Podcasts about saddle again

The first singing cowboy of the movies—Gene Autry —was one of America's most popular stars. As the Texas native sang "Back in the Saddle Again" he was also promoting ideas that supported the New Deal and friendly relations with Mexico. His messages rang true with his fans during the Great Depression. On this episode, we unpack the ways this western folk hero, Gene Autry, used his talents to support a positive pro-America agenda.

This week the COWboys are talking about the way it used to be. Along with some fun and lively conversation on the topic, you'll also hear some great music from Dave Stamey (Used Rough), Trinity Seely (Reasons We Live Here), Red Steagall (How Green was the Grazing Back Then), and Doug Figgs (Those Old Days). There is also some great cowboy poetry this week from ​Randy Reiman (Bruce Kiskaddon's "When They've Finished Shipping Cattle in the Fall"). We'll have the ever popular Dick's Pick (Back in the Saddle Again), Cowpoke Poetry, and a whole bunch of goofin' off too!

Welcome to Season 04 Episode 01 - the "Back in the Saddle" edition - of Notes from the Aisle Seat, the podcast featuring news and information about the arts in northern Chautauqua County NY, sponsored by the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. Your host is Tom Loughlin, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair Emeritus of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia. Guests on this episode include: Mr. Rick Davis, Executive Director, 1891 Fredonia Opera House; Mr. Max Walters, Curator, Darwin R. Barker Museum, Fredonia NY; Mr. Tom Briscoe, comedian. Notes from the Aisle Seat is available from most of your favorite podcast sites, as well as on the Opera House YouTube Channel. If you enjoy this podcast, please spread the word through your social media feeds, give us a link on your website, and consider becoming a follower by clicking the "Follow" button in the upper right-hand corner of our home page. If you have an arts event you'd like to publicize, hit us up at operahouse@fredopera.org and let us know what you have! Please give us at least one month's notice to facilitate timely scheduling. Thanks for listening! Time Stamps Mr. Rick Davis - 1:35 Mr. Max Walters - 20:05 Arts Calendar - 40:40 Mr. Tom Briscoe - 43:24 Media "Back in the Saddle Again", Gene Autry and Ray Whitley, composers; performed by Gene Autry; September 1939, American Record Corporation/Vocalion 5080 Records "Bottle of Wine", Tom Paxton, composer, performed by Doc and Merle Watson for the album Then and Now, 1973 "Theme from The Endless Summer"; Gaston Georgis and John Blakeley, composers; performed by The Surf Riders, from the album Remember Malibu, 1966 "Margaritaville"; Jimmy Buffett, composer (1977), performed by Robert Greenidge, from the album A Lovely Cruise: The Steel Drum Music of Jimmy Buffett, February 2013 Artist Links Rick Davis Max Walters Grape Belt Digital Collection Tom Briscoe BECOME AN OPERA HOUSE MEMBER!      

Back in the Saddle Again   (See, this is a Western episode and "Back in the Saddle" is a song sung by a cowb...never mind.)   Some might say that it's been a long road gettin' from there to here. They might also say it's been a long time, but our time is finally near.   Well, that time is NOW! That's right Geeks, the Flagship has entered standard orbit and is beaming down a classic Star Trek episode this week: "Spectre of the Gun."   Bill & Dan have loved this episode since childhood and think it gets unfairly maligned with a good portion of Season 3. They'll tell you why everyone else is wrong and why you should give it another watch!   Plus, a recap of Trek Talks 3, new FanSets product news, and a celebration of 9 years of The Biggest Little Show in the Alpha Quadrant in the episode Bill's wife Kelly calls, "Episode Three Hundred and IT'S ABOUT F***ING TIME!"

Paul is Back in the Saddle Again. We're coming down to the final stretch of the regular football season and Paul looks at the playoff format and previews the playoffs. He thinks this year's playoffs are going to be wild wild wild and he tells us whySupport the show

DREAMS Sept 2017 De Ja Vu, Brown, Male Voice & Appear, Virginia, Red & Black, Line Dancing Oct 2017 A Boy, Back in the Saddle Again, Trippy Revelation Regarding the Name, Sterling, Baby Girl, The Last Supper Poster, Guys & Visions --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ruby-warner/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ruby-warner/support

We've got reviews from our latest Vegas trip and a few updates about the Aria food court, Tropicana's ownership change and some other stuff The post FHBM #846: Back in the Saddle Again first appeared on Five Hundy By Midnight.

This week, Alexis and Suzanne cover Season 2 Episode 18, "Back in the Saddle Again." They are both pretty appalled at how clear it is that Rory is not into Dean anymore, but Lorelai's urging keeps them together. Suzanne gets frustrated with Headmaster Charleston's failure to realize that school is part of the "real" world, and Alexis notes the beginning of Rory's pattern of avoidance that leads to a lot of problems in the future. Don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen! Join us on Instagram and TikTok @talkingfastpodcast, and send us your thoughts to talkingfastpodcast@gmail.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

1 Kgs 21:17-29 When we do evil, we get evil Mt 5:43-48 How do I love my enemies? Letters I've accumulated many Catholic items and I don't want to let them go; what should I do with them? Kathleen thanks Father for playing 'Back in the Saddle Again.' Father Simon talks about the importance of good liturgy  Word of the Day: Tax Collectors Callers How to answer friends who asking me to go to their Same-Sex wedding? What should we call 'a lot of miracles'? 'Behold your son, and behold your mother'  Does this refer to the fact about Mary being widow and possibly being stoned? 'People of Goodwill'  Doesn't everybody think they're a people of Goodwill?

This is your pop culture for S2, E18 "Back in the Saddle Again". Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brian is BAAACK! Listen or watch as he tries to get back into the swing of things and gives some local updates.   Music: Aerosmith / Back In the Saddle Again  

A parody of Gene Autry's “Back in the Saddle Again” about toilet paper shortages hitting stores once again. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A parody of Gene Autry's “Back in the Saddle Again” about toilet paper shortages hitting stores once again. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What Episode is this Really? “Back in the Saddle Again”. Reflecting back on Memorial Day, at least we remember the reason for the “Long Weekend” unlike our V.P. Brittney Aldean seems to care a lot more than V.P. Harris. This weeks shot of the week is a new one by Ol' Smokey. Bringing back some Lewis Black with a little bit called “Isis”. Should the female high school athletes have to compete with trans-gender boys? Governor DeSantis doesn't seem to think so. The anger is becoming so prevalent that flight attendants are losing teeth. The “Deep Dives” this week include some Twisted Sister “Stay Hungry” and a real dive into Rainbow including “Rock Fever” and “Stone Cold”. Are we really going to live until 150 years old? Well probably not us. I think Dr. Fauci is in trouble, we'll see. The Preacher Mans Top11 includes some great southern bands to listen too! Of course we have to cover the Hypocrisy of Governor Whitmer, she has definitely become the “Do as I say, NOT as I do” leader. Kalamazoo man catches a record setting Sturgeon in the Detroit river. Woman gives birth to a 12lb 9oz baby…OUCH!!! Be sure to order your Uranium filled “RushRooms”.

