gustado y que no tengáis ningún reparo para, el próximo jueves, acudir a nuestra cita. Aquí tendréis más música, más músicos y más historias. Entre tanto… ¡¡¡BUENAS VIBRACIONES!!!

In preparation for reading Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, we explore the history and musical legacy of one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Parchman Farm.

"Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton" is the first studio album by John Mayall And The Blues Breakers which was released on July 22, 1966 by Decca, and the tracks were recorded in March and April of the same year. This album was a pioneer in the British Blues Rock movement....   For reading the whole article you can check : https://bluesrockhistory.com/f/blues-...  Tracks list :   Side 1   1. All Your Love  2. Hideaway  3. Little Girl  4. Another Man  5. Double Crossing Time  6. What's I say   Side 2   1. Key To Love  2. Parchman Farm  3. Have You Heard  4. Ramblin' On My Mind  5. Steppin' Out  6. It Ain't Right --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bluesrockhistory/support

In 1969, while attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish leader in Meridian, Mississippi, our guest was ambushed by law enforcement and shot multiple times during a high-speed chase. Nearly dead from his wounds, he was arrested and sentenced to thirty years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm. Unrepentant, he and two other inmates made a daring escape from Parchman yet were tracked down by an FBI SWAT team and apprehended in hail of bullets that killed one of the convicts. It was then that he began a search for truth that led him to the Bible and a reading of the gospels. Hear the full story as we learn the power of true love.

In 1969, while attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish leader in Meridian, Mississippi, our guest was ambushed by law enforcement and shot multiple times during a high-speed chase. Nearly dead from his wounds, he was arrested and sentenced to thirty years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm. Unrepentant, he and two other inmates made a daring escape from Parchman yet were tracked down by an FBI SWAT team and apprehended in hail of bullets that killed one of the convicts. It was then that he began a search for truth that led him to the Bible and a reading of the gospels. Hear the full story as we learn the power of true love.

As an ordinary high school student in the 1960s, Tom Tarrants became deeply unsettled by the social upheaval of the era. In response, he turned for answers to extremist ideology and was soon utterly radicalized. Before long, he became involved in the reign of terror spread by Mississippi's dreaded White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, described by the FBI as the most violent right-wing terrorist organization in America.In 1969, while attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish leader in Meridian, Mississippi, Tom was ambushed by law enforcement and shot multiple times during a high-speed chase. Nearly dead from his wounds, he was arrested and sentenced to thirty years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm. Unrepentant, Tom and two other inmates made a daring escape from Parchman yet were tracked down by an FBI SWAT team and apprehended in hail of bullets that killed one of the convicts. Tom spent the next three years alone in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell. There he began a search for truth that led him to the Bible and a reading of the gospels, resulting in his conversion to Jesus Christ and liberation from the grip of racial hatred and violence.Astounded by the change in Tom, many of the very people who worked to put him behind bars began advocating for his release. After serving eight years of a 35-year sentence, Tom left prison. He attended college, moved to Washington, DC, and became copastor of a racially mixed church. He went on to earn a doctorate and became the president of the C. S. Lewis Institute, where he devoted himself to helping others become wholehearted followers of Jesus.A dramatic story of radical transformation, Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love demonstrates that hope is not lost even in the most tumultuous of times, even those similar to our own.Support the show (http://www.faithandlaw.org/donate)

Allyson Baker of Dirty Ghosts jumps on the podcast to talk about the new Dirty Ghosts single - Strange Weather. The chat also covers her previous band Parchman Farm, Katon W. De Pena, Derrick Beckles, moving to San Francisco and The Red Room Orchestra.

Listen closely to the start of the 2015 hit "Hey Mama" by David Guetta, Nicki Minaj, Afrojack, and Bebe Rexha and you'll hear voices intoning a chant: "Be my woman, girl, I'll be your man." It's sample from a 1948 recording called "Rosie," and it's the propulsive hook of "Hey Mama," driving the song to over a billion views on YouTube. The voices in the sample belong to CB Cook and ten other unidentified prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, aka Parchman Farm. These men never got credit for their work, even though it's been reused by everyone from Guetta to the Animals to Nina Simone. We investigate the story of "Rosie" to understand an inequity that lies at the heart of the music business and our national consciousness. Songs Discussed David Guetta ft Nicki Minaj, Bebe Rexha, and Afrojack - Hey Mama CB Cook and Axe Gang - Rosie The Animals - Inside Looking Out Grand Funk Railroad - Inside Looking OUt KRS-One - Sound of Da Police Jay Z - Takeover Nina Simone - Be My Husband Check out Kembrew McLeod's and Peter DiCola's book Creative License to learn more about the law and culture of digital sampling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 33. Back to the origins, the MODern Jazz is considered so cool by the Mods and still on the spot nowadays. The track is "Parchman Farm" by Mose Allison **Puntata 33. Si ritorna alle origini e si parla e si ascolta Mod jazz, uno dei generi più apprezzati dai MODS. Il brano è "Parchman Farm" di Mose Allison