We're back!!!!   (Imagine Aerosmith's 'Back in the Saddle Again' playing in the background. It'll help).   Returning after a brief Easter Break to deal with life, Covid, the Universe and Everything, Broken Oars Podcast returns with its twentieth official episode (or 22cnd in total if we're including our one-off specials).   And have we got a guest for you?   Well, of course we have otherwise it would just be your genial hosts (the tall, posh Southern one and the short, oppressed Northern one) picking a subject and running it wildly off the rails.   Some artists (bands, groups, writers, movie-makers - pick your own poison here) can be variable in quality. For every Appetite For Destruction, there is, unfortunately, often a G n R Lies EP that should never have seen the light of day. After our last episode with Eric Murray and an outstanding run of exceptional guests, it would have been easy for us to put our feet up and do the 'What Dog Breed Would You Put In What Seats In An Eight' Episode.   Not us.   In the episode, you will find to your delight and delectation that our commitment to making each stroke as good as it can be (little rowing metaphor for you there) remains far more in place than it ever was at the end of long outings when scallies were shooting us with air-rifles.   In this episode, you will find the Posh Southern One giving the Northern One his P45; the Northern one will find that a stutter that he thought he'd successfully dealt with in his teenage years has returned, making him sound like he's being remixed by DJ EZ Rock; and the Southern One admitting that his day job involves being a character in Middle Earth.    Luckily, though, our guest Tim Morris rides to the rescue and brings wisdom to the party.   We chat about his trajectory through rowing from his earliest days as cox through to his coaching roles now, the development of the sport in that time, rowing as a toolkit for life, race strategies, composite boats and blades, how sport can develop your personality and your personality can find an expression in sport that serves in everything else you go on to do, and the future of the sport in the UK.   Designed as a rowing podcast for the people by the people, this is a Broken Oars Podcast of the first rank. We've been incredibly lucky with all of our guests, and Tim is no exception. With him, as with everyone else, what's clear is that when you get rowers together, what we love to do is talk about this amazing sport of ours.   And it's out in time for the weekend!? GET SOME!   Bowside? Strokeside? You were told this was a tidal river. You were told to bring wellies. None of you did. We will leave you stuck in this mud as a warning to others. Bow, stop crying. You brought it on yourself.

Buffy S2 E18: "Killed by Death"/Gilmore Girls S2 E18: "Back in the Saddle Again"A German Freddy Krueger is on the loose at Sunnydale's hospital. Luckily Buffy caught the town flu and is able to save the day. Joyce is very not concerned with Buffy's oddly close relationship with her school librarian. And apparently Willow is secretly a doctor? Lorelai and Puppy Dog Dean work very hard to keep Dean and Rory's relationship afloat, but Rory's got other plans, like pouring over Jess's big chunky pastel handwriting in her book margins. Richard's still trying out new hobbies, like car repair and high school projects. And Rory wouldn't DARE have a digital meeting!Don't forget to follow us on social media for more Buffy/Gilmore content as well as other comedy content.YouTube:Bryan & StaceyInstagram:@gilmoreslayer@bryanandstacey@BMofunny@staceykulowTikTok:@gilmoreslayerTwitter:@gilmoreslayer@bryanandstacey@BMofunny@staceykulowFacebook:Bryan & StaceyBuffy the Gilmore SlayerCheck out bryanandstacey.com to find out what else we've been up to, or email us at:bryanandstaceyreviews@gmail.comTheme song written and performed by Louie Aronowitz @louiearonowitz

Posted 11/23/20This week the C.O.W.boys are asking if they are born that way? Along with some fun and lively conversation on the topic, you'll also hear some great music from Brenn Hill (Monster on Your Back), Ian Tyson (Fifty Years Ago), Chuck Pyle (Nighthorse), and Juni Fisher (Listen). There is also some great cowboy poetry this week from Kathy Moss (He'll Never Ride Again). We'll have the ever popular Dick's Pick (Back in the Saddle Again), Cowpoke Poetry, and a whole bunch of goofin' off too!

Performers include: Jimmy Rodgers, Gene Autry, the Carter Family, The Chuck Wagon Gang, Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Ray Price and Bob Wills. Songs include: Mule Skinner Blues, Heaven Is My Home, Back In the Saddle Again, Time Changes Everything and The Little Old Log Cabin.

Back in the Saddle Again 08/10/20 Vol. 9 #143Tom is back from vacation and loaded for bear on issues surrounding the news in the last few weeks.*Back in the Saddle Again*Eating a Pizza*Michelle Obama's 'Depression'*Tax Cut or Tax Delay*Why It's a Bad Idea*Clinton and Epstein*Pedophiles and Deviants*Bidens VP Pick*Big Problems in Little China*Covid and China*2nd Biological Attack*Dividing a SocietyShow Video On: https://www.bitchute.com/video/dYhC09m4qGzm/Books by host Thomas Purcell are available free on to Amazon Prime and Kindle subscribersThe money pledged thru Patreon.com will go toward show costs such as advertising, server time, and broadcasting equipment. If we can get enough listeners, we will expand the show to two hours and hire additional staff.To help our show out, please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LibertyNeverSleepsAll bumper music and sound clips are not owned by the show, are commentary, and of educational purposes, or de minimus effect, and not for monetary gain.No copyright is claimed in any use of such materials and to the extent that material may appear to be infringed, I assert that such alleged infringement is permissible under fair use principles in U.S. copyright laws. If you believe material has been used in an unauthorized manner, please contact the poster.Special Thanks To:Patricia P.MirrakuAnnie W.Additionally:Craig B.Vanessa A.Scott L.David A.Marcia D.Chris S.Eric M.Michael L.Darryl R.Patrick G.

Back in the Saddle Again 08/10/20 Vol. 9 #143Tom is back from vacation and loaded for bear on issues surrounding the news in the last few weeks.*Back in the Saddle Again*Eating a Pizza*Michelle Obama's 'Depression'*Tax Cut or Tax Delay*Why It's a Bad Idea*Clinton and Epstein*Pedophiles and Deviants*Bidens VP Pick*Big Problems in Little China*Covid and China*2nd Biological Attack*Dividing a SocietyShow Video On: https://www.bitchute.com/video/dYhC09m4qGzm/Books by host Thomas Purcell are available free on to Amazon Prime and Kindle subscribersThe money pledged thru Patreon.com will go toward show costs such as advertising, server time, and broadcasting equipment. If we can get enough listeners, we will expand the show to two hours and hire additional staff.To help our show out, please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LibertyNeverSleepsAll bumper music and sound clips are not owned by the show, are commentary, and of educational purposes, or de minimus effect, and not for monetary gain.No copyright is claimed in any use of such materials and to the extent that material may appear to be infringed, I assert that such alleged infringement is permissible under fair use principles in U.S. copyright laws. If you believe material has been used in an unauthorized manner, please contact the poster.Special Thanks To:Patricia P.MirrakuAnnie W.Additionally:Craig B.Vanessa A.Scott L.David A.Marcia D.Chris S.Eric M.Michael L.Darryl R.Patrick G.

Episode Nine of the Six-Gun Justice Podcast dives into the dynamic duo of Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and the brilliant films they made together...Just give Paul Bishop and Richard Prosch 36 minutes to fill you in on seven of the most iconic films of the 1950s. You’d do it for Randolph Scott. (Randolph Scott!!)01:36 — Paul shares the skinny on the Six-Gun Justice Book Club02:29 — Rich recommends Steve Hockensmith’s Fathers’ Day Essay at SixGunJustice.com03:10 — Paul shares Derrick Ferguson’s review of the 1951 film, Westward the Women.11:30 — Rich’s review of the new Ralph Campton novel, TIN STAR by Jackson Lowry plus13:50 — Paul and Rich visit about the legends: Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher21:36 — Rich and Paul take a look at Randolph Scott’s career, beginning with his Zane Grey series25:32 — Scott and Boetticher live again — better, together with the Ranown Cycle29:35 — Rich tracks down Seven Men From Now31:45 — Paul targets Buchanan Rides Alone33:01 — Rich visits The Tall T34:48 — Paul expounds on Decision at Sundown35:44 — Rich rides along with Ride Lonesome36:54 — Paul finds Westbound never quite discovers its footing37:36 — Rich pulls into Comanche Station40:29 — Shoot-outs and Shout-outsThanks to Steve Hockensmith for “Dad’s in the Saddle Again,” at https://www.sixgunjustice.com/2020/06/dads-in-saddle-againa-fathers-day.htmlMuch gratitude to Robert Vardeman for his exclusive Q&A at https://www.sixgunjustice.com/2020/06/western-wordslingersrobert-vardeman.htmlShout-out to Michael Stradford for his tips on the Seven Men From Now paperback tie-in and Blu Ray set.Support us at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sixgunjusticePlease drop us an email at: sixgunjusticewesterns@gmail.comThanks to our sponsor, Wolfpack Publishing, and all our friends and listeners.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=suROpN0f2hQhThddyTchkgR4CytqmFW705g1jNJV3rCDT8OLxSCXKbf8j0oyifmCvb3fAW&fromUL=true&country.x=US&locale.x=en_US)

Due to COVID-19, we had to set down the podcast for a while – but with the semester’s end, we’re back! Join Dinur and Adam as we talk about what we’ve learned from the COVID-19 experience, and what we plan to do going forward. We’re also making some changes to our original schedule, so be […] The post Episode: Back in the Saddle Again! appeared first on Go From Stress To Success!.

This week we're gettin' WEIRD! Join the bookclub gang as we check out the first stories from the Hellboy: Weird Tales collection! Listen as we discuss "The Children of the Black Mound," "Lobster Johnson: Action Detective Adventure," "Midnight Cowboy," "Haunted," "A Love Story," & "Hot!"  04:01 - Listener Feedback 37:41 - Weird Tales Discussion!   "Back in the Saddle Again" by Gene Autry used for educational purposes only

Back in the Saddle Again feat. Gut (Ep. 24) by Down Set Mic!

We discuss Dead Uncles and Vegetables, Back in the Saddle Again, Teach Me Tonight, and Help Wanted. Our website: We Don’t Wanna Wait Email: wedontwannawait@gmail.com Twitter: @WeDontWannaWait Join our discussion group: facebook.com/groups/Dawsonsgroup Download

What happens when Chaos is unleashed on the world?  Evidently, it takes a few extra weeks to produce the next episode of your nerdcast!  Yet like, the fabled Smith of the Aero, the D & Dweebs Boys are "Back in the Saddle Again!"  Join Bob, Luke, Klab, and Paul as we hop on our dragons of many colors to drink some ale, fong a few haters, discourse about cousin-lovin', argue about the minutiae of ransoming a person, and check in with all the crew of Krynn: The Next Generation as they prepare to take on Himself, the Father of All and of None!  Strap on your swords and grab your staffs for Dragons of Summer Flame...Part 1!