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined from Jackson, Mississippi by veteran community organizers Pauline and Frederick Rogers. Pauline is President of the RECH Foundation or Reaching and Educating for Community Hope, and cofounder of that organization along with her husband Fred. Pauline and Frederick were both formerly incarcerated at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. Together they founded RECH as a prison and reentry ministry whose projects include the Wendy Hatcher Transitional Home and the Mississippi Freedom Letters Campaign in collaboration with historian and activist Garrett Felber, assistant professor of history the University of Mississippi and author of the book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, out now from University of North Carolina Press.  After Pauline and Fred share a bit of how their lives have been impacted by the prison system, they outline the broad range of services and advocacy they are able to engage in through the RECH Foundation. Pauline, Fred and Garrett discuss the deepening prison crisis in Mississippi, where 19 inmates have died in state prisons since the end of last year, most of them in the notorious Parchman facility. They explain why the Mississippi prison system and especially Parchman have a particular reputation for brutality, detailing both the history of the institution and the current conditions inmates endure. The crew ends by giving their assessment of state and federal government responses to the crisis as well as the double-edged sword of celebrity-driven media attention that has recently brought Parchman into the national spotlight.  You can follow Pauline on Twitter @rechpauline, Garrett at @garrett_felber and learn more about everyone’s work at the RECH Foundation on their website.  If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!! 

Brutality and inhumanity were central to the Southern state prison farms, in their theory and their practice, and of them all, the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm was the most brutal and inhuman. Both John A. and Alan Lomax made repeated visits to Parchman, recording — under the eye of the disinterested white captains, sergeants, and warden, and the guns of the "trusty" prisoner-guards — a body of American song unmatched in its depth, dignity, and power. Folklorist and prison documentarian Bruce Jackson once said that the group work songs sung by the black inmates of the Southern penitentiary farms were means of "making it in Hell." Alan Lomax, writing in 1947, said that: "In the pen itself, we saw that the songs, quite literally kept the men alive and normal.... These songs, coming out of the filthy darkness of the pen, touched with exquisite musicality, are a testimony to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait." In this episode, spurred by the ongoing horrors being reported in the Mississippi Department of Corrections in general and at Parchman in particular, we listen back over the four decades of recordings made by the four white folklorists (the Lomaxes, Herbert Halpert, and William Ferris) who took the trouble to visit the place and document the singing of its prisoners: work songs for clearing ground, felling trees, picking cotton, or breaking rocks, as well as solo field hollers, spirituals, and blues.No one can mourn the passing of this song tradition and the system of black disenfranchisement and white supremacy that made it necessary to its singers. But, despite the 1971 class-auction lawsuit that forced federal reorganization of Parchman due to its epidemic use of "cruel and unusual punishment," it's only differently awful in 2020. In his harrowing "Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice," Michael Oshinsky provides a 1975 quote from a convict named Horace Carter, who'd been at Parchman for fifty years. What was missing in the “new” Parchman, Mr. Carter said, was “the feeling that work counted for something… awful bad as it was in most camps, that kept us tired and kept us together and made me feel better. I'm not looking to go backwards. I know the troubles at old Parchman better than any man alive. I'm 73 years old. But I look around today and see a place that makes me sad.” This episode was completed before the announcement that William Barr's Justice Department will open a civil rights investigation into conditions at Parchman. It's hard to imagine an administration with less sympathy for incarcerated people of color, but who knows, maybe, at last, Parchman Farm will be shuttered for good. “These songs are a vivid reminder of a system of social control and forced labor that has endured in the South for centuries, and I do not believe that the pattern of Southern life can be fundamentally reshaped until what lies behind these roaring, ironic choruses is understood.” —Alan Lomax, 1958For streaming audio of all of Alan Lomax's 1947, 1948, and 1959 Parchman Farm recordings, visit archive.culturalequity.org.PLAYLIST:[Bed music:] Unidentified ensemble, including Lonnie Robertson, guitar, and possibly "Black Eagle," cornet. Camp 1, April 1936. *Frank Devine and unidentified man: In the Bye and Bye. Unidentified camp, August 1933. *Bowlegs (real name unknown): Drink My Morning Tea. Camp 12, August 1933. *Unidentified men: He Never Said A Mumblin' Word. Unidentified camp, August 1933. *M.B. Barnes, Louella Dade, Passion Buckner, Alberta Turner, Bertha Riley, Lily Mallard, Christine Shannon, and Josephine Douglas: Oh Freedom. Women's camp, April 1936.*Big Charlie Butler: Diamond Joe. Unidentified camp, March 1937.[Bed music:] John Dudley: Cool Drink of Water Blues. Dairy camp, October 1959. *Mattie May Thomas: Workhouse Blues. Women's camp, May 1939.*"22" (Benny Will Richardson) and group: It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad. Camp B, November or December 1947. *Ervin Webb and group: I'm Goin' Home. Dairy camp, October 1959. *Johnny Lee Moore, Henry Mason, Ed Lewis and James Carter: Tom Devil. Camp B, October 1959.[Bed music:] James Carter and group: Poor Lazarus. Camp B, October 1959. *Unidentified prisoners: Water Boy Drowned In the Mobile Bay. Unidentified camp, August 1968. *Heuston Earms: Ain't Been Able to Get Home No More / interview. Camp B, October 1959.