Welcome to episode nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Les Paul and Mary Ford, and “How High The Moon”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—-  A couple of notes: This one is a few hours late, as I had some *severe* technical problems with the several previous attempts at recording this. This version was recorded starting around midnight on Sunday night, which is usually the time I put them up, so I apologise if it’s lacking a final polish Resources If the episode starts you wondering about playing instruments while physically disabled, or inventing new instruments, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD box set is a very good compilation of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s best work. The quotes from Les Paul in this episode come from this book of interviews with him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   To be a truly great guitarist, you need to have an imagination. You need to be inventive. And you need to have a sense of musicality. Some would also say that you need to have a lot of dexterity, and to be able to move your fingers lightning fast. Maybe also have long fingers, so you could reach further down the neck. But let’s talk about Django Reinhardt for a bit. We mentioned Django a little bit in the episode on Bob Wills and “Ida Red”. We talked, in particular, about how he was making music that sounded very, very similar to what the early Western Swing musicians were doing. We’re not going to talk much about Django in this series, because he was a jazz musician, but he *was* very influential on a few of the people who went on to influence rock, so we’re going to touch on him briefly here. He never played an electric guitar, but he still influenced pretty much every guitarist since, either directly or indirectly. And this was despite having disadvantages that would have stopped almost anyone. One point we haven’t made very much yet, but which needs to be made repeatedly, is that the people in most of these early podcasts were crushingly, hellishly, poor by today’s standards. Poverty still exists of course, to far too great an extent, but the people we’re talking about here lived in conditions that would be unimaginable to almost all of the listeners to this podcast. And Reinhardt had it worse than most. He was a Romany traveller, and while growing up his greatest skill was stealing chickens — real, proper, poverty. But he became a professional musician, and it looked like he might actually become well off. And then his bad luck got worse. His caravan caught on fire, and in trying to rescue his wife and child, he suffered such extreme burns that one of his legs became paralysed — and more importantly for Reinhardt as a musician, he lost the use of two of his fingers on his left hand. He had to re-teach himself to play the guitar, and to use only two fingers and a thumb on his left hand to play. Remarkably, he managed well enough to do things like this: [Excerpt: “How High The Moon” Django Reinhardt] Reinhardt influenced many guitarists, and one American guitarist in particular became a friend of Reinhardt and said that he and Reinhardt were the only two guitarists in the world at that time who were actually serious about their instrument. He was another jazzman, with a similar style to Reinhardt but one who had a more direct influence on rock and roll. Waukesha, Wisconsin, is not the most rock and roll town in the world. It was a spa town, before the water started to dry up, and about the most exciting thing that ever happened there is that Mr Sears, the founder of Sears & Roebuck, retired there when he got too ill to work any more. It’s a bland, whitebread, midwestern town in a state that’s most notable for dairy farming. Yet it’s also the birthplace of the only man who is in the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and who probably did more than any other individual to make the guitar a respected lead instrument. Almost every moderately-known guitarist eventually gets a “signature” model named after them, and most of these sell a small number of instruments before being discontinued. But one man has a signature model that’s so popular that other guitarists get their signatures *alongside his*. When you buy a Jimmy Page or Mark Knopfler or Slash or Eric Clapton signature guitar, there are two names on there — the name of Page or Clapton or whoever, and the name Les Paul. Les Paul was a remarkable man, whose inventions are far more widely known even than his name. You’ll almost certainly have seen musicians playing guitar and harmonica at the same time, using a harmonica holder — Les Paul invented that, as a teenager, making the first one out of a coathanger. I guess if you were a teenager in Waukesha in the 1920s, you’d have little better to do with yourself than invent coathanger harmonica holders too. But Les Paul was, first and foremost, a guitar player, and he became a semi-professional musician by the time he was thirteen. The choice of the guitar was one that was actually made by his mother. She explained to him “if you play the piano you got your back turned to the audience. If you play the drums, you gotta carry all that stuff around, it’s not musical. If you play a saxophone, you can’t sing and talk at the same time.” In his own words, she “whittled it down to guitar in a hurry”. His mother, indeed, seems to have been a remarkable woman in many ways — if you read any interviews with Les, he barely ever goes a few sentences without saying something about how much she did for him. That’s one of the defining characteristics of Les Paul’s life, really — his admiration for his mother. There were two more things that characterised him though. The first was that pretty much dead on, every ten years, he would have some major health crisis that would put him out of commission for a year. The other was his lifelong devotion to learning, which meant that he used those health crises as an opportunity to learn something new. This love of learning could be seen from his very early days. When he was just learning the guitar, the singing cowboy star Gene Autry came to town. Gene Autry was a star of Western music — the very biggest star in the country — and his music was a cleaned-up, politer, version of the kind of music Bob Wills played: [excerpt: Gene Autry “Back in the Saddle Again”]. Les and his friend went to every show in the residency, and after a couple of nights, Gene Autry stopped the show in the middle of the set and said “something strange has been happening here — every time I play an F chord, and *only* when I play an F chord, there’s a flash of light. What’s going on, how is this happening?” It turned out that Les had been wanting to learn how Autry made that chord shape, so he’d been there with a pencil and paper, and his friend had a torch, and every time he played the chord Les Paul wanted to learn, the torch would come on and Les would be trying to sketch the shape of Autry’s fingers. Autry invited Les Paul onto the stage, showed him how to make the chord, and had him play a couple of songs. A few years later, when Autry moved from radio to films, he suggested Les Paul take over his radio show. So Les Paul was always fascinated by learning, and always trying to improve himself and his equipment. And once he decided to be a guitarist, he also decided to electrify his guitar, a full decade before electric guitars became a widespread instrument. He explained that when he was starting out, he was playing at a hotdog stand, using a homemade microphone for his voice and harmonica — the microphone was made out of bits of an old telephone, and it was plugged in to his mother’s radio. People who were listening liked his performances, but they said they wished the guitar was as loud as his voice — so he took his *dad’s* radio, too, and connected it to a record player needle, which he jammed into the body of his guitar. Once electric guitars started being manufactured, Paul started playing them, but he never liked them. The electric guitars of the late 1930s were what we’d now call electro-acoustics — they were acoustic guitars, playable as such, but with pickups. There were two main problems with them — firstly, they were very prone to feedback, because the hollow body of the guitar would resonate. And secondly, most of the sonic energy from the strings was going into the guitar itself, so there was no sustain. Paul came up with a simple solution to this problem, which he called “the log”. The log was almost exactly what the name would suggest. It was a plank, to which were nailed some pickups, strings, and tuning pegs. On the front was attached the front of a normal guitar — not anything that would actually resonate, just to make it look like a proper guitar. But basically it was just a lump of wood. Les Paul wasn’t the first person to build a solid-body electric guitar — but as he put it himself later “there may be some guy out there in Iowa says he built the guitar in 1925, for all I know, and he may have. I only know what I was doing and I was out there weaving my own basket, and there wasn’t anybody else around and it had to be done.”. He perfected the solid-body guitar during the first of his years of illness — he’d been running an illegal radio station, accidentally stuck his hand in the transmitter, and not only got an electric shock but had a load of equipment fall on him. By the time he was well enough to work again, he had the idea perfected. He took his solid-body guitar idea to Gibson in 1941, but they weren’t interested — no-one was going to want to buy a solid guitar. It wasn’t until Leo Fender started selling his guitars in 1950 that Gibson realised that it might be worth doing. But by then Les Paul had become one of the most famous guitarists in the country. Even before he became hugely famous, though, he’d been one of the *best* guitarists in the country. In 1944, when the guitarist Oscar Moore was unable at the last minute to play at Jazz At The Philharmonic — the first of what would eventually become the most famous series of jazz concerts ever — Les Paul was drafted in at short notice, and the live recordings of that show are some of the greatest instrumental jazz you’ll hear, at a time when the borders between jazz, R&B, and pop music were more fluid than they became. Listen, for example, to this excerpt from “Blues, 1, 2, & 3”. [excerpt] The honking saxophone player there is Ilinois Jacquet, the man who we talked about in episode one of this podcast, who invented R&B saxophone. The pianist there was also pretty great — he was, in fact, a pianist who was already regarded as one of the best in the business, even before he started to sing, and who later had two further, separate careers under his more familiar name – one in R&B in which he inspired a generation of singers like Charles Brown and Ray Charles, and one in pop, where he became one of the great ballad singers of all time. He’s credited on the track we just heard as “Shorty Nadine” for contractual reasons, but you probably know him better as Nat “King” Cole. Listening to that you can hear musicians performing at a time when jazz and R&B and rock and roll were all still sort of the same thing, before they all went off in their different directions, and it’s hard not to wish that that cross-fertilisation had continued a while longer. But it didn’t, and it would be easy to imagine that as a result Les Paul, who was absolutely a jazz musician, would make no further contributions to rock and roll after his popularising the solid-body electric guitar. But we haven’t even got to his real importance yet. Yes, something he did that was even more important than the Les Paul guitar. It started when his mother told him she’d enjoyed something she heard him play on the radio. He’d replied that it wasn’t him she’d heard, and she’d said “well, all those electric guitar players sound the same. If you want to be a real success, you want to sound different from everyone else — at least different enough that your own mother can recognise you”. And over the years, Les Paul had learned to listen to his mother — she’d been the one who’d got him playing guitar, and she’d been the one who had told him to go and see Bob Wills, the day he’d ended up meeting Charlie Christian for the first time. So he went and spent a lot of time working on a sound that was totally different from anything else, spending days and weeks alone. He stopped working with his trio — and started working with a young country singer who renamed herself Mary Ford, who Gene Autry had introduced him to and who he soon married — and he eventually came up with a whole new idea. This episode is primarily about Les Paul, because he was such an astonishing force of nature, but it’s worth making clear that Mary Ford was very much an equal partner in their sixteen years together. She was an excellent singer — *far* better than Les Paul was — and also a pretty good guitarist herself. On their live dates she would play rhythm guitar, and often the two would do a comedy guitar duel, with her copying everything Les Paul played. She was a vital part of the sound — and of the sonic innovations the records contained, because one of the things they did for the first time was to have her sing very close to the mic — a totally different technique than had been used before, which gave her vocals a different tone which almost everyone imitated. But that wasn’t the only odd sound on the records. It sounded like Les Paul was playing two or three guitars at the same time, playing the same part. And sometimes he was playing notes that were higher than any guitar could play. And sometimes, when Mary Ford was singing… it sounded as if there were two or more of her! This was such an unusual sound that on the duo’s radio and TV appearances they made a joke of it — they pretended that Paul had invented a “Les Paulveriser”, which could duplicate everything, and that for example he could use the Les Paulveriser on Mary, so there’d be multiple Marys and she could get the vacuum cleaning done quicker. It was the fifties. But of course, what Paul was actually doing was overdubbing — recording one guitar part, and then going back and recording a second over it. He’d been fascinated by the idea for decades and he’d first done it as an experiment when he was still with the trio. He’d wanted to rehearse a song on his own, but with the arrangement the rest of the band played, so he’d recorded himself playing all the parts, using a disc cutter and playing along with previous takes. This didn’t give good results until the introduction of magnetic tape recording in the very late forties — when you recorded directly to a disc there was so much surface noise, and recording quality was so poor, that no-one would even think of recording overdubs. But in 1945, American soldiers brought back a new technology from Germany as spoils of war — high fidelity tape recording. With magnetic tape you could record sound with orders of magnitude less noise than by cutting to disc. And Bing Crosby, who often worked with Les Paul, was the first person to see the possibilities of this new technology (in his case, for pre-recording his radio shows so they didn’t have to go out live, which meant he could record them in batches and have more time to spend on the golf course). Les Paul was far more technical than Crosby, though, and far more aware of what could happen if, for example, you had two tape recorders. Or if you ran one slow so that when you played it back at normal speed everything sounded sped up. Or a dozen other obvious tricks that occurred to him, but had never occurred to anyone else. So on those Les Paul and Mary Ford records, literally every instrument was Les Paul on the guitar. The bass was Les Paul’s guitar slowed down to half speed, the percussion was his guitar, *everything* was his guitar. So now we come to “How High the Moon” itself. This is a song that originally dated back to 1940 — the Benny Goodman band had the first hit with it, and indeed Les Paul had recorded a version of it in 1945, with his trio. [excerpt Les Paul Trio version of “How High the Moon”] That was right before his experiments with tape recording started. Shortly after the first results of those were released, in 1948, there was another one of those every-decade health problems. In this case, Mary Ford was driving the two of them from Wisconsin to LA. She was from California, and not used to driving in winter weather. She hit a patch of ice and the two of them went off the road. Les Paul spent hours in ice water with multiple bones broken before anyone could get him to a hospital. For a while, it was believed it would not be possible to save his right arm — and then for a while after that the doctors believed they could save it, but it would permanently be fixed in a single position if they did, as his elbow would be unfixable. He told them to try their best, and to set it in a position with his hand over his navel, because if it was in that position he could still play guitar. As a precaution, he spent his time in hospital drawing up plans for a synthesiser, ten years before Robert Moog invented his, because he figured he could play the synth with one arm. When he got better, he and Mary Ford recorded a new version of “How High The Moon”, but at first the record label didn’t want to release it: [Excerpt Les Paul and Mary Ford: “How High The Moon”] That record sat unreleased for eighteen months, until 1951, because Jim Conkling at Capitol said that there’d been seventy-five recordings of the song before and none of them had been a hit. Conkling thought this was because the lyrics don’t make sense, but Les Paul was insistent that no-one was going to listen to the lyrics anyway. “It doesn’t matter what Mary sang or if it was done by the Four Nosebleeds. It didn’t make any difference, because that wasn’t what made the record. It was the arrangement and the performance.” And he was right — the version by Les Paul and Mary Ford was an absolute phenomenon. It spent twenty-five weeks in the Billboard pop charts, nine of them at number one, and while it was at number one another Paul and Ford track was at number two. Even more astonishingly, it also made number two on the rhythm and blues charts. Remember, that was a chart that was specifically aimed at the black audience, and between 1950 and 1955 only five records by white performers made the R&B charts at all, mostly very early rock and roll records. “How High the Moon” might easily seem an odd fit for the R&B charts. To twenty-first century ears, it’s hard to imagine anything more white-sounding. But what it does, absolutely, share with the music that was charting on the R&B charts at the time, and the reason it appealed to the R&B audience, is a delight in finding totally new sounds. The R&B charts at the time were where you looked for experimentation, for people trying new things. And also, there’s that rhythm on the record — this is entirely a record that’s driven by the rhythm. It’s not quite dance music, not like the jump bands — and there’s only guitar and vocals on it, something which would be absolutely out of the ordinary for rhythm and blues records at the time with their emphasis on piano and saxophone — but what there is in that guitar playing is personal expression. And R&B was all about individual expression. Les Paul was doing something which was qualitatively different both from jazz and from R&B, and so it’s not surprising that he ended up crossing over from one market to another. But in doing so, he also invented the way the guitar was to be used in rock and roll music. There’s a lot of Western Swing about what he’s doing on “How High the Moon”, unsurprisingly. But while the rhythm guitar is keeping to the same kind of rhythms that the Western Swing people would use, the lead guitar is much more aggressive and forceful than anything you got in country or western music at the time. It’s playing jazz and R&B lines — it’s playing, in fact, the kind of thing that a saxophone player like Illinois Jacquet might play, full of aggressive stabs and skronks. And more than that, he invented the way the recording studio would be used in rock and roll. Before Les Paul and Mary Ford’s early records, the recording studio was used solely as a way of reproducing the sound of live instruments as accurately as possible. After them, it became a way to create new sounds that could not be made live. One thing we’re going to see over and again in this series is the way technological change, artistic change and social change all feed back into each other. The 1950s was a time of absolutely unprecedented technological change in America, and people went from, in the beginning of the decade, listening to recordings played at 78RPM, often on wind-up gramophones, made of breakable shellac, to listening to high fidelity forty-five RPM singles and long-playing records which could — shockingly — last more than four minutes a side. Radio went from being something that had to be listened to as a family because of the size of the radiogram to something a teenager could listen to in bed under the blankets on a transistor radio, or something that you could even have on in your car! The combination of these changes made music into something that could be personal as well as communal. Teenagers didn’t have to share the music with their parents. All of that was still to come, of course, and we’ll look at those things as they happen during our history. But “How High the Moon” was the first and best sign of what was to come, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, and music entered a totally new age. Les Paul kept playing the guitar into his nineties. Interviewed in his late seventies, when his arthritis was so bad he only had movement in two fingers, with all the others so stiff they just had to stay where he put them, he said he played better than he had when he had ten fingers, because he’d had to learn more about the instrument to do it this way. In the end, his arthritis got to the point that he could no longer move any fingers on either hand — so he just let his fingers stay where they were, but would move his whole hand to play single notes and bar chords — he could lift his fingers up and down, just not move the knuckles. But he could still play. This is him on his ninetieth birthday: [excerpt: Les Paul 90th birthday concert “Sweet Georgia Brown”] So it turns out you don’t even need the two fingers Django had left, not if you have the kind of mind that gets you into the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the inventors’ hall of fame. Les Paul died, aged ninety-four, in 2009.