Brutality and inhumanity were central to the Southern state prison farms, in their theory and their practice, and of them all, the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm was the most brutal and inhuman. Both John A. and Alan Lomax made repeated visits to Parchman, recording — under the eye of the disinterested white captains, sergeants, and warden, and the guns of the "trusty" prisoner-guards — a body of American song unmatched in its depth, dignity, and power. 

Folklorist and prison documentarian Bruce Jackson once said that the group work songs sung by the black inmates of the Southern penitentiary farms were means of "making it in Hell." Alan Lomax, writing in 1947, said that: "In the pen itself, we saw that the songs, quite literally kept the men alive and normal.... These songs, coming out of the filthy darkness of the pen, touched with exquisite musicality, are a testimony to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait." In this episode, spurred by the ongoing horrors being reported in the Mississippi Department of Corrections in general and at Parchman in particular, we listen back over the four decades of recordings made by the four white folklorists (the Lomaxes, Herbert Halpert, and William Ferris) who took the trouble to visit the place and document the singing of its prisoners: work songs for clearing ground, felling trees, picking cotton, or breaking rocks, as well as solo field hollers, spirituals, and blues.No one can mourn the passing of this song tradition and the system of black disenfranchisement and white supremacy that made it necessary to its singers. But, despite the 1971 class-auction lawsuit that forced federal reorganization of Parchman due to its epidemic use of "cruel and unusual punishment," it's only differently awful in 2020. In his harrowing "Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice," Michael Oshinsky provides a 1975 quote from a convict named Horace Carter, who’d been at Parchman for fifty years. What was missing in the “new” Parchman, Mr. Carter said, was “the feeling that work counted for something… awful bad as it was in most camps, that kept us tired and kept us together and made me feel better. I’m not looking to go backwards. I know the troubles at old Parchman better than any man alive. I’m 73 years old. But I look around today and see a place that makes me sad.”  

This episode was completed before the announcement that William Barr's Justice Department will open a civil rights investigation into conditions at Parchman. It's hard to imagine an administration with less sympathy for incarcerated people of color, but who knows, maybe, at last, Parchman Farm will be shuttered for good. 

“These songs are a vivid reminder of a system of social control and forced labor that has endured in the South for centuries, and I do not believe that the pattern of Southern life can be fundamentally reshaped until what lies behind these roaring, ironic choruses is understood.” —Alan Lomax, 1958For streaming audio of all of Alan Lomax's 1947, 1948, and 1959 Parchman Farm recordings, visit research.culturalequity.org.