Welcome to episode nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Les Paul and Mary Ford, and "How High The Moon". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more----  A couple of notes: This one is a few hours late, as I had some *severe* technical problems with the several previous attempts at recording this. This version was recorded starting around midnight on Sunday night, which is usually the time I put them up, so I apologise if it's lacking a final polish Resources If the episode starts you wondering about playing instruments while physically disabled, or inventing new instruments, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD box set is a very good compilation of Les Paul and Mary Ford's best work. The quotes from Les Paul in this episode come from this book of interviews with him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   To be a truly great guitarist, you need to have an imagination. You need to be inventive. And you need to have a sense of musicality. Some would also say that you need to have a lot of dexterity, and to be able to move your fingers lightning fast. Maybe also have long fingers, so you could reach further down the neck. But let's talk about Django Reinhardt for a bit. We mentioned Django a little bit in the episode on Bob Wills and “Ida Red”. We talked, in particular, about how he was making music that sounded very, very similar to what the early Western Swing musicians were doing. We're not going to talk much about Django in this series, because he was a jazz musician, but he *was* very influential on a few of the people who went on to influence rock, so we're going to touch on him briefly here. He never played an electric guitar, but he still influenced pretty much every guitarist since, either directly or indirectly. And this was despite having disadvantages that would have stopped almost anyone. One point we haven't made very much yet, but which needs to be made repeatedly, is that the people in most of these early podcasts were crushingly, hellishly, poor by today's standards. Poverty still exists of course, to far too great an extent, but the people we're talking about here lived in conditions that would be unimaginable to almost all of the listeners to this podcast. And Reinhardt had it worse than most. He was a Romany traveller, and while growing up his greatest skill was stealing chickens -- real, proper, poverty. But he became a professional musician, and it looked like he might actually become well off. And then his bad luck got worse. His caravan caught on fire, and in trying to rescue his wife and child, he suffered such extreme burns that one of his legs became paralysed -- and more importantly for Reinhardt as a musician, he lost the use of two of his fingers on his left hand. He had to re-teach himself to play the guitar, and to use only two fingers and a thumb on his left hand to play. Remarkably, he managed well enough to do things like this: [Excerpt: "How High The Moon" Django Reinhardt] Reinhardt influenced many guitarists, and one American guitarist in particular became a friend of Reinhardt and said that he and Reinhardt were the only two guitarists in the world at that time who were actually serious about their instrument. He was another jazzman, with a similar style to Reinhardt but one who had a more direct influence on rock and roll. Waukesha, Wisconsin, is not the most rock and roll town in the world. It was a spa town, before the water started to dry up, and about the most exciting thing that ever happened there is that Mr Sears, the founder of Sears & Roebuck, retired there when he got too ill to work any more. It's a bland, whitebread, midwestern town in a state that's most notable for dairy farming. Yet it's also the birthplace of the only man who is in the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and who probably did more than any other individual to make the guitar a respected lead instrument. Almost every moderately-known guitarist eventually gets a "signature" model named after them, and most of these sell a small number of instruments before being discontinued. But one man has a signature model that's so popular that other guitarists get their signatures *alongside his*. When you buy a Jimmy Page or Mark Knopfler or Slash or Eric Clapton signature guitar, there are two names on there -- the name of Page or Clapton or whoever, and the name Les Paul. Les Paul was a remarkable man, whose inventions are far more widely known even than his name. You'll almost certainly have seen musicians playing guitar and harmonica at the same time, using a harmonica holder -- Les Paul invented that, as a teenager, making the first one out of a coathanger. I guess if you were a teenager in Waukesha in the 1920s, you'd have little better to do with yourself than invent coathanger harmonica holders too. But Les Paul was, first and foremost, a guitar player, and he became a semi-professional musician by the time he was thirteen. The choice of the guitar was one that was actually made by his mother. She explained to him "if you play the piano you got your back turned to the audience. If you play the drums, you gotta carry all that stuff around, it's not musical. If you play a saxophone, you can't sing and talk at the same time." In his own words, she "whittled it down to guitar in a hurry". His mother, indeed, seems to have been a remarkable woman in many ways -- if you read any interviews with Les, he barely ever goes a few sentences without saying something about how much she did for him. That's one of the defining characteristics of Les Paul's life, really -- his admiration for his mother. There were two more things that characterised him though. The first was that pretty much dead on, every ten years, he would have some major health crisis that would put him out of commission for a year. The other was his lifelong devotion to learning, which meant that he used those health crises as an opportunity to learn something new. This love of learning could be seen from his very early days. When he was just learning the guitar, the singing cowboy star Gene Autry came to town. Gene Autry was a star of Western music -- the very biggest star in the country -- and his music was a cleaned-up, politer, version of the kind of music Bob Wills played: [excerpt: Gene Autry "Back in the Saddle Again"]. Les and his friend went to every show in the residency, and after a couple of nights, Gene Autry stopped the show in the middle of the set and said "something strange has been happening here -- every time I play an F chord, and *only* when I play an F chord, there's a flash of light. What's going on, how is this happening?" It turned out that Les had been wanting to learn how Autry made that chord shape, so he'd been there with a pencil and paper, and his friend had a torch, and every time he played the chord Les Paul wanted to learn, the torch would come on and Les would be trying to sketch the shape of Autry's fingers. Autry invited Les Paul onto the stage, showed him how to make the chord, and had him play a couple of songs. A few years later, when Autry moved from radio to films, he suggested Les Paul take over his radio show. So Les Paul was always fascinated by learning, and always trying to improve himself and his equipment. And once he decided to be a guitarist, he also decided to electrify his guitar, a full decade before electric guitars became a widespread instrument. He explained that when he was starting out, he was playing at a hotdog stand, using a homemade microphone for his voice and harmonica -- the microphone was made out of bits of an old telephone, and it was plugged in to his mother's radio. People who were listening liked his performances, but they said they wished the guitar was as loud as his voice -- so he took his *dad's* radio, too, and connected it to a record player needle, which he jammed into the body of his guitar. Once electric guitars started being manufactured, Paul started playing them, but he never liked them. The electric guitars of the late 1930s were what we'd now call electro-acoustics -- they were acoustic guitars, playable as such, but with pickups. There were two main problems with them -- firstly, they were very prone to feedback, because the hollow body of the guitar would resonate. And secondly, most of the sonic energy from the strings was going into the guitar itself, so there was no sustain. Paul came up with a simple solution to this problem, which he called "the log". The log was almost exactly what the name would suggest. It was a plank, to which were nailed some pickups, strings, and tuning pegs. On the front was attached the front of a normal guitar -- not anything that would actually resonate, just to make it look like a proper guitar. But basically it was just a lump of wood. Les Paul wasn't the first person to build a solid-body electric guitar -- but as he put it himself later "there may be some guy out there in Iowa says he built the guitar in 1925, for all I know, and he may have. I only know what I was doing and I was out there weaving my own basket, and there wasn't anybody else around and it had to be done.". He perfected the solid-body guitar during the first of his years of illness -- he'd been running an illegal radio station, accidentally stuck his hand in the transmitter, and not only got an electric shock but had a load of equipment fall on him. By the time he was well enough to work again, he had the idea perfected. He took his solid-body guitar idea to Gibson in 1941, but they weren't interested -- no-one was going to want to buy a solid guitar. It wasn't until Leo Fender started selling his guitars in 1950 that Gibson realised that it might be worth doing. But by then Les Paul had become one of the most famous guitarists in the country. Even before he became hugely famous, though, he'd been one of the *best* guitarists in the country. In 1944, when the guitarist Oscar Moore was unable at the last minute to play at Jazz At The Philharmonic -- the first of what would eventually become the most famous series of jazz concerts ever -- Les Paul was drafted in at short notice, and the live recordings of that show are some of the greatest instrumental jazz you'll hear, at a time when the borders between jazz, R&B, and pop music were more fluid than they became. Listen, for example, to this excerpt from "Blues, 1, 2, & 3". [excerpt] The honking saxophone player there is Ilinois Jacquet, the man who we talked about in episode one of this podcast, who invented R&B saxophone. The pianist there was also pretty great -- he was, in fact, a pianist who was already regarded as one of the best in the business, even before he started to sing, and who later had two further, separate careers under his more familiar name – one in R&B in which he inspired a generation of singers like Charles Brown and Ray Charles, and one in pop, where he became one of the great ballad singers of all time. He's credited on the track we just heard as "Shorty Nadine" for contractual reasons, but you probably know him better as Nat "King" Cole. Listening to that you can hear musicians performing at a time when jazz and R&B and rock and roll were all still sort of the same thing, before they all went off in their different directions, and it's hard not to wish that that cross-fertilisation had continued a while longer. But it didn't, and it would be easy to imagine that as a result Les Paul, who was absolutely a jazz musician, would make no further contributions to rock and roll after his popularising the solid-body electric guitar. But we haven't even got to his real importance yet. Yes, something he did that was even more important than the Les Paul guitar. It started when his mother told him she'd enjoyed something she heard him play on the radio. He'd replied that it wasn't him she'd heard, and she'd said "well, all those electric guitar players sound the same. If you want to be a real success, you want to sound different from everyone else -- at least different enough that your own mother can recognise you". And over the years, Les Paul had learned to listen to his mother -- she'd been the one who'd got him playing guitar, and she'd been the one who had told him to go and see Bob Wills, the day he'd ended up meeting Charlie Christian for the first time. So he went and spent a lot of time working on a sound that was totally different from anything else, spending days and weeks alone. He stopped working with his trio -- and started working with a young country singer who renamed herself Mary Ford, who Gene Autry had introduced him to and who he soon married -- and he eventually came up with a whole new idea. This episode is primarily about Les Paul, because he was such an astonishing force of nature, but it's worth making clear that Mary Ford was very much an equal partner in their sixteen years together. She was an excellent singer -- *far* better than Les Paul was -- and also a pretty good guitarist herself. On their live dates she would play rhythm guitar, and often the two would do a comedy guitar duel, with her copying everything Les Paul played. She was a vital part of the sound -- and of the sonic innovations the records contained, because one of the things they did for the first time was to have her sing very close to the mic -- a totally different technique than had been used before, which gave her vocals a different tone which almost everyone imitated. But that wasn't the only odd sound on the records. It sounded like Les Paul was playing two or three guitars at the same time, playing the same part. And sometimes he was playing notes that were higher than any guitar could play. And sometimes, when Mary Ford was singing... it sounded as if there were two or more of her! This was such an unusual sound that on the duo's radio and TV appearances they made a joke of it -- they pretended that Paul had invented a "Les Paulveriser", which could duplicate everything, and that for example he could use the Les Paulveriser on Mary, so there'd be multiple Marys and she could get the vacuum cleaning done quicker. It was the fifties. But of course, what Paul was actually doing was overdubbing -- recording one guitar part, and then going back and recording a second over it. He'd been fascinated by the idea for decades and he'd first done it as an experiment when he was still with the trio. He'd wanted to rehearse a song on his own, but with the arrangement the rest of the band played, so he'd recorded himself playing all the parts, using a disc cutter and playing along with previous takes. This didn't give good results until the introduction of magnetic tape recording in the very late forties -- when you recorded directly to a disc there was so much surface noise, and recording quality was so poor, that no-one would even think of recording overdubs. But in 1945, American soldiers brought back a new technology from Germany as spoils of war -- high fidelity tape recording. With magnetic tape you could record sound with orders of magnitude less noise than by cutting to disc. And Bing Crosby, who often worked with Les Paul, was the first person to see the possibilities of this new technology (in his case, for pre-recording his radio shows so they didn't have to go out live, which meant he could record them in batches and have more time to spend on the golf course). Les Paul was far more technical than Crosby, though, and far more aware of what could happen if, for example, you had two tape recorders. Or if you ran one slow so that when you played it back at normal speed everything sounded sped up. Or a dozen other obvious tricks that occurred to him, but had never occurred to anyone else. So on those Les Paul and Mary Ford records, literally every instrument was Les Paul on the guitar. The bass was Les Paul's guitar slowed down to half speed, the percussion was his guitar, *everything* was his guitar. So now we come to "How High the Moon" itself. This is a song that originally dated back to 1940 -- the Benny Goodman band had the first hit with it, and indeed Les Paul had recorded a version of it in 1945, with his trio. [excerpt Les Paul Trio version of "How High the Moon"] That was right before his experiments with tape recording started. Shortly after the first results of those were released, in 1948, there was another one of those every-decade health problems. In this case, Mary Ford was driving the two of them from Wisconsin to LA. She was from California, and not used to driving in winter weather. She hit a patch of ice and the two of them went off the road. Les Paul spent hours in ice water with multiple bones broken before anyone could get him to a hospital. For a while, it was believed it would not be possible to save his right arm -- and then for a while after that the doctors believed they could save it, but it would permanently be fixed in a single position if they did, as his elbow would be unfixable. He told them to try their best, and to set it in a position with his hand over his navel, because if it was in that position he could still play guitar. As a precaution, he spent his time in hospital drawing up plans for a synthesiser, ten years before Robert Moog invented his, because he figured he could play the synth with one arm. When he got better, he and Mary Ford recorded a new version of "How High The Moon", but at first the record label didn't want to release it: [Excerpt Les Paul and Mary Ford: "How High The Moon"] That record sat unreleased for eighteen months, until 1951, because Jim Conkling at Capitol said that there'd been seventy-five recordings of the song before and none of them had been a hit. Conkling thought this was because the lyrics don't make sense, but Les Paul was insistent that no-one was going to listen to the lyrics anyway. "It doesn't matter what Mary sang or if it was done by the Four Nosebleeds. It didn't make any difference, because that wasn't what made the record. It was the arrangement and the performance." And he was right -- the version by Les Paul and Mary Ford was an absolute phenomenon. It spent twenty-five weeks in the Billboard pop charts, nine of them at number one, and while it was at number one another Paul and Ford track was at number two. Even more astonishingly, it also made number two on the rhythm and blues charts. Remember, that was a chart that was specifically aimed at the black audience, and between 1950 and 1955 only five records by white performers made the R&B charts at all, mostly very early rock and roll records. "How High the Moon" might easily seem an odd fit for the R&B charts. To twenty-first century ears, it's hard to imagine anything more white-sounding. But what it does, absolutely, share with the music that was charting on the R&B charts at the time, and the reason it appealed to the R&B audience, is a delight in finding totally new sounds. The R&B charts at the time were where you looked for experimentation, for people trying new things. And also, there's that rhythm on the record -- this is entirely a record that's driven by the rhythm. It's not quite dance music, not like the jump bands -- and there's only guitar and vocals on it, something which would be absolutely out of the ordinary for rhythm and blues records at the time with their emphasis on piano and saxophone -- but what there is in that guitar playing is personal expression. And R&B was all about individual expression. Les Paul was doing something which was qualitatively different both from jazz and from R&B, and so it's not surprising that he ended up crossing over from one market to another. But in doing so, he also invented the way the guitar was to be used in rock and roll music. There's a lot of Western Swing about what he's doing on "How High the Moon", unsurprisingly. But while the rhythm guitar is keeping to the same kind of rhythms that the Western Swing people would use, the lead guitar is much more aggressive and forceful than anything you got in country or western music at the time. It's playing jazz and R&B lines -- it's playing, in fact, the kind of thing that a saxophone player like Illinois Jacquet might play, full of aggressive stabs and skronks. And more than that, he invented the way the recording studio would be used in rock and roll. Before Les Paul and Mary Ford's early records, the recording studio was used solely as a way of reproducing the sound of live instruments as accurately as possible. After them, it became a way to create new sounds that could not be made live. One thing we're going to see over and again in this series is the way technological change, artistic change and social change all feed back into each other. The 1950s was a time of absolutely unprecedented technological change in America, and people went from, in the beginning of the decade, listening to recordings played at 78RPM, often on wind-up gramophones, made of breakable shellac, to listening to high fidelity forty-five RPM singles and long-playing records which could -- shockingly -- last more than four minutes a side. Radio went from being something that had to be listened to as a family because of the size of the radiogram to something a teenager could listen to in bed under the blankets on a transistor radio, or something that you could even have on in your car! The combination of these changes made music into something that could be personal as well as communal. Teenagers didn't have to share the music with their parents. All of that was still to come, of course, and we'll look at those things as they happen during our history. But "How High the Moon" was the first and best sign of what was to come, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, and music entered a totally new age. Les Paul kept playing the guitar into his nineties. Interviewed in his late seventies, when his arthritis was so bad he only had movement in two fingers, with all the others so stiff they just had to stay where he put them, he said he played better than he had when he had ten fingers, because he'd had to learn more about the instrument to do it this way. In the end, his arthritis got to the point that he could no longer move any fingers on either hand -- so he just let his fingers stay where they were, but would move his whole hand to play single notes and bar chords -- he could lift his fingers up and down, just not move the knuckles. But he could still play. This is him on his ninetieth birthday: [excerpt: Les Paul 90th birthday concert “Sweet Georgia Brown”] So it turns out you don't even need the two fingers Django had left, not if you have the kind of mind that gets you into the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the inventors' hall of fame. Les Paul died, aged ninety-four, in 2009.