PLAYLIST:[Bed music:] Unidentified ensemble, including Lonnie Robertson, guitar, and possibly "Black Eagle," cornet. Camp 1, April 1936. *Frank Devine and unidentified man: In the Bye and Bye. Unidentified camp, August 1933. *Bowlegs (real name unknown): Drink My Morning Tea. Camp 12, August 1933. *Unidentified men: He Never Said A Mumblin' Word. Unidentified camp, August 1933. *M.B. Barnes, Louella Dade, Passion Buckner, Alberta Turner, Bertha Riley, Lily Mallard, Christine Shannon, and Josephine Douglas: Oh Freedom. Women's camp, April 1936.*Big Charlie Butler: Diamond Joe. Unidentified camp, March 1937. [Bed music:] John Dudley: Cool Drink of Water Blues. Dairy camp, October 1959. 

*Mattie May Thomas: Workhouse Blues. Women's camp, May 1939.*"22" (Benny Will Richardson) and group: It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad. Camp B, November or December 1947.

*Ervin Webb and group: I'm Goin' Home. Dairy camp, October 1959. *Johnny Lee Moore, Henry Mason, Ed Lewis and James Carter: Tom Devil. Camp B, October 1959.[Bed music:] James Carter and group: Poor Lazarus. Camp B, October 1959. *Unidentified prisoners: Water Boy Drowned In the Mobile Bay. Unidentified camp, August 1968. *Heuston Earms: Ain't Been Able to Get Home No More / interview. Camp B, October 1959.

Sara and Misasha bring you the second part of their Criminal Justice series and another big issue affecting the 2020 Presidential election. This episode focuses on the juvenile. Pause for a moment and think about someone you know that’s a juvenile. Maybe you think of your kid, or maybe you think of yourself at 13. What were you like? Did you ever make any poor choices? Listen in for a shocking history lesson and find out how old laws are impacting our children in the court system even today. Show Highlights: Being 13 is a difficult age. You often think you know everything, how to do everything, hormones are raging, you encounter peer pressure. What you don’t understand when you’re 13 is the consequences of your actions. There’s a reason why car rental companies do not rent to those under the age of 25.  Your brain does not fully develop until you’re 25. Misasha reads from an article regarding Jim Crow era laws resulting in a high rate of black kids being charged as adults in the State of Mississippi and shares her worst fears. She shares a story of a young teenager named Isaiah and his experience in the adult court system. In the last 25 years, nearly 5,000 Mississippi children have been charged as adults. Three out of every four are black. “Convict leasing”, where the State loaned out its prison population to work on plantations and build railroads, became popular after slavery but was outlawed at the end of the Civil War. In the late 1880’s state laws made no distinction between punishing children and punishing adults. By 1880, children and adolescents made up about one quarter of the prison population. As a result of national pressure, the State of Mississippi ended convict leasing in 1890, but it gave way to the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. Even the youngest inmates at Parchman picked cotton and cultivated other cash crops for the state’s profits while incurring lashings from “Black Annie”, the name given to a thick leather strap. By the time the state got around to making separate jails for kids in 1916, the Governor was a well-known klansman by the name of Theodore Bilbo. Bilbo created so-called “training schools,” where the state could jail kids charged with breaking the law, homeless kids, abandoned kids, and even kids the courts thought might one day be criminals. More than two decades later, the 1940 Legislature created a separate court system for kids and at the same time permitted children as young as 14 to face criminal charges in adult court. Lawmakers wanted to take it even further. In 1942, the all-white body wrote a bill to permit children of any age to face criminal charges in adult court. But then-Governor Paul Johnson, Sr., vetoed this bill, arguing that the law was redundant. He already had approved $60,000 – nearly $1 million by today’s standards – to fund a “negro reformatory at Oakley State Farm.” This basically meant that there was no need to criminally prosecute younger kids when the state had a new plan in place to send black kids to Oakley. Laws passed in 1946 permitted kids as young as 13 to face criminal prosecution as adults. Their legacy remains seven decades later in the form of “original jurisdiction” laws. They are not unique to Mississippi: Twenty-six states automatically put children into the adult system at the moment of arrest for certain charges. Sara shares the impact on your brain of time spent in isolation, and the states that still allow solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure for juveniles: Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Texas, and Wyoming. Solitary confinement of juveniles is prohibited under the Federal Bureau of Prisons. There is no evidence that solitary confinement improves behavior. There is, however, a lot of evidence that shows that it is harmful to children. There are approximately 67,000 prisoners placed in these conditions in the United States and Canada at any given time. Of the kids charged as adults who have gone before a Mississippi judge in the last quarter-century, nearly 75% are black. While boys make up most of the system, the racial disparity among Mississippi girls in the system also is stunning: 60% are black. White kids are over twice as likely to get a plea bargain that’s known as a “non-adjudication of guilt.” The laws need to change, and we should reflect on what the President can do, what Congress needs to do, and how the court systems can address these issues. NEXT WEEK:  Sara and Misasha share their thoughts on key issues relating to the criminal justice system surrounding the 2020 election. Resources / Links: PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, RATE & REVIEW US! Dear White Women Podcast GET ON OUR INSIDER’S LIST! Sign up for our weekly emails! Dear White Women Website Email: hello@dearwhitewomen.com Please Give Us a Like on Facebook! Instagram Follow Us! Twitter Follow Us! Suggested Reading Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice by David M. Oshinsky Before We Were Yours: A Novel by Lisa Wingate

A band's lineage can often be underrated, so today we thought we would discuss some of the offshoots of bands/artist we've loved over the years.Jelly Jam – ProfitSonny Landreth – Bound By The BluesElvis Costello with Bill Frisell – Deep Dead BlueSea Level –Sea LevelJohn Scofield – Combo 66Jason Falkner – Presents Author UnknownBlue Murder – Blue MurderBadlands – BadlandsCactus – Cactus

What is Parchman Farm? How did the state of Mississippi get into the business of sharecropping? Explore these questions in Bukka White's "Parchman Farm Blues."

Interview of Julia Simon about her book, Time in the Blues, on the Music Preserves Foundation Stage at the Doheny Blues Festival in May 2019. The interview covers sharecropping, Parchman Farm, convict labor and how they shape time in the blues.

Topical, protest, and resistance songs from Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, Trinidad by way of New York City, Oklahoma by way of California, and the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm.1. Sarah Ogan Gunning: I Hate the Capitalist System. NYC, November 1937. 2. Hobart Smith: Peg and Awl. Bluefield, Virginia, August 1959. 3. Big Bill Broonzy: Black, Brown and White Blues. Decca Studios, NYC, March 1947. 4. Lord Invader: Yankee Dollar. Town Hall, NYC, December 1947. 5. Woody Guthrie: Dust Bowl Refugees. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., March 1940. 6. Nimrod Workman: 42 Years. Mascot, Tennessee, July 1983. 7. Floyd Batts: Dangerous Blues. Parchman Farm Camp 11, Parchman, Mississippi, September 1959. 8. M.B. Barnes & prisoners: Oh Freedom. Parchman Farm Women's Camp, April 1936.

Topical, protest, and resistance songs from Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, Trinidad by way of New York City, Oklahoma by way of California, and the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. 1. Sarah Ogan Gunning: I Hate the Capitalist System. NYC, November 1937. 2. Hobart Smith: Peg and Awl. Bluefield, Virginia, August 1959. 3. Big Bill Broonzy: Black, Brown and White Blues. Decca Studios, NYC, March 1947. 4. Lord Invader: Yankee Dollar. Town Hall, NYC, December 1947. 5. Woody Guthrie: Dust Bowl Refugees. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., March 1940. 6. Nimrod Workman: 42 Years. Mascot, Tennessee, July 1983. 7. Floyd Batts: Dangerous Blues. Parchman Farm Camp 11, Parchman, Mississippi, September 1959. 8. M.B. Barnes & prisoners: Oh Freedom. Parchman Farm Women's Camp, April 1936.  

Starting off the show with our Opening Salvo and the Rolling Stones- No Expectations in glorious MONO, baby! The Stones are supported by none other than Terry Reid with "Tinker Tailor" off his killer 1st LP BANG BANG, YOU'RE TERRY REID. Tricky Dickie Nixon lets us know that he really wanted to end the War in Vietnam...right...war was way too profitable back then. Reid is supported by a band called Freedom and their very first 45 rpm from 1968 "Glimpse of You" on the Mercury label. Freedom sported 2 ex-Procol Harum alumni: Ray Royer [guitar] and Bobby Harrison [drums]. They both played on A WHITER SHADE OF PALE before jumping ship...hence the band name FREEDOM. The Fugs announce that "The Garden Is Open" for the summer! and Sweden is represented by one of their latest supergroups SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIFE...or STOOL for the hipcats. Set 2 starts off with one of my newer "discoveries" EYELIDS out of Portland featuring members of THE DECEMBERISTS, THE JICKS, etc. Produced by Peter Buck who knows cool shit when he hears it. JOE STRUMMER & THE MESCALEROS a painfully ignored band fills the #2 slot with "Coma Girl" off STREETCORE [2003] RIP the great Stummer! One of the coolest Jazz / Blues tracks ever follows with PARCHMAN FARM by Mose Allison...nobody's hipper than Mose...and speaking of hip JIM MORRISON & The Doors with "The W.A.S.P. [Texas Radio] from their last offering dated 1971....almost to time to blast out of the studio we clean it all up with "Schmetterling" by BROSSELMACSHINE dateline Germany 1971....

In 2011, Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, and last year, she became the first woman to ever win twice. This time it was for Sing, Unburied, Sing, an American epic that earned her comparisons to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. As Leonie, a mother struggling with drug abuse, drives with her children to bring her husband home from Parchman Farm, Mississippi’s state penitentiary, she and her thirteen-year-old son Jojo are visited by two ghosts. While Leonie waits for visits from her dead brother, Jojo hears from a boy his own age, the ghost of a dead Parchman inmate who carries all the ugly history of the South with him in death.Ward is in conversation with Aminatta Forna, Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and author of five books, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning The Memory of Love and, most recently, Happiness.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781501126062Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"There is so much feeling of racial injustice around the issue of punishment. And you have to understand that those feelings have a history -- and that history is Parchman Farm."

Mississippi Chain Gang. Danie and Carlos talk about relapse and reaching out before disaster happens. Parole and be of service to the community and others by bringing food to skid row, going into juvenile facilities; we want to set the example with our actions.   If you are formerly incarcerated and need help, shoot us a line:   Email Daniel: danielh@releasedintocaptivity.com Email Carlos: carlosc@releasedintocaptivity.com Scott Countryman: countryman447@icloud.com   ARC Mentorship Program workshops that teach peer to peer mentorship and train allies others in the community and Stanford Ride Home Program Daniel talks about his week with one of the Released Into Captivity family members in Nor Cal: going to 12-step meetings and sponsorship. Make the effort to transition with support. Life is a brand new world: paying rent, car payment, food on the table. Joshua 1:9 waiting for a jury verdict.No re-entry textbook. Daniel was a guest with Chris and Dave of The Dopey Podcast (episode 90) and Jed and Jay of Church and Other Drugs. Inside Out Writers , Sally Hamilton (ARC Ally Mentor), Jimmy Woo, and Matthew Mizel. Matthew connected us with Emma Hughes of Project Rebound Fresno. Matthew is also connecting Carlos DeLeon with Project Rebound. Cut 50, JLUSA, Glenn Martin.   Scott and Daniel discuss the effects pay differences between guards in Mississippi and California have on life in prison. Scott is the middle child of a very affluent family. Started drinking and living a rebel lifestyle to feel a part of and cool. Finds vicodin as a sophomore in high school and plays Contra loaded Hurricane Katrina fraud. Scott buys 1000 dilaudid and a gallon of promethazine and developes a huge opiate habit. Finds himself broke, ODs and faces federal charges for moving fraudulently obtained money across state line and illegal stock sales.Turtle suit, tp squares, and used cups. Part of the jail destroyed by the hurricane and they served Lunchables. Delicious breakfast biscuits in Harrison County jail. Scott receives 10 years, suspended and drug court. Fails a drug screen and receives all 10 years.  He goes to South Mississippi Correctional Institute then to Parchman Mississippi. Down on the Parchman Farm. A balanced public safety policy. 80% Mississippi prison population affiliated with “organizations” (gangs): Simon City Royals or Latin Kings (Five Point Star) , Six Point Stars (Gangster Disciples), Vice Lords. Scott touches on the corruption inside. We talk about consequences to criminal activity inside the cage. CID (Criminal Investigation Division). Cell phone consequences. The Box!!! Get to work! No one owes you shit!! Do what you say! If you don’t want change, no program can change you. Suit up and show up. Get a mentor/sponsor The Shair Podcast   www.releasedintocaptivity.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/Released2cptvty Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Releasedintocaptivity/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/releasedintocaptivity/

Hal Hartley and Justin Kawashima - "Trust (closing)" - Possible Music - From the Films (etc) of Hal Hartley Phone caller - "The great discussion, part 1" Benny Will Richardson & unidentified prisoners - "It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad" - Parchman 12/47 [These recordings were made in late 1947 at the Lambert Camp at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. Some were originally issued by Tradition on a 1958 LP entitled "Negro Prison Songs" and they are currently available on CD in two volumes - "Prison Songs" - as part of the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records.] Benny Will Richardson & unidentified prisoners - "It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad" - Parchman 12/47 Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "What Is It About?" - What Is It About?: 2/3/04, show #292 [Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, Cambodian field recording, callers.] Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "What Is It About?" - What Is It About?: 2/3/04, show #292 American Standards - "My Bathroom Is a Private Kind of Place" - Bathrooms Are Coming!! The Brothers Johnson - "Strawberry Letter #23" Guest mic - "Commercialism" Phone caller - "Whistles" Phone caller - "The great discussion, part 2" Phone caller - "Drummer" The Magnetic Fields - "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" - i Matrna Zubova - "Lampa Kuukna Bi (Dance Of The Maiden, Lampa)" - Kalmyk 8/64 [Dubbed recording by Alan Lomax from Radio Moscow archives. Lampa is the name of the girl.] Phone caller - "Ticket re-gifter" Phone caller - "Ticket re-gifter, on absurdity" Phone caller - "Singing" Van Morrison - "Tupelo Honey" - Still On Top (CD 2) Van Morrison - "Tupelo Honey" - Still On Top (CD 2) Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "Tired of hitting butterflies (Reminders to do less)" - Tired of hitting butterflies: 7/31/13, show #465 [Sample listing and audio: https://lastever.org/show/130731] Phone caller - "Blooping" Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "Tired of hitting butterflies (Reminders to do less)" - Tired of hitting butterflies: 7/31/13, show #465 Phone caller - "Last day with crazy soil scientist, last summer show" Nine Inch Nails - "Hurt" - The Downward Spiral (instrumental) Alan Watts - "The Silent Mind" Alan Watts - "Limits of Language" Pinback - "Anti-Hu" - Penelope EP Pinback - "Anti-Hu" - Penelope EP Phone caller - "The great discussion, part 3" Alan Watts - "Purpose (Now)" - Teaching Meditation https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/52030

Hal Hartley and Justin Kawashima - "Trust (closing)" - Possible Music - From the Films (etc) of Hal Hartley Phone caller - "The great discussion, part 1" Benny Will Richardson & unidentified prisoners - "It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad" - Parchman 12/47 [These recordings were made in late 1947 at the Lambert Camp at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. Some were originally issued by Tradition on a 1958 LP entitled "Negro Prison Songs" and they are currently available on CD in two volumes - "Prison Songs" - as part of the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records.] Benny Will Richardson & unidentified prisoners - "It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad" - Parchman 12/47 Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "What Is It About?" - What Is It About?: 2/3/04, show #292 [Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, Cambodian field recording, callers.] Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "What Is It About?" - What Is It About?: 2/3/04, show #292 American Standards - "My Bathroom Is a Private Kind of Place" - Bathrooms Are Coming!! The Brothers Johnson - "Strawberry Letter #23" Guest mic - "Commercialism" Phone caller - "Whistles" Phone caller - "The great discussion, part 2" Phone caller - "Drummer" The Magnetic Fields - "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" - i Matrna Zubova - "Lampa Kuukna Bi (Dance Of The Maiden, Lampa)" - Kalmyk 8/64 [Dubbed recording by Alan Lomax from Radio Moscow archives. Lampa is the name of the girl.] Phone caller - "Ticket re-gifter" Phone caller - "Ticket re-gifter, on absurdity" Phone caller - "Singing" Van Morrison - "Tupelo Honey" - Still On Top (CD 2) Van Morrison - "Tupelo Honey" - Still On Top (CD 2) Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "Tired of hitting butterflies (Reminders to do less)" - Tired of hitting butterflies: 7/31/13, show #465 [Sample listing and audio: http://lastever.org/show/130731] Phone caller - "Blooping" Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "Tired of hitting butterflies (Reminders to do less)" - Tired of hitting butterflies: 7/31/13, show #465 Phone caller - "Last day with crazy soil scientist, last summer show" Nine Inch Nails - "Hurt" - The Downward Spiral (instrumental) Alan Watts - "The Silent Mind" Alan Watts - "Limits of Language" Pinback - "Anti-Hu" - Penelope EP Pinback - "Anti-Hu" - Penelope EP Phone caller - "The great discussion, part 3" Alan Watts - "Purpose (Now)" - Teaching Meditation http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/52030