Episode 39- Back in the Saddle Again by The Googer Brothers

Brian is, Back in the Saddle Again, with Mark and Kyle to discuss all the news, trailers, past discussions of The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead that came out of Comic-Con this year. Read More...

Brian is, Back in the Saddle Again, with Mark and Kyle to discuss all the news, trailers, past discussions of The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead that came out of Comic-Con this year. Read More...

Episode 712, Back in the Saddle Again, features Mackenzie Rosman's step sister as a guest star playing Katelyn. This episode is all about dusting yourself off and getting back up again. The Rev starts to go to therapy and Simon tries to win Cecelia back. Plus, in a surprising turn of events, Roxanne turns into her worst enemy, Lucy.

Songs include: Silver Bells, Great Speckled Bird, Back In the Saddle Again, Don't Be Blue, Truck Driver's Blues, Back On the Montana Plains and When I Put On My Long White Robe. Performers include: Bob Wills, Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, Roy Acuff, The Swift Jewel Cowboys, Floyd Tillman and Hank Snow.

After a bit of a detour back in the world, we're in the 'Nam again and so is Daniels, the communications officer who was more cut-up than cut out for combat. But he's there reluctantly and has definitely changed. It's "Back in the Saddle Again" in The 'Nam #33 by Doug Murray, Wayne Vansant, and Geof Isherwood. As always, in addition to the summary and review of the issue I'll be taking a look at the letters, ‘Nam Notes, and ads.

After a bit of a detour back in the world, we're in the 'Nam again and so is Daniels, the communications officer who was more cut-up than cut out for combat. But he's there reluctantly and has definitely changed. It's "Back in the Saddle Again" in The 'Nam #33 by Doug Murray, Wayne Vansant, and Geof Isherwood. As always, in addition to the summary and review of the issue I'll be taking a look at the letters, ‘Nam Notes, and ads.

AFTERBUZZ TV — Hart of Dixie edition, is a weekly "after show" for fans of CW's Hart of Dixie. In this show, host Whitney Lane breaks down the episode in Zoe and Lemon turn to each other for girlfriend advice; Wade takes Vivian out; Lavon loses focus while bidding on bringing the County Fair to BlueBell when he learns that AnnaBeth is dating; Magnolia tries to get Brick to leave so she can throw a party. There to help Whitney is co-host Michelle Renee. It's Hart of Dixie's "Back in the Saddle Again" podcast! Follow us on http://www.Twitter.com/AfterBuzzTV "Like" Us on http://www.Facebook.com/AfterBuzzTV For more of your post-game wrap up shows for your favorite TV shows, visit http://www.AfterBuzzTV.com

Performers include: Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, Bill Monroe, Bob Wills and the Carter Family. Songs include: Great Speckled Bird, Old Love Letters, San Antonio Rose, Back in the Saddle Again and I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart.