American Piedmont blues musician
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12 episodes with Sonny Terry
7 episodes with Sonny Terry
21 episodes with Sonny Terry
11 episodes with Sonny Terry
7 episodes with Sonny Terry
6 episodes with Sonny Terry
4 episodes with Sonny Terry
6 episodes with Sonny Terry
6 episodes with Sonny Terry
Dennis Greaves took a week off from Nine Below Zero in 1980 but otherwise kept his nose firmly applied to the grindstone. They broke up in 1983 when he formed the Truth, who broke up in 1989 when he rebooted the old band. He looks back here at the first gigs he ever saw and played – a world with the attractive scent of spilt beer and tobacco – stopping off at various points, among them … … why blues and R&B flourished in South London, police and villains drinking together at the Thomas A Becket and the folklore of the Old Kent Road. ... the great advantage of never having a hit. … taking his parents to see Chuck Berry in 1972. ... the lasting appeal of R&B in a world of processed music. … what he learnt from Glyn Johns when he produced them at Olympic Studios, “the man who invented phasing with Itchycoo Park”. … buying singles at A1 Records in Walworth – “Progressive, Reggae, Artists A-Z …” … seeing Blackfoot Sue and Scarecrow on the pub circuit, and the Groundhogs and Rory Gallagher at the Rainbow. … Pete Townshend watching Nine Below Zero from the wings - “you remind me of us in the ‘60s”. … seeing the Jam 11 times – “900 people in a 400 capacity venue!” … “getting gyp is good as you learn how to control an audience.” … 2am service station food and how touring has changed in 45 years. ... performing in the pilot for The Young Ones in 1982. … “the song you should study for A-Level Pop”. … memories of Mylone LeFevre, Capability Brown, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee, BB King, Muhammad Ali, Henry Cooper, Uriah Heep, The Little Roosters, Deep Purple, Gary Moore, Greg Lake, Love Sculpture, Free, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Alvin Lee, Dr Feelgood and Charlie McCoy playing Lady Madonna on the harmonica on the Val Doonican Show … … and the greatest record ever made! Nine Below Zero tickets and tour dates here: https://www.ninebelowzero.com/tourHelp us to keep the conversation going by joining our worldwide Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dennis Greaves took a week off from Nine Below Zero in 1980 but otherwise kept his nose firmly applied to the grindstone. They broke up in 1983 when he formed the Truth, who broke up in 1989 when he rebooted the old band. He looks back here at the first gigs he ever saw and played – a world with the attractive scent of spilt beer and tobacco – stopping off at various points, among them … … why blues and R&B flourished in South London, police and villains drinking together at the Thomas A Becket and the folklore of the Old Kent Road. ... the great advantage of never having a hit. … taking his parents to see Chuck Berry in 1972. ... the lasting appeal of R&B in a world of processed music. … what he learnt from Glyn Johns when he produced them at Olympic Studios, “the man who invented phasing with Itchycoo Park”. … buying singles at A1 Records in Walworth – “Progressive, Reggae, Artists A-Z …” … seeing Blackfoot Sue and Scarecrow on the pub circuit, and the Groundhogs and Rory Gallagher at the Rainbow. … Pete Townshend watching Nine Below Zero from the wings - “you remind me of us in the ‘60s”. … seeing the Jam 11 times – “900 people in a 400 capacity venue!” … “getting gyp is good as you learn how to control an audience.” … 2am service station food and how touring has changed in 45 years. ... performing in the pilot for The Young Ones in 1982. … “the song you should study for A-Level Pop”. … memories of Mylone LeFevre, Capability Brown, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee, BB King, Muhammad Ali, Henry Cooper, Uriah Heep, The Little Roosters, Deep Purple, Gary Moore, Greg Lake, Love Sculpture, Free, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Alvin Lee, Dr Feelgood and Charlie McCoy playing Lady Madonna on the harmonica on the Val Doonican Show … … and the greatest record ever made! Nine Below Zero tickets and tour dates here: https://www.ninebelowzero.com/tourHelp us to keep the conversation going by joining our worldwide Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hola, gente. De inicio, en el primer bloque de la Wurli, abrimos un álbum fabuloso firmado por dos luminarias del blues, Lightnin' Hopkins, abanderado del blues tejano, y el inmenso armonicista Sonny Terry. Lightnin' Hopkins & Sonny Terry - Rocky Mountain Lightnin' Hopkins & Sonny Terry - Got To Move Your Baby Lightnin' Hopkins & Sonny Terry - Take A Trip With Me Lightnin' Hopkins & Sonny Terry - Lightnin's Stroke Lightnin' Hopkins & Sonny Terry - Hard To Love a Woman Luego nos vamos con las novedades, entre las que aquí destacan dos álbumes soberbios que son ejemplo de la grandeza de nuestros músicos. Por aquí suenan: Ma Polaine's Great Decline - Gasoline Can Tony Holiday & Eddie 9V - She's A Burglar Rackoners - Outta Love Stef Rosen - Higher The Soulers - Like A Hero The Soulers - Takin' ‘Bout Love Rambalaya - Shadow Rambalaya - Broken Heart Little Feat. - Too High To Cut My Hair Joanne Shaw Taylor - What Are You Gonna Do Now? Deltaphonic - Bad People Skyofant - Red Sun Gracias por escuchar con cariño y dejar tu corazón en el audio, aunque no lo parezca, esta chorradita es importante. Apoya este proyecto desde 1,49€ al mes. Tan solo tienes que pulsar el botón azul que tienes en la cabecera de este canal Y gracias infinitas, ya que tu aportación permite mejorar cada programa. Este programa, como siempre, está dedicado especialmente a nuestros patrocinadores: Yago Llopis, Joao Sampaio, RLP, Juan Carlos Acero, Mechimariani, Iñaki Del Olmo, L Ibiricu Traba, Nachoigs, Alfonso Ladrón, Javier Carmona, Ana López, Gustavo, Carmen Neke, Manuel García y Michel. ¡Qué la música os acompañe!
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Son House | This Little Light Of Mine | Son House-Real Delta Blues | Sleepy John Estes | Rats In My Kitchen | Legend Of Sleepy John Estes | Henry Thomas | The Fox And The Hounds | Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929 | LR Phoenix (Leighton Phoenix) | Grinnin' In Your Face | If the Devil Sang the Blues | LR Phoenix (Leighton Phoenix) | Smokestack Lightnin' | If the Devil Sang the Blues | Lightnin' Hopkins | Traveller's Blues | Lightnin' Hopkins: Blues Master | Tony Joe White | Roosevelt & Ira Lee | Baby Please Don't Go | Big Joe Wiliiams. Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee | Wimmen From Coast To Coast | Folk Blues Revival | | Willie ''61'' Blackwell | Noiseless Motor Blues | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A) | 2007 JSP Records | LR Phoenix (Leighton Phoenix) | Po' Black Mattie | If the Devil Sang the Blues | Martin Mc Neill | Lately I've Let Things Slide | Lately I've Let Things Slide | Lightnin' Hopkins | Katie Mae Blues | Lightnin' Hopkns: Blues Master | Pinetop Perkins and Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith | Lord, Lord, Lord | Joined At The Hip [Grammy winner 2011] | The Curse of K.K. Hammond | Don't Sell Your Sunshine for a Knife | Death Roll Blues | | Lead Belly | 'fore Day Worry Blues | Country Southern Blues
Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Crooked Eyed Tommy on his new project with Tomislav GolubanIt's not very often that an old-school Croatian harmonica player hooks up with a West Coast guitarist. In fact, this collaboration is partially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. Tomislav Goluban, whose surname translates to Pigeon in English, has been inspired by harmonica masters Sonny Boy Williamson, Paul Butterfield, Kim Wilson, Gary Primich, Sonny Terry, and Joe Filisko. His twenty-year music career includes 15 studio albums. Tomislav began playing harp in 1997 and released his debut recording, “Pigeon's Flight,” in 2005. http://www.makingascene.org
Playlist: Park Jiha - Breathe AgainMelón Jimenez & Lara Wong - De Sevilla A KeralaAmmar El Sherei - Balad El Mahbobacrxxkedclwn - moon, my museAmir Amiri Ensemble - Chahar Mazrab Abu AttaSababa 5, Sophia Solomon - Ranjha - रांझाAl-Qasar , featuring Alsarah - Desse BaramaMontuno West - CoquitoSonghoy Blues - WoyhennaThe Rosenberg Trio, featuring Stochelo Rosenberg - Les Yeux NoirShabaka, featuring Esperanza Spalding - Cycles of GrowthZal Sissoko - XaritVarious, featuring Grant Green - BrazilVarious, featuring Dur-Dur Band - HaleloThe Harpoonist - I May Not Have It TogetherTotal Gadjos - Hank Lee And The Maniacal TenSonny Landreth - M'ssippi BluesDoug Cox & Salil Bhatt with Ramkumar Mishra - Bhoopali DanceArşivplak - Mogol İstilası (Demo)Various, featuring Sonny Terry, Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston - Lonesome TrainWrong Way Up - Sweet Sweet Music
Remember to get your tickets to the 2025 CPMAs coming up on March 5th:https://amtshows.com/show/6th-annual-cpmas-hall-of-fame-induction-ceremony/This week we have:Dave Still:Sr. Recording Engineer and Operations Manager of the Schoolhouse Recording Studio, Westport, Connecticut from 1976-1984. Responsible for three (3) Muddy Waters Grammy Award Winning Blues Records. Dave's biography speaks for itself in this episode. We get a glimpse of the recording process and equipment used to record those iconic songs in the 80s. Other notable artists that recorded with Dave are: Edgar Winter, Johnny Winter, 38 Special, Cyndi Lauper, Dan Hartman, Foghat, Rick Derringer, Sonny Terry & Willie Dixon, Allen Merrill, 3rd Stream, and many more.https://www.lvc.edu/profiles/david-still/&Brian Seneca:Guitarist for Zero Gravity out of Harrisburg, PA, Brian has been playing music for most of his life. Brian just released his first solo album "I Am Still Around" which was nominated for "Album of the Year" for the 6th annual CPMAs this year. Brian collaborated with many names on this album including; Amy Simpson, Greg Platzer, Shelby Nelson of The Famous, and more. Stick around to the end for an exclusive performance of "Alright by Me" and be sure to check out his new album! https://music.apple.com/us/artist/brian-seneca/1777624113https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RNAkmwj7AUhttps://www.reverbnation.com/zerogravityrockandrollbandYou can find out more about the CPMHOF @ https://cpmhof.com/Brought to you by Darker with Daniel @ Studio 3.http://darkerwithdaniel.com/All media requests: thecpmpodcast@gmail.comWant to be on an episode of the CPMP? For all considerations please fill out a form @ https://cpmhof.com/guest-considerationJoin us back here or on your favorite audio streaming platform every other week for more content.
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Dixieland Jug Blowers | Boodle-Am-Shake | A Richer Tradition - Country Blues & String Band Music, 1923-1935 | Joe Turner | Christmas Date Boogie | Arhoolie Records Christmas Time Blues | Corey Harris* & Henry Butler | King Cotton | Vu-Du Menz | | Ramsey Lewis Trio | Merry Christmas Baby | Sound of Christmas | | Bukka White | Black Train | The Complete Sessions 1930-1940 | Seasick Steve & The Level Devils | Xmas Prison Blues | Cheap | | | Alger ''Texas'' Alexander | I am Calling Blues (1928) | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1928 - 1930) | Charley Jordan with Mary Harri | No Christmas Blues | Charley Jordan Vol 3 (1935-1937) | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | Hootin' the Blues - [ASH GROVE 1-21-1967 1ST SHOW] | Michael Messer | Rollin 'n' Tumblin | King Guitar 2001 | | Andres Roots Roundabout | Miss Carmen James | Three! | | | Lead Belly | The Christmas Song | Rockin' Blues Christmas | Pistol Pete Wearn | Riverside Blues | Live At Liège | | Jerry 'Boogie' McCain- | I Want To Be Your Santa Claus | I've Got The Blues All Over Me 1993 | MJQ | God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen | Germany (1956-1958 Lost Tapes)
Paul Lamb, Joe Filisko and Adam Sikora join me on episode 125, for a retrospective on one of the legends of the diatonic harmonica, Sonny Terry, whose real name was Saunders Terrell.Sonny was born in 1911 (or 1912), in Greensboro, Georgia (or it could have been North Carolina). Growing up on a farm in a rural community, Sonny was left blind by two accidents in his youth. Unable to work on the farm he turned to music, with his harmonica playing father giving him his early lessons.Sonny first rose to prominence playing with Blind Boy Fuller, and then made a splash by performing at Carnegie Hall in 1938 as part of the ‘From Spirituals To Swing' concert.A few years later he formed probably the most famous blues duo ever, with Brownie McGhee. Sonny and Brownie made their name in the New York Folk scene and went on to play together for forty years, travelling the world, with many festival appearances, on Broadway, in movies and countless albums together. Sonny also played solo and with many other notable musicians besides Brownie, including an album with Johnny Winter towards the end of his life.We look into Sonny's style of playing and talk about how his rhythmical work is essential study in getting your own harmonica chops together.Links:Sonny Terry Estate items for sale:https://bluemoonharmonicas.com/collections/sonny-terry-estate-llcPaul Lamb: http://paullamb.com/Joe Filisko: https://www.filiskostore.com/Adam Sikora: https://jukejointsmokers.com/http://www.the-archivist.co.uk/rare-early-blues-harp-recordings-by-singers-and-sidemen-introduced-by-joe-filisko/Videos:American Folk Blues Festival, Hootin' The Blues:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtO7cctW1uISonny and Woody Guthrie postage stamps playing Lost John:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4ldxb0iGHcSonny and Brownie in one of their last concerts, 1980:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzDNhA5irc8Sonny and Brownie playing on The Jerk, Steve Martin movie:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDgOUoDTsYPodcast website:https://www.harmonicahappyhour.comDonations:If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GBSpotify Playlist: Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQPodcast sponsors:This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS--------------------------------Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.comSupport the show
Interview with Arlen Roth 2024 Arlen Roth is a true guitar legend; part of the list of who he's recorded and toured with contains folks like Simon & Garfunkel (together and individually), John Prine, Phoebe Snow, Bob Dylan, Bee Gees, Don McLean, Levon Helm, Ry Cooder, Duane Eddy, Danny Gatton, Janis Ian, Dusty Springfield, John Sebastian, Johnny Winter and countless more. He also appeared with Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Patti Smith in the Martin Scorcese Rolling Thunder film, created the guitar parts and was consultant and teacher to Ralph Macchio for the legendary blues film, Crossroads. In 2016, he wrote and performed an acoustic guitar piece with Daveed Diggs and Leslie Odom, Jr. of Hamilton for ESPN. Arlen was voted in the Top 100 most Influential guitarists of all time by Vintage Guitar Magazine and top 50 all-time acoustic guitarists by Gibson.com. Now, on Arlen Roth's 20th solo album and his fifth all-acoustic offering, he's bringing rootsy acoustic music to new heights on Playing Out the String, set for release September 27 and distributed by MVD. The new album was recorded, mixed and mastered by Alex Salzman, who also contributes keyboards to the mix. Arlen's previous album, Super Soul Session, with bass legend Jerry Jemmott, sat atop the Blues and Soul charts for 22 straight weeks, and was in the Top 5 for 55 straight weeks this past year. Arlen has also been at the forefront of guitar and music education, with 10 best-selling books, and he was the first-ever to offer video instruction with the giants of the music industry through his “Hot Licks” company, which he started in 1979, and has had millions of students worldwide. His column for Guitar Player magazine was voted #1 by the largest margin of readers from 1982 to 1992, and was also turned into a best-selling book, Hot Guitar. On Playing Out the String, this all-acoustic, mostly solo album is very personal to Arlen and is really like getting an up-close "at home" concert in your living room. On it, he paints with broad strokes across several genres of music he loves. From "Old Timey" Norman Blake material to country blues from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Tampa Red; he even makes you feel at home with Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'" and gives his 12-string guitar a workout on the archetypical, "Walk Right In." https://www.arlenroth.com
Today's show features music performed by Sonny Terry and Jimmy Dawkins
SELECCIÓN 16 2024 BLUES SYNDICATE 1- TOMORROW NIGHT – B.B. KING 2- CHICKEN A LA KING – COUSING JOE 3- SINNER´S PRAYER – RAY CHARLES & B.B. KING 4- WAR IS COMING – WAR 5- BLUES FOR THE LOWLANDS – SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE 6- SINCE I FELL FOR YOU – B.B. KING 7- I WALKED ALL NIGHT – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG 8- TAKE OUT SOME INSURANCE – JIMMY REED 9- KNEE DEEP – ZAC BROWN BAND 10- STICK WAY OUT BEHIND – SNOOKY PRYOR 11- MR. PITIFUL – TAJ MAHAL 12- FUNKY MABEL – JOHN LEE HOOKER 13- I WANT MY CROWN – ERIC GALES & JOE BONAMASSA 14- WE´LL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER – BOBBY KING & TERRY EVANS
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Eric Clapton & Chris Barber et al - John Mayall & The Blues Breakers | Hideaway | 70th Birthday Concert | Eric Clapton & John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers | Tribute to Elmore | The Early Years | | John Mayall With Buddy Whittington | Sen-Say-Shun | Blues From The Lost Days | Walter Trout | Mayall's Piano Boogie (Instrumental) | The Blues Came Callin' | Blues Breakers | All Your Love/ Hideaway | Blues Breakers. John Mayall with Eric Clapton | John Mayall's Bluesbreakers | Bye Bye Bird | Live In 1967 Vol. II | | John Mayall & The Blues Breakers And Friends, Mayall, Clapton & Barber | Please Mr Lofton | 70th Birthday Concert | John Mayall & Duster Bennett | My Babe [John Mayall & Friends, Live At The Palais Des Sport | Live In France [Disc 1] | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | God And Man | Sonny & Brownie | | James Oliver | Peter Gun | Less Is More | | Stompin' Dave's Rockin' Outfit | Great Balls Of Fire | Stompin' Dave's Rockin' Outfit | John Mayall's Bluesbreakers w Peter Green, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood | Stormy Monday | Live In 1967 Vol. II |
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | | J.D. Harris | The Grey Eagle | The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of (disc 1) | Lonnie Johnson | Lonesome Road | Lonnie Johnson Tomorrow Night 1970 | Tampa Red | Through Train Blues | Tampa Red Vol. 1 (1928-1929) | | Lightnin' Hopkins | Mean Old Frisco | The Blues of Lightnin' Hopkins (1967) | Big Bill Broonzy | Sad Letter Blues | Chicago 1937-1938 (CD8) 1937-1940 Part 2 | Leecan and Cooksey | Dirty Guitar Blues | A Richer Tradition - Country Blues & String Band Music, 1923-1928 | Corey Harris | Jack O' Diamonds | Fish Ain't Bitin' | | | Half Deaf Clatch | Storm Brewin | The Blues Continuum | | Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee | Worried Life Blues (Recorded Live At The Free Trade Hall, Manchester | Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series | Jake Leg Jug Band | I Love Me | Break A leg | | | Dik Banovich | Pay Day | Run to You | | | Blind Blake | Fancy Tricks | All The Recorded Sides | | Tom Doughty | Come Back Baby | You Can't Teach An Old Dog | | Bluesblabber | The Ballad of Mr. Wright | Like It Raw | | | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers | That Suits Me | Get In Union | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Peg Leg Howell | Coal Man Blues | Country Southern Blues |
Grand finale de 'Queen II Reimagined': hoy celebramos el quinto y último capítulo de nuestro homenaje al segundo e icónico disco de Queen. Estrenamos las dos últimas versiones: 'Funny How Love Is' a cargo de Quincalla y 'Seven Seas Of Rhye' de la mano de Gyoza. Charlamos con ambas bandas del enfoque de sus versiones y su proceso de grabación, y Edu Molina, productor de este homenaje, nos deleita con una buena ración de trivia e interesantes historias sobre las canciones que cierran este álbum emblemático.Playlist:ALAIN JOHANNES, DAVE GROHL & JOSH HOMME - A Trick with No Sleeve (BSO 'Sound City')LOST SATELLITE - Getaway (feat. Alan Johannes)FU MANCHU - Hands Of The ZodiacQUEEN - Funny How Love IsLARRY LUREX - I Can Hear MusicQUINCALLA - Funny How Love Is ['Queen II Reimagined']QUEEN - Seven Seas Of RhyeQUEEN - Seven Seas Of Rhye (Live At Wembley Stadium / July 1986)GYOZA - Seven Seas Of Rhye ['Queen II Reimagined']QUEEN - See What a Fool I've Been (B-Side Version)SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE - That's How I FeelQUEEN - KIller QueenTHE WARNING - Automatic SunFEEDER - SaharaFEEDER - Universe of LifeREMI WOLF - CinderellaMANOLA - 1977JUNGLE - Keep MovingEscuchar audio
Dennis Gruenling feat. Doug Deming and The Jewel Tones (Actin' Crazy); Kirris Riviere and The Delta du Bruit (Have Mercy Baby); King Solomon Hicks (Have Mercy On Me); Zataban (Good Luck Goes Away); The Diego Mongue Band (While You Were Gone); Albert Cummings (Let It Burn); Johnny Shines (Too Wet To Plow); Bill Abel (Gospel Plow); Jimmy Dawkins (Down, Down Baby); Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee with Lightnin' Hopkins and Big Joe Williams (Early Morning Blues); Honey Island Swamp Band (Till The Money's Gone); Johnny Young (All My Money Gone); Pinetop Perkins (4 O'Clock In The Morning); Bonnie Raitt (About To Make Me Leave Home); Vance Kelly and His Back Street Blues Band (How Can I Miss You, When You Won't Leave).
SELECCIÓN 01 2024 BLUES SYNDICATE 1- KATIE MAY – ARTHUR BIG BOY CUDRUP 2- AIN´T SEEN MY BABY – CEPHAS & WIGGINS 3- CROSSROADS – HOMESICK JAMES 4- YOU DON´T KNOW MY MIND – GUY DAVIS 5- THE MOON IS RISING – ROBERT NIGHTHAWK 6- NORTH COUNTY WOMAN – DOUG MACLEOD 7- I AM LOUISIANA RED – LOUISIANA RED 8- MISSISSIPPI BLUES – RORY BLOCK 9- BLACK TRAIN BLUES – BUKKA WHITE 10- NODODY´S FAULT BUT MINE – JOHNNY SHINES 11- KEY TO THE HIGHWAY – SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE 12- LEVEE BREAK BLUES – BIG JOE WILLIAMS 13- COME TO ME – JUKE BOY BONNER 14- BABY PLEASE DON´T GO – PINK ANDERSON 15- YOU GOTTA MOVE – JOHN CAMPBELLJOHN 16- RAIN SO HARD – OTIS TAYLOR 17- BIG FAT MAMA – DAVID HONEBOY EDWARDS 18- DON´T GOT OVER – CLARENCE EDWARDS 19- TOUGH TIMES – JOHN BRIM 20- CATFISH BLUES – ROBERT PETWAY 21- SOME DAY BABY – LONNIE JOHNSON 22- WEE BABY BLUES – EDDIE CLEANHEAD VINSON
Just like jazz, country music was on radio from the very start. One of the earliest country music programs to be broadcast was the Grand Ole Opry, which also produced the first African-American country music star. DeFord Bailey was known as a harmonica wizard, and began appearing on radio in 1925. In 1927, Bailey had the first of a series of hit records, beginning with his trademark song, "Pan American Blues". Bailey was so popular, he became the first black artist to become a regular member of the Grand Ole Opry. He was a part of the cast until 1941, and was inducted Country Music Hall of Fame. You will hear DeFord Bailey perform on a 1940 Opry broadcast. You will also hear the second African-American to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Charlie Pride had 30 number one country hits during his long career, and he will play a few on the radio show "Here's to Veterans". You will hear Hootenanny, a 1947 show from CBS Radio featuring Country and folk superstars Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, plus African-American legends Brownie McGee, Sonny Terry, Sidney Bechet, and the Coleman Brothers. We also honor Linda Martell. The South Carolina native was the first commercially successful black female country artist, and the first African-American woman to play the Grand Ole Opry in 1970, and went on to make 11 more appearances there. Linda Martell's first hit was Color Him Father, released in 1969. Our podcast will wrap up with Dude Martin's Radio Rancho from 1947. For details visit http://krobcollection.com
Bruce Springsteen and Thurston Moore adore his work and rightly so...Wizz Jones is a lynchpin of the UK folk blues guitar scene and has been since the early 1960s. When London was an epicenter for artists from the USA such as Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jackson C. Frank, and Bob Dylan - Wizz was right there. Wizz was also there to hear some of the first notes Davey Graham played in DADGAD tuning, to witness the impact of a young Bert Jansch on the UK guitar scene, and to run sessions at the legendary Les Cousins club in Soho's Greek Street. It's not there anymore, of course. That end of Soho is now a preponderance of private members clubs and bijoux eateries but back in the day things were a lot less salubrious and, judging from how Wizz tells it, a hell of a lot more fun. Wizz talks about the early days of his life on the fretboard: When he was a young bohemian, the influence of Jack Kerouac on his generation, London's Soho in the sixties when you could bump into everyone from Cat Stevens to Quentin Crisp, his travels around Morocco and France, and offers the benefit of his experience and wisdom with one important caveat. Now in his 80s, Wizz can still be seen playing around London with his trademark 1963 Epiphone Texan. I caught up with him at RMS recording studios in London where Wizz has made several albums in the past. He was in characteristically fine form (the conversation is somewhat peppered with adult language). To my everlasting disgrace, I may have joined in, too. But that can happen when you're hanging out with the cool kids. You can support this podcast here: https://michaelwattsguitar.com/tip-jars/4745 Donate to Maui Strong here: https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/maui-strong Thank you to my sponsors for this episode: Microtech Gefell Microphones https://www.microtechgefell.de and, you, the listener!
Today's show features music performed by Sonny Terry and Jimmy Dawkins
As broadcast October 9, 2023 with plenty of good vibes in tow for the festival hangover. Tonight, in our final edition of the Busking World Cup Special Series, we welcomed two very talented artists to the studio for a heavy dose of folk, classics, and just downright sunshine as one of the best ongoing events in Gwangju wraps its 2nd edition. First hour we welcomed Pompey native folk singer Sam Brothers to the show, who not only is the spitting image of David Bowie and Mick Jagger's long-rumored love child, but also took us on a journey of influences across a variety of eras and styles. For our final busking guests of the week, we welcomed Steph and Georgie Fisher, who are the Sydney-born Berlin-based duo that comprise Sissos. Much like their own places of connection in this world, they showcased some of their friends from both places, and talked about the duality of family and artistry in a fascinating and exceedingly funny interview to wrap the week properly.#feelthegravityBusking World Cup 2023 Special #62023.10.09Tracklist (st:rt) Part 1 with Sam Brothers (00:00)Sam Brothers – Still I'm Here, As AlwaysColter Wall – The Devil Wears A Suite and Tie (Original 16 Brewery Sessions)Sonny Terry – Key To The Highway (Live at Sugar Hill)Devendra Banhart – Now That I KnowVan Morrison – Star of the County DownJoanna Newsom – Easy Part 2 (37:56)Sam Brothers – Gwangju Busking World Cup App VideoBob Dylan – On More Cup of CoffeeJoni Mitchell – CaliforniaJeff Buckley – GracePlanxty – As I Roved Out Part 3 with Sissos (69:08)Sissos – You Can't Have BothJessie Monk – Gets Me DownStu Larsen – Lost in a HazeJoe Mungovan – Soaking Up The SunshineSonny Casey – A Thousand Setting SunsMichael Brinkworth – Good Old Feeling Part 4 (1:43:10)Sissos – Leave My Dreams for MeFirst Aid Kit – My Silver LiningLucas Laufen – WeatheringJulia Jacklin – ComfortJudy Blank – KaraokePaul Kelly – To Her Door
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Emma Wilson feat. Don Bryant (from Album 'Memphis Calling') | What Kind Of Love | | | Corey Ledet | Pendan Koronaj | Médikamen | | Dee's Honeytones | Out Of My Mind | Wow Wow | | Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry | Spread the News Around | The Bluesville Years, Vol. 5 | Jimmy Regal & The Royals | Empty Streets | The First And Last Stop | Bob Angell | Drinkin' Shoes | Supernal Blues | | Muddy Waters | My Captain | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965 CD2 | Sam Myers | What Have I Done | Down Home In Mississippi | Ben Levin | Mr. Stroger's Strut (feat. Bob Stroger) | Take Your Time | | Arlen Roth And Jerry Jemmott | Memphis Soul Stew | Super Soul Session | | Parchman Prison Prayer | You Did Not Leave Me, You Bless Me Still | Some Mississippi Sunday Morning | Glitter Beat/Proper | Fats Domino | Walkin' To New Orleans | | Jerry Lee Lewis | No Honky Tonks In Heaven | A Whole Lotta... Jerry Lee Lewis (CD3) | Ivy Gold | No Ordinary Woman | Broken Silence | | Emma Wilson feat. Don Bryant & (from Album 'Memphis Calling') | What Kind Of Love | |
Tom Halchak joins me on episode 91.Tom tells us how he grew his successful company, Blue Moon Harmonicas, started in 2009. Tom started out selling custom combs, and then covers in different materials and colours. Tom went on to develop his customisation skills to offer fully fledged custom harmonicas using his Blue Moon product lines. Tom also started offering pre-war Marine Band harmonicas for sale. These hand-crafted harps have stood the test of time and with some improvements by Tom, provide a playing experience which conjures the spirit of the players of the past. As a result of his pre-war harmonicas trading, Tom now acts on behalf of the estate of Sonny Terry, offering Sonny's actual harmonicas for sale, complete with the DNA of the great man himself, as well as a range of other memorabilia, such as concert posters and contracts. Tom also prides himself in providing great service.Links:Blue Moon harmonicas:https://bluemoonharmonicas.com/Blue Moon Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/BlueMoonHarmonicasSonny Terry harmonica collection:https://bluemoonharmonicas.com/collections/sonny-terry-estate-llcVideos:Blue Moon instrumental by Whitt Smith:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NGES1uduekRange of harps available at Blue Moon:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXlrOo9qQKECNC Milling GM wood comb:https://youtu.be/lhVFoRTDMjsJason Ricci video on Blue Moon products he uses:https://youtu.be/PWrKgdGnhZEJason Ricci playing ‘Feel Good Funk':https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSAvtxrTbccCustom combs for Big River:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcgQktZ8gDsAdam Gussow appraisal of 150 of Sonny Terry's harmonicas:https://youtu.be/EDT4Xt70OmgSonny Terry tribute concert at SPAH 2016:https://youtu.be/7ycKmefNKfgPodcast website:https://www.harmonicahappyhour.comDonations:If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GBor sign-up to a monthly subscription to the podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/995536/supportSpotify Playlist:Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQPodcast sponsors:This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICASSupport the show
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 --
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Arthur Montana Taylor | Sweet Sue (rec Chicago 18/4/46) | Montana Taylor | | Tampa Red | It's Red Hot | Bottleneck Guitar 1928-1937 | Lightnin' Hopkins | Wake Up Old Lady | Goin' Away (1963) | | Half Deaf Clatch | The Elysian Blues | Simple Songs For These Complicated Times | Seasick Steve | Purple Shadows | Hubcap Music | | Blind Willie Johnson | If I Had My Way I'd Tear The Building Down | The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (1 of 2) | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | Hey Baby Hey Baby You're So Sweet - [ASH GROVE 1-21-1967 1ST SH | Ash Grove 01-21-1967 1st Show | Bill Abel | Don't You Hurt (Instrumental) | One-Man Band | | Tony Joe White | Baby Please Don't Go | Bad Mouthin' (2018) | Andres Roots | Thanks For Bringing Me Down | Winter | | | Washboard Sam | Phantom Black Snake | Washboard Swing | | Paul Cowley | Preaching Blues | Stroll Out West | | R. L. Burnside | Goin' Down South | First Recordings | | Lonnie Johnson | C.C. Rider (Traditional) | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965 CD3 | John Hammond | Sugar Mama | Sooner Or Later (2002 reissue) - 2002 - 320 - FC | Mississippi Fred Mc Dowell | Highway 61 | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965 CD5
We're checking off a BIG ONE this week -- Steve's Martin's cinematic debut THE JERK manages to be absent of cynicism, while biting in it's commentary about wealth. Satirical and charming, and stacked with comedic talents like Bernadette Peters, Jackie Mason, M. Emmet Walsh under the direction of Carl Reiner.Shop the Store: http://tee.pub/lic/bvHvK3HNFhkFollow us on Letterboxd!Victoria: https://letterboxd.com/vicrohar/Chelsea: https://letterboxd.com/chelseathepope/Theme Music "A Movie I'd Like to See"Arranged & Performed by Katrina EresmanWritten by Al HarleyShow Art: Cecily Brown Follow the Show @freshmoviepod YouTube Channel abreathoffreshmovie@gmail.com
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Taj Mahal | Killer Joe | Savoy | | | Half Deaf Clatch | Light Never Escapes | Beyond The Horizon's Shadow | Nick Steed Five | Just Singin' the Blues | Feeling The Blues | | Gene 'Mighty' Flea' Conners | I Wouldn't Give A Cripple Crab | Coming Home | | Pete Rea | Never Fade Away | Zero Hour | | Errol Linton | Love Is Strong | Packing My Bags | | Canned Heat | Nighthawk | Songs From The Road | TBelly Live @ The Albert 2022 | Walk With Me (Live) | TBelly Live @ The Albert 2022 | Charles -Cow Cow- Davenport | We Gonna Rub It | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1929-1945) | (Mike) Ziito & (Albert) Castiglia | One Step Ahead of the Blues | Blood Brothers | | Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee | Glory-I'm Going To Walk And Talk with Jesus (Recorded Live from Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series | Bo Diddley | I'm A Man - ALT | Down Home Blues Chicago Volume 2 CD4 | Little Richard | Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On | Little Richard and Friends: Good Golly Miss Molly | Ron Kraemer Trio With The Nashville Cats | Who's Knockin' | Sarasota Swing |
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | | | Son House | Clarksdale Moan | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A) | 2007 JSP Records | | | Roosevelt Sykes | Come On Back Home | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965 CD5 | Doc Watson & Rec Live Newport Folk Fest 1963/4 | Little Orphan Girl | The Essential Doc Watson | | | Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee | John Henry (Recorded Live At The Free Trade Hall, Manchester, E | Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series | Lightnin' Hopkins | 4. Stool Pigeon Blues | Folk Blues Revival | | | | Snooks Eaglin | Mailman Passed | That's Alright | | | | John Hammond | My Starter Won't Start | You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover - 1993 | Half Deaf Clatch | Waiting For The Storm to Pass | The Album With No Name | | | Blind Willie McTell | Experience Blues | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1931-1933) | Jelly Jaw Short | Barefoot Blues | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD C) | 2007 JSP Records | | | Andres Roots Roundabout | Miss Carmen James | Three! | | | | | Tony Joe White | Heartbreak Hotel | Bad Mouthin' (2018) | | | Fiona Boyes | Party at Red's | Voodoo In The Shadows | | | Seasick Steve & The Level Devils | Cheap | Cheap | | | | | Seasick Steve | Happy (To Have A Job) | Man From Another Time | | | David Evans | Don't Leave Me Here | Lonesome Midnight Dream | |
Today's show features music performed by Nat King Cole and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Catfish Keith [Fishtail Records] | It Can't Be Undone | Put On A Buzz | | Mississippi Fred McDowell & Annie Mae McDowell | Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed | My Home Is In The Delta | Blind Willie McTell | Atlanta Strut | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1927-1931) | Duwayne Burnside | Stay All Night.mp3 | Acoustic Burnside | | John Hammond | Shake For Me | You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover - 1993 - Vbr - FC | Jake Leg Jugband | I Never Knew I Had A Wonderful Wife (Until The Town Went Dry) | Goodbye Booze | | Charles -Cow Cow- Davenport | Alabama Mistreater | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 | Furry Lewis | Mistreatin' Mama | In His Prime 1927-1928 | Jimmy 'Duck' Holmes | Leave In the Morning | Get Old Someday | | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | Kansas City Blues | American Folk Blues Festival Live In Manchester 1962 | Papa Charlie Jackson | Hot Papa Blues No. 2 | Classic Blues Artwork From the 1920's | Amos Milburn | Bow-Wow! | Complete Aladdin Recordings 1994 CD3 | Stompin' Dave | Still Some Wonder | Acoustic Blues | | Pink Anderson | Try Some Of That | Blues Legend | | The Curse of K.K. Hammond | 10 Memento Mori | Death Roll Blues | | Jimmy Yancey | P. L. K. Special (Remastered) | Yancey's Getaway |
The first episode of our new theme: April Fools. Brent, Nate, and Kate dive into the 1979 screwball comedy The Jerk starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Catlin Adams, Mabel King, Richard Ward, Dick Anthony Williams, Bill Macy, M. Emmet Walsh, Dick O'Neill, Maurice Evans, Helena Carroll, Ren Woods, Pepe Serna, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, Jackie Mason, David Landsberg, Domingo Ambriz, Richard Foronjy, Lenny Montana, Carl Gottlieb, Clete Roberts, Frances E. Williams, and Carl Reiner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#192 Transmitido diretamente da cidade das sete colinas, Júlio Adler e João Valente gravaram esse episodio frente a frente - enquanto Bruno Bocayuva se ausentava para jogar tênis com Jorge Paulo. Entramos de cabeça no desproporcional problema que o Brasil tem com os talentos no ramo do surfe profissional, pero sem perder a ternura jamais. Recuperamos o Sunday Joint do Mr. Warshaw de janeiro, expondo a misoginia australiana, tão antiga quanto a sede por cervejas, descobrindo a história fascinante e melancólica de Judy Trim. Uma postagem do Mark Richards foi suficiente para desandar tudo, descrito no pormenor na legenda, praticamente uma imposição dos anos 70 para o Imagem Falada. Mas tudo o que até então foi conversado perde o interesse quando Tito Rosemberg cisma de partilhar suas lembranças do concerto do Jimi Hendrix Experience em 1969, no Royal Albert Hall! A trilha, absolutamente destrambelhada como de costume, parte da Índia de Asha Puthli com Right Down Here e deságua numa pérola do Quincy Jones, do clássico do Spielberg, A Cor Purpura, na voz da maravilhosa Tata Vega, acompanhada de Sonny Terry e Ry Cooder, Miss Celie's Blues (Sister). --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/boia/message
Willie Cobbs (Feeling Good); The Cash Box Kings (Down On The South Side); The Cadillac Kings (Don't Fix It); Johnny Laws (Big Question); Memphis Minnie (Man You Won't Give Me No Money); Sue Foley ((Me And My) Chauffeur Blues); Coco Montoya (Lost In The Bottle); Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (Born To Live The Blues); Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi (Walk On); Ally Venable (Blues Is My Best Friend); Yack Taylor (Hard Lovin' Blues); Baby Hines (This Is The End); Crystal Thomas (The Blues Ain't Nothing But Some Pain); Blood Brothers (A Fool Never Learns); Big Harp George (Behind The Eight Ball); Sugaray Rayford (Country Boy).
Intro Song – Zac Harmon, “Long As I Got My Guitar”, Long As I Got My Guitar First Set - Little Milton Featuring Willie Love & His Three Aces, “Feed My Body To The Fishes”, Running Wild Blues Kenny Neal, “It Don't Cost Nothing”, Straight From The Heart Memphis Slim, “Memphis Slim U.S.A.”, Memphis Slim U.S.A. Hound Dog Taylor, “Take Five”, Deluxe Edition-Hound Dog Taylor And The House Rockers Second Set – Clarence Gatemouth Brown, “Pressure Cooker”, Pressure Cooker Holmes Brothers, “Fanny Mae”, Soul Street Pee Wee Crayton, “Central Avenue Blues”, The Pee Wee Crayton Collection 1947-1962 Sonny Terry, “I'm Crazy About Your Pie”, Wizard of the Harmonica Third Set – WIB Mavis Staples, “Pop's Recipe”, Have A Little Faith Zora Young, “Girl Friend”, Learned My Lesson Janice Harrington, “Blues Rocking”, 80 Years Of International Friendship Fourth Set – Muddy Waters, “Turn Your Lamp Down Low (Baby Please Don't Go)”, The Definitive Collection Buddy Guy featuring Bobby Rush, “What's Wrong With That”, The Blues Don't Lie B.B. King, “Six Silver String”, Bending The Rules
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Adam Franklin | Kokomo Blues | 112 Guildford Street | | Chad Strentz | Open D | Acoustically Yours Vol 2 | Blind Willie McTell | Broke Down Engine | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1931-1933) | Bob Dylan | Blackwater Blues Live | Acoustic Blues Kings and Queens, Vol. 1 | Paul Rishell | M & O Blues [Willie Brown] | Talkin' Guitar | | Big Bill Broonzy | Humble Blues | Big Bill Broonzy Vol 12 (1945-1947) | Seasick Steve & The Level Devils | Love Thang | Cheap | | | Amos Milburn | I Love Her | Complete Aladdin Recordings 1994 CD2 | Lightnin' Hopkins | Whiskey Blues | Blues Master Works: Lightnin' Hopkins | Gus Cannon | Jonestown Blues | Searching For Secret Heroes | Document Records | Black Byrd and Washboard Walter | I Don't Care What You Do | Classic Blues Artwork From the 1920's | Robert Johnson | Kind Hearted Woman Blues | The Complete Recordings; The Centennial Collection | Big Joe Wiliams. Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee | Penitentiary Blues | Folk Blues Revival | | Duster Bennett | Georgina | Shady Little Baby - 2000 - 320 | Jesse Fuller | Sleeping In The Midnight Cold | Move On Down the Line | Tampa Red | It's Tight Like That | Tampa Red Vol. 1 (1928-1929)
City Limits drives circles around Chris and Charlotte as they talk about Kim Cattrall, James Earl Jones, Rae Dawn Chong, Robbie Benson, and Morrissey.SHOW NOTES.City Limits: IMDb. MST3K Wiki. Trailer.Fiasco Family Movie Night.Our patreon has some new features!The Greatest Story Ever Told. (And yes, Charlotte did join us!)Kim Cattrall and Pierre Trudeau.Mannequin.Big Trouble in Little China.Today's Special.This is CNN.Beastmaster or Conan the Barbarian?Commando.John Stockwell and Andy Warhol.John Stockwell and Bianca Jagger (taken by Andy Warhol).Breast Men.Beauty and the Beast.Gaston's song.Grim Fandango.Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.The Smiths: Shiela Take a Bow.Austin City Limits.Khruangbin on Austin City Limits.Guns by state.Our episode on Pod People.Gerry Rafferty: Baker's Street.Hūsker Dū.Paul Revere and the Raiders: Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian).Billy Preston: Nothing from Nothing.Roger Ramjet and his PEP Pills.Support us on Patreon and you can hear us talk about The Greatest Story Ever Told!
First broadcast on January 28, 1970. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry discuss their careers as blues musicians and longtime collaborators. The close relationship between Terry and McGhee is apparent as they perform a number of original and traditional songs during the interview. Songs have been removed due to copyright.
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Mick Clarke | Barbecue Bob | Telegram | | | Big River | Slow Burn | Beautiful Trauma | | Duke Robillard | Going Straight | Dangerous Place | | Steve Roux & Brass Knuckle Blues Band | Satisfy Susie | Live @ The Boarhunt Blues Club | Aynsley Lister | Along For The Ride | Along For The Ride | | Wide Mouth Mason | Anywhere- | I Wanna Go With You MP3 | JD Short | Slidin' Delta | Searching For Secret Heroes | Document Records | Jon Townsend & Friends | Miss you when you've gone | Just Got To! | | Amos Milburn | Real Gone | Complete Aladdin Recordings 1994 CD1 | Sir Rod & the Blues Doctors | What'd I Say | Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors -Come Together (2020) mp3 | Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee | Down By The Riverside | Folk Blues Revival | | Red Prysock | Rock 'n' Roll | Great Rock 'n Roll Instrumentals, Vol. 1 CD 2 | Jerry Lee Lewis | Break Up | A Whole Lotta... Jerry Lee Lewis (CD1) | Janiva Magness | Comes Around | Hard To Kill |
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Big Joe Wiliams. Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee | Wimmen From Coast To Coast | Folk Blues Revival | | Robert Lockwood | Black Spider Blues | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A) | 2007 JSP Records | Lightnin' Hopkins | Sun Goin' Down | The Swarthmore Concert (1964) | Michael Messer | Living By The Water | MOONbeat 1995 | | Half Deaf Clatch | My Babe (Live) | Live In Shetland 2014 | Catfish Keith | She Got Washed Away | Honey Hole | | Lightnin' Hopkins With Sonny Terry | Take A Trip With Me | Last Night Blues | | Rory Block | Pure Religion | I Belong To The Band | Robert Pete Williams | Sweep My Floor | Robert Pete Williams | Julian Piper | Who Got The Olds? (When Johnny Ace Died) | Terlingua | | | Blind Willie McTell | Three Women Blues | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1927-1931) | Andy Cohen | Miss The Mississippi And You | Built Right On The Ground | Furry Lewis | Furry Lewis talking 3 | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968 | Cora Mae Bryant | Hambone | Sisters Of The South (Cd2) | Jake Leg Jugband | Just A Little Drink | Prohibition Is A Failure
It is a pleasure to welcome singer-songwriter Finlay Morton to The Jake's Take with Jacob Elyachar Podcast. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Finlay taught himself to play his older brother's Epiphone guitar at 10. His influences vary from blues musician Sonny Terry and Scottish folk act The Corries to classic rockers Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. At 18, he packed up his guitar and moved to London to play in a band. While he played in various band, he worked as 10 Downing Street as its official sound engineer. From 1990 to 2007, Finlay Morton served four British Prime Ministers. He was present when a teary Margaret Thatcher left 10 Downing Street for the last time. He was ‘Tony Blair's Roadie' and was feet away when the former Prime Minister met former US President George W. Bush, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and the infamous Muammar Gaddafi. He also advised former Prime Minster Gordon Brown on his first day in office to never forget when he is wearing a microphone, advice that the former British Prime Minister seemingly forgot.In 2004, Finlay had a chance meeting with Moody Blues and Status Quo producer Pip Williams, which resulted in his first self-penned album Interpret This, which was released in 2006. Two singles went to radio with resulting airplay on regional radio stations throughout the United Kingdom along with a successful acoustic tour with guitarist Greg Bone. In 2008, Finlay started working on his second album, Back to Basics, at West London's Wendyhouse Studios. During the mixing process, he suffered a heart attack. Thanks to speedy medical attention, he went back to work only in a few days. His first single, “Scary Monsters,” was released later that year with more radio support. Legendary Los Angeles-based producer John Ryan updated Finlay's masters and the album was re-released as Back to Basics 2009. “The Devil Ain't Getting My Soul,” the album's first single, garnered both US and UK airplay. In addition to his passion for music, Finlay is a co-founder of London internet radio station Soho Radio, which is now, after five years, firmly established. Soho Radio won Mixcloud's “Best Internet Station in the World.” In 2019, Soho Radio also launched in New York City.In this edition of The Jake's Take with Jacob Elyachar Podcast, Finlay Morton spoke about his experience working at 10 Downing Street and his song: “Move Mountains.”
Taj Mahal y Ry Cooder, dos leyendas vivientes de la música, nos regalan esta joya del blues en un trabajo pra Nonesuch Records en este 2022. Un 2 de uno imperdible.
Brendan Power is famous internationally as a phenomenal harmonica player in many genres and also as an instrument innovator. He's invented many unique harmonicas to increase the expressiveness and range possibilities of the instrument family, and is constantly experimenting. Brendan also has a fascinating personal story in that he discovered the harmonica in his university years, and changed his life in order to master it. He is completely self-taught and you may have heard his playing on albums with Sting, Kate Bush, Van Morrison, movies like Shanghai Noon and Atonement, or over 20 of his solo albums. I was thrilled to have this opportunity to speak with him! During the episode Brendan demonstrates a few of his harmonicas in different styles, and I've added timestamps below. The video version (transcript will be added soon) is: https://www.leahroseman.com/episodes/brendan-power-harmonica-player-and-inventor Brendan Power's website is: https://www.brendan-power.com/ Help me out? https://ko-fi.com/leahroseman Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:12) Amazing Grace on the AsiaBend harmonica (03:15) Discussion of the AsiaBend harmonica and different musical traditions, including Indianization of different instruments (07:58) Bulgarian music (10:10) How Brendan started developing different tunings (10:58) Brendan's start in music, hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (12:56) Brendan's family influences, early playing opportunities in New Zealand (15:27) how Brendan learned by ear, understanding of harmony (18:32) Brendan early years in England, winning the All-Ireland (21:39) getting hired by Sting for the Ten Summoner's Tales videos, playing with David Sanchez, Vinnie Colaiuta (24:04) Internet history: a CD of Ten Summoner's Tales sold in 1994 was the first secure transaction on the internet (24:59) Lucy Randall (25:26) Irish music Corner House jig into a reel (28:01) retuning harmonicas, developing different harmonicas (29:45) History of the harmonica (31:27) using iPad for music effects, MIDI, Akai EWI, SWAM Audio Modeling (35:43) Richter tuning, development of bending notes in the Blues, Paddy Richter tuning (38:10) the number of harmonicas most serious players have (41:38) pros and cons of the chromatic harmonica (43:46) how to alter a chromatic harmonica for more expressive possibilities (45:54) discussion of the SlipSlider and new innovations (49:07) pros and cons of MIDI harmonicas (51:21) Brendan's early years learning on his own --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leah-roseman/message
Aretha Franklin "Don't Play That Song"Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee (with Lightin' Hopkins) "Everybody's Blues"Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee "Trouble In Mind"Cat Power "Do the Romp"Paul Westerberg "Knockin on Mine"Justin Townes Earle "Far From Me"Nina Simone "Revolution (Pts. 1 and 2)"Cory Branan "You Make Me"The Handsome Family "The Bottomless Hole"Songs: Ohia "Farewell Transmission"Bob Dylan "Meet Me In the Morning"Bob Dylan "Gotta Serve Somebody"George Jones & Ernest Tubb "Half a Mind"Woody Guthrie "Going Down the Road"Etta James "Almost Persuaded"Margo Price "Twinkle Twinkle"Millie Jackson "If Loving You Is Wrong I Don't Want to Be Right"Arthur Conley "Shake, Rattle & Roll"Wilson Pickett "Mini-Skirt Minnie"Gladys Knight & The Pips "Midnight Train to Georgia"Bonnie Raitt "I Thank You"Ted Hawkins "There Stands The Glass"Vic Chesnutt "Guilty By Association"Candi Staton "I'm Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin')"Solomon Burke "Proud Mary"Patterson Hood "Heat Lighting Rumbles In the Distance"Centro-matic "Iso-Residue"Counting Crows "Omaha"Pedro The Lion "First Drum Set"Mos Def "Close Edge"M. Ward "Never Had Nobody Like You"Bettye Swann "Stand By Your Man"Craig Finn "This is What It Looks Like"Widespread Panic "Contentment Blues"Buddy Guy "She's Got The Devil In Her"Waylon Jennings "Midnight Rider"Mildred Anderson "Cool Kind of Poppa (Good Kind Daddy)"Lucinda Williams "It's Nobody's Fault But Mine"Grateful Dead "Cold Rain and Snow"Little Milton "That's What Love Will Make You Do"Steve Earle "Feel Alright"Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens "What Have You Done?"Jason Isbell "Hurricanes and Hand Grenades"David Ramirez "That Ain't Love"
When they first collaborated almost sixty years ago, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder came together over a shared love of the music of blues legends Sonny Terry and Brownie Mcghee. Now with the help of Joachim Cooder, the two friends have reunited to make sure that the music of the past isn't forgotten and Get On Board, a recreation of the classic Folkways release is the result. PLUS! Music we love from The Bogie Band's debut album The Prophets in the City and Washington, D.C.'s Rosie Cima & What She Dreamed!Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/discologist. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week on the program we'll hear some great acoustic blues. We have classics from Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Frank Hovington and new releases from Grammy winner Cedric Burnside, and Bonnie Raitt. We'll feature three selections and a review of the new CD Get On Board from old friends Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, focused on the music of Sonny & Brownie. Acoustic blues, old and new … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysWoody Mann / “The Rev's Music” / Road Trip / Acoustic SessionsGrant Dermody & Frank Fotusky / “Peach Tree Blues” / Digging in John's Backyard / Self ProducedFrank Hovington / “Mean Old Frisco” / Lonesome Road Blues / RounderMaria Muldaur w/ Tuba Skinny / “I Like You Best of All” / Let's Get Happy Together / Stony PlainWillie Dixon / “88 Boogie” / The Big Three Trio / ColumbiaSon House / “Preachin' Blues” / Forever on My Mind / Easy Eye SoundBonnie Raitt / “Down the Hall” / Just Like That... / RedwingBlind Willie Johnson / “Dark Was the Night-Cold Was the Ground” / Praise God I'm Satisfied / YazooWoody Mann / “Aflenz” / Road Trip/ Acoustic SessionsTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder / “Hooray Hooray” / Get on Board / NonesuchTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder / “What a Beautiful City” / Get on Board / NonesuchTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder / “I Shall Not Be Moved” / Get on Board / NonesuchCedric Burnside / “The World Can Be So Cold” / I Be Trying / Single LockSonny Terry & Brownie McGhee / “Walk On” / Blues Cafe / PutumayoPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways
The harmonica master and singer with Canned Heat and Poncho Sanchez grew up in the musical hotbed of Downey, California, with Phil and Dave Alvin. Influenced early on by the Louis Jordan records of his trumpet-playing mother, he caught the blues bug hearing artists like the Paul Butterfield Band, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove and the Golden Bear in L.A. Comfortable in a variety of musical settings, tonight Dale tests his tolerance level in a session with the Troubled Men. Topics include baths vs. showers, the impending 200th episode, a borrowed book, Michael Tisserand, a student worker, a Bob Dylan show, tainted cupcakes, sailing from Pongo-Pongo, Bud Ferillo, the Coach House, the Vietnam draft, evading the FBI, going country, Lon Price, Duke Burrell, a Jazz Fest gig, moving to New Orleans, meeting Fito De La Parra, Larry Taylor, a music cruise, psychedelics, and much more. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break music: “You’re The One” by The Little Elmore Reed Blues Band featuring Dale Spalding Outro music: “Early In The Mornin’” from “Latin Spirits” by Poncho Sanchez Support the podcast: Paypal or Venmo Join the Patreon page here. Shop for Troubled Men’s Wear here. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts or any podcast source. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Troubled Men Podcast Facebook Troubled Men Podcast Instagram Big Island Jazz and Blues Festival Iguanas Tour Dates René Coman Facebook Canned Heat Homepage Dale Spalding Facebook
Durham, North Carolina - a city that blossomed out of the tobacco industry and was originally fueled by manufacturing - has gone through many phases. Today its factories house performing arts centers and bougie lofts, but this place has just as long and varied a musical history going back a century or more. Then and now, it's been a center for jazz, hip-hop, Americana country-rock and most of all, Piedmont blues.Back when Durham was becoming known as the Bull City, its soundtrack was Piedmont blues as played by giants like Blind Boy Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. In the 1920s and ‘30s, factory workers made up the audience for blues and other developing styles of music. Now, tech workers and college students flock to the city's many venues.It's a long way from the city's early days, but also still rife with change; battles over segregation have evolved into disputes over gentrification. But what hasn't changed is that it remains a great music town, one that draws both artists and fans alike.In this episode, we explore the phases of Durham's past, present and future with guests who call it home, like Bluegrass Hall of Famer Alice Gerrard, country singer Rissi Palmer, Hiss Golden Messenger's M.C. Taylor, Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, and more.Subscribe to Carolina Calling to follow along as we journey across the Old North State, visiting towns like Wilmington, Greensboro, Shelby, Asheville, and more. Brought to you by The Bluegrass Situation and Come Hear NCCove photo courtesy of Discover DurhamAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
The image of bluegrass is mountain music played and heard at high altitudes and towns like Deep Gap and remote mountain hollers across the Appalachians. But the earliest form of the music originated at lower elevations, in textile towns across the North Carolina Piedmont. As far back as the 1920s, old-time string bands like Charlie Poole's North Carolina Ramblers were playing an early form of the music in textile towns, like Gastonia, Spray, and Shelby - in Cleveland County west of Charlotte.In this second episode of Carolina Calling, we visit the small town of Shelby: a seemingly quiet place, like most small Southern towns one might pass by in their travels. Until you see the signs for the likes of the Don Gibson Theatre and the Earl Scruggs Center, you wouldn't guess that it was the town that raised two of the most influential musicians and songwriters in bluegrass and country music: Earl Scruggs, one of the most important musicians in the birth of bluegrass, whose banjo playing was so innovative that it still bears his name, “Scruggs style,” and Don Gibson, one of the greatest songwriters in the pop & country pantheon, who wrote “I Can't Stop Loving You,” “Sweet Dreams,” and other songs you know by heart. For both Don Gibson and Earl Scruggs, Shelby is where it all began.Subscribe to Carolina Calling to follow along as we journey across the Old North State, visiting towns like Greensboro, Durham, Wilmington, Asheville, and more.Brought to you by The Bluegrass Situation and Come Hear NCMusic featured in this episode:Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers - "Take a Drink On Me"Flatt & Scruggs - "Ground Speed"Don Gibson - "I Can't Stop Loving You"Andrew Marlin - "Erie Fiddler" (Carolina Calling Theme)Hedy West - "Cotton Mill Girl"Blind Boy Fuller - "Rag Mama, Rag"Don Gibson - "Sea Of Heartbreak"Patsy Cline - "Sweet Dreams "Ray Charles - "I Can't Stop Loving You"Ronnie Milsap - "(I'd Be) A Legend In My Time"Elvis Presley - "Crying In The Chapel"Hank Snow - "Oh Lonesome Me"Don Gibson - "Sweet Dreams"Don Gibson - "Oh Lonesome Me"Chet Atkins - "Oh Lonesome Me"Johnny Cash - "Oh, Lonesome Me"The Everly Brothers - "Oh Lonesome Me"Neil Young - "Oh Lonesome Me"Flatt & Scruggs - "Foggy Mountain Breakdown"Bill Preston - "Holy, Holy, Holy"Flat & Scruggs - "We'll Meet Again Sweetheart"Snuffy Jenkins - "Careless Love"Bill Monroe - "Uncle Pen"Bill Monroe - "It's Mighty Dark to Travel"The Earl Scruggs Revue - "I Shall Be Released"The Band - "I Shall Be Released"Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"The Country Gentlemen - "Fox on the Run"Sonny Terry - "Whoopin' The Blues"Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - "Born With The Blues (Live)"Nina Simone - "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free"Cover image courtesy of the Don Gibson TheatreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
We all have people in our lives who inspire us, encourage us, and who push us to dream, hope and create. For musicians Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi, two of those inspirations where the great bluesmen, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Earlier in 2017, Davis and Poggi released a tribute album, 'Sonny and Brownie's Last Train' and stopped by Folk Alley for an exclusive in-studio performance and to talk more about two of their musical heroes.
Episode 126 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For Your Love", the Yardbirds, and the beginnings of heavy rock and the guitar hero. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "A Lover's Concerto" by the Toys. 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/ Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. The Yardbirds have one of the most mishandled catalogues of all the sixties groups, possibly the most mishandled. Their recordings with Giorgio Gomelsky, Simon Napier-Bell and Mickie Most are all owned by different people, and all get compiled separately, usually with poor-quality live recordings, demos, and other odds and sods to fill up a CD's running time. The only actual authoritative compilation is the long out-of-print Ultimate! . Information came from a variety of sources. Most of the general Yardbirds information came from The Yardbirds by Alan Clayson and Heart Full of Soul: Keith Relf of the Yardbirds by David French. Simon Napier-Bell's You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is one of the most entertaining books about the sixties music scene, and contains several anecdotes about his time working with the Yardbirds, some of which may even be true. Some information about Immediate Records came from Immediate Records by Simon Spence, which I'll be using more in future episodes. Information about Clapton came from Motherless Child by Paul Scott, while information on Jeff Beck came from Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck by Martin Power. 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 take a look at the early career of the band that, more than any other band, was responsible for the position of lead guitarist becoming as prestigious as that of lead singer. We're going to look at how a blues band launched the careers of several of the most successful guitarists of all time, and also one of the most successful pop songwriters of the sixties and seventies. We're going to look at "For Your Love" by the Yardbirds: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] The roots of the Yardbirds lie in a group of schoolfriends in Richmond, a leafy suburb of London. Keith Relf, Laurie Gane, Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty were art-school kids who were obsessed with Sonny Terry and Jimmy Reed, and who would hang around the burgeoning London R&B scene, going to see the Rolling Stones and Alexis Korner in Twickenham and at Eel Pie Island, and starting up their own blues band, the Metropolis Blues Quartet. However, Gane soon left the group to go off to university, and he was replaced by two younger guitarists, Top Topham and Chris Dreja, with Samwell-Smith moving from guitar to bass. As they were no longer a quartet, they renamed themselves the Yardbirds, after a term Relf had found on the back of an album cover, meaning a tramp or hobo. The newly-named Yardbirds quickly developed their own unique style -- their repertoire was the same mix of Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry as every other band on the London scene, but they included long extended improvisatory instrumental sequences with Relf's harmonica playing off Topham's lead guitar. The group developed a way of extending songs, which they described as a “rave-up” and would become the signature of their live act – in the middle of a song they would go into a long instrumental solo in double-time, taking the song twice as fast and improvising heavily, before dropping back to the original tempo to finish the song off. These “rave-up” sections would often be much longer than the main song, and were a chance for everyone to show off their instrumental skills, with Topham and Relf trading phrases on guitar and harmonica. They were mentored by Cyril Davies, who gave them the interval spots at some of his shows -- and then one day asked them to fill in for him in a gig he couldn't make -- a residency at a club in Harrow, where the Yardbirds went down so well that they were asked to permanently take over the residency from Davies, much to his disgust. But the group's big break came when the Rolling Stones signed with Andrew Oldham, leaving Giorgio Gomelsky with no band to play the Crawdaddy Club every Sunday. Gomelsky was out of the country at his father's funeral when the Stones quit on him, and so it was up to Gomelsky's assistant Hamish Grimes to find a replacement. Grimes looked at the R&B scene and the choice came down to two bands -- the Yardbirds and Them. Grimes said it was a toss-up, but he eventually went for the Yardbirds, who eagerly agreed. When Gomelsky got back, the group were packing audiences in at the Crawdaddy and doing even better than the Stones had been. Soon Gomelsky wanted to become the Yardbirds' manager and turn the group into full-time musicians, but there was a problem -- the new school term was starting, Top Topham was only fifteen, and his parents didn't want him to quit school. Topham had to leave the group. Luckily, there was someone waiting in the wings. Eric Clapton was well known on the local scene as someone who was quite good on guitar, and he and Topham had played together for a long time as an informal duo, so he knew the parts -- and he was also acquainted with Dreja. Everyone on the London blues scene knew everyone else, although the thing that stuck in most of the Yardbirds' minds about Clapton was the time he'd seen the Metropolis Blues Quartet play and gone up to Samwell-Smith and said "Could you do me a favour?" When Samwell-Smith had nodded his assent, Clapton had said "Don't play any more guitar solos". Clapton was someone who worshipped the romantic image of the Delta bluesman, solitary and rootless, without friends or companions, surviving only on his wits and weighed down by troubles, and he would imagine himself that way as he took guitar lessons from Dave Brock, later of Hawkwind, or as he hung out with Top Topham and Chris Dreja in Richmond on weekends, complaining about the burdens he had to bear, such as the expensive electric guitar his grandmother had bought him not being as good as he'd hoped. Clapton had hung around with Topham and Dreja, but they'd never been really close, and he hadn't been considered for a spot in the Yardbirds when the group had formed. Instead he had joined the Roosters with Tom McGuinness, who had introduced Clapton to the music of Freddie King, especially a B-side called "I Love the Woman", which showed Clapton for the first time how the guitar could be more than just an accompaniment to vocals, but a featured instrument in its own right: [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I Love the Woman"] The Roosters had been blues purists, dedicated to a scholarly attitude to American Black music and contemptuous of pop music -- when Clapton met the Beatles for the first time, when they came along to an early Rolling Stones gig Clapton was also at, he had thought of them as "a bunch of wankers" and despised them as sellouts. After the Roosters had broken up, Clapton and McGuinness had joined the gimmicky Merseybeat group Casey Jones and his Engineers, who had a band uniform of black suits and cardboard Confederate army caps, before leaving that as well. McGuinness had gone on to join Manfred Mann, and Clapton was left without a group, until the Yardbirds called on him. The new lineup quickly gelled as musicians -- though the band did become frustrated with one quirk of Clapton's. He liked to bend strings, and so he used very light gauge strings on his guitar, which often broke, meaning that a big chunk of time would be taken up each show with Clapton restringing his guitar, while the audience gave a slow hand clap -- leading to his nickname, "Slowhand" Clap-ton. Two months after Clapton joined the group, Gomelsky got them to back Sonny Boy Williamson II on a UK tour, recording a show at the Crawdaddy Club which was released as a live album three years later: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds and Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Twenty-three Hours Too Long"] Williamson and the Yardbirds didn't get along though, either as people or as musicians. Williamson's birth name was Rice Miller, and he'd originally taken the name "Sonny Boy Williamson" to cash in on the fame of another musician who used that name, though he'd gone on to much greater success than the original, who'd died not long after the former Miller started using the name. Clapton, wanting to show off, had gone up to Williamson when they were introduced and said "Isn't your real name Rice Miller?" Williamson had pulled a knife on Clapton, and his relationship with the group didn't get much better from that point on. The group were annoyed that Williamson was drunk on stage and would call out songs they hadn't rehearsed, while Williamson later summed up his view of the Yardbirds to Robbie Robertson, saying "Those English boys want to play the blues so bad -- and they play the blues *so bad*!" Shortly after this, the group cut some demos on their own, which were used to get them a deal with Columbia, a subsidiary of EMI. Their first single was a version of Billy Boy Arnold's "I Wish You Would": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "I Wish You Would"] This was as pure R&B as a British group would get at this point, but Clapton was unhappy with the record -- partly because hearing the group in the studio made him realise how comparatively thin they sounded as players, and partly just because he was worried that even going into a recording studio at all was selling out and not something that any of the Delta bluesmen whose records he loved would do. He was happier with the group's first album, a live recording called Five Live Yardbirds that captured the sound of the group at the Marquee Club. The repertoire on that album was precisely the same as any of the other British R&B bands of the time -- songs by Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Slim Harpo, Sonny Boy Williamson and the Isley Brothers -- but they were often heavily extended versions, with a lot of interplay between Samwell-Smith's bass, Clapton's guitar, and Relf's harmonica, like their five-and-a-half-minute version of Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Smokestack Lightning"] "I Wish You Would" made number twenty-six on the NME chart, but it didn't make the Record Retailer chart which is the basis of modern chart compilations. The group were just about to go into the studio to cut their second single, a version of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", when Keith Relf collapsed. Relf had severe asthma and was also a heavy smoker, and his lung collapsed and he had to be hospitalised for several weeks, and it looked for a while as if he might never be able to sing or play harmonica again. In his absence, various friends and hangers-on from the R&B scene deputised for him -- Ronnie Wood has recalled being at a gig and the audience being asked "Can anyone play harmonica?", leading to Wood getting on stage with them, and other people who played a gig or two, or sometimes just a song or two, with them include Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Rod Stewart. Stewart was apparently a big fan, and would keep trying to get on stage with them -- according to Keith Relf's wife, "Rod Stewart would be sitting in the backroom begging to go on—‘Oh give us a turn, give us a turn.'” Luckily, Relf's lung was successfully reinflated, and he returned to singing, harmonica playing... and smoking. In the early months back with the group, he would sometimes have to pull out his inhaler in the middle of a word to be able to continue singing, and he would start seeing stars on stage. Relf's health would never be good, but he was able to carry on performing, and the future of the group was secured. What wasn't secure was the group's relationship with their guitarist. While Relf and Dreja had for a time shared a flat with Eric Clapton, he was becoming increasingly distant from the other members. Partly this was because Relf felt somewhat jealous of the fact that the audiences seemed more impressed with the group's guitarist than with him, the lead singer; partly it was because Giorgio Gomelsky had made Paul Samwell-Smith the group's musical director, and Clapton had never got on with Samwell-Smith and distrusted his musical instincts; but mostly it was just that the rest of the group found Clapton rather petty, cold, and humourless, and never felt any real connection to him. Their records still weren't selling, but they were popular enough on the local scene that they were invited to be one of the support acts for the Beatles' run of Christmas shows at the end of 1964, and hung out with the group backstage. Paul McCartney played them a new song he was working on, which didn't have lyrics yet, but which would soon become "Yesterday", but it was another song they heard that would change the group's career. A music publisher named Ronnie Beck turned up backstage with a demo he wanted the Beatles to hear. Obviously, the Beatles weren't interested in hearing any demos -- they were writing so many hits they were giving half of them away to other artists, why would they need someone else's song? But the Yardbirds were looking for a hit, and after listening to the demo, Samwell-Smith was convinced that a hit was what this demo was. The demo was by a Manchester-based songwriter named Graham Gouldman. Gouldman had started his career in a group called the Whirlwinds, who had released one single -- a version of Buddy Holly's "Look at Me" backed with a song called "Baby Not Like You", written by Gouldman's friend Lol Creme: [Excerpt: The Whirlwinds, "Baby Not Like You"] The Whirlwinds had split up by this point, and Gouldman was in the process of forming a new band, the Mockingbirds, which included drummer Kevin Godley. The song on the demo had been intended as the Mockingbirds' first single, but their label had decided instead to go with "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)": [Excerpt: The Mockingbirds, "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)"] So the song, "For Your Love", was free, and Samwell-Smith was insistent -- this was going to be the group's first big hit. The record was a total departure from their blues sound. Gouldman's version had been backed by bongos and acoustic guitar, and Samwell-Smith decided that he would keep the bongo part, and add, not the normal rock band instruments, but harpsichord and bowed double bass: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] The only part of the song where the group's normal electric instrumentation is used is the brief middle-eight, which feels nothing like the rest of the record: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] But on the rest of the record, none of the Yardbirds other than Jim McCarty play -- the verses have Relf on vocals, McCarty on drums, Brian Auger on harpsichord, Ron Prentice on double bass and Denny Piercy on bongos, with Samwell-Smith in the control room producing. Clapton and Dreja only played on the middle eight. The record went to number three, and became the group's first real hit, and it led to an odd experience for Gouldman, as the Mockingbirds were by this time employed as the warm-up act on the BBC's Top of the Pops, which was recorded in Manchester, so Gouldman got to see mobs of excited fans applauding the Yardbirds for performing a song he'd written, while he was completely ignored. Most of the group were excited about their newfound success, but Clapton was not happy. He hadn't signed up to be a member of a pop group -- he wanted to be in a blues band. He made his displeasure about playing on material like "For Your Love" very clear, and right after the recording session he resigned from the group. He was convinced that they would be nothing without him -- after all, wasn't he the undisputed star of the group? -- and he immediately found work with a group that was more suited to his talents, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The Bluesbreakers at this point consisted of Mayall on keyboards and vocals, Clapton on guitar, John McVie on bass, and Hughie Flint on drums. For their first single with this lineup, they signed a one-record deal with Immediate Records, a new independent label started by the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham. That single was produced by Immediate's young staff producer, the session guitarist Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "I'm Your Witch Doctor"] The Bluesbreakers had something of a fluid lineup -- shortly after that recording, Clapton left the group to join another group, and was replaced by a guitarist named Peter Green. Then Clapton came back, for the recording of what became known as the "Beano album", because Clapton was in a mood when they took the cover photo, and so read the children's comic the Beano rather than looking at the camera: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Bernard Jenkins"] Shortly after that, Mayall fired John McVie, who was replaced by Jack Bruce, formerly of the Graham Bond Organisation, but then Bruce left to join Manfred Mann and McVie was rehired. While Clapton was in the Bluesbreakers, he gained a reputation for being the best guitarist in London -- a popular graffito at the time was "Clapton is God" -- and he was at first convinced that without him the Yardbirds would soon collapse. But Clapton had enough self-awareness to know that even though he was very good, there were a handful of guitarists in London who were better than him. One he always acknowledged was Albert Lee, who at the time was playing in Chris Farlowe's backing band but would later become known as arguably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. But another was the man that the Yardbirds got in to replace him. The Yardbirds had originally asked Jimmy Page if he wanted to join the group, and he'd briefly been tempted, but he'd decided that his talents were better used in the studio, especially since he'd just been given the staff job at Immediate. Instead he recommended his friend Jeff Beck. The two had known each other since their teens, and had grown up playing guitar together, and sharing influences as they delved deeper into music. While both men admired the same blues musicians that Clapton did, people like Hubert Sumlin and Buddy Guy, they both had much more eclectic tastes than Clapton -- both loved rockabilly, and admired Scotty Moore and James Burton, and Beck was a huge devotee of Cliff Gallup, the original guitarist from Gene Vincent's Blue Caps. Beck also loved Les Paul and the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, while Page was trying to incorporate some of the musical ideas of the sitar player Ravi Shankar into his playing. While Page was primarily a session player, Beck was a gigging musician, playing with a group called the Tridents, but as Page rapidly became one of the two first-call session guitarists along with Big Jim Sullivan, he would often recommend his friend for sessions he couldn't make, leading to Beck playing on records like "Dracula's Daughter", which Joe Meek produced for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages: [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Dracula's Daughter"] While Clapton had a very straightforward tone, Beck was already experimenting with the few effects that were available at the time, like echoes and fuzztone. While there would always be arguments about who was the first to use feedback as a controlled musical sound, Beck is one of those who often gets the credit, and Keith Relf would describe Beck's guitar playing as being almost musique concrete. You can hear the difference on the group's next single. "Heart Full of Soul" was again written by Gouldman, and was originally recorded with a sitar, which would have made it one of the first pop singles to use the instrument. However, they decided to replace the sitar part with Beck playing the same Indian-sounding riff on a heavily-distorted guitar: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul"] That made number two in the UK and the top ten in the US, and suddenly the world had a new guitar god, one who was doing things on records that nobody else had been doing. The group's next single was a double A-side, a third song written by Gouldman, "Evil Hearted You", coupled with an original by the group, "Still I'm Sad". Neither track was quite up to the standard of their previous couple of singles, but it still went to number three on the charts. From this point on, the group stopped using Gouldman's songs as singles, preferring to write their own material, but Gouldman had already started providing hits for other groups like the Hollies, for whom he wrote songs like “Bus Stop”: [Excerpt: The Hollies, “Bus Stop”] His group The Mockingbirds had also signed to Immediate Records, who put out their classic pop-psych single “You Stole My Love”: [Excerpt: The Mockingbirds, “You Stole My Love”] We will hear more of Gouldman later. In the Yardbirds, meanwhile, the pressure was starting to tell on Keith. He was a deeply introverted person who didn't have the temperament for stardom, and he was uncomfortable with being recognised on the street. It also didn't help that his dad was also the band's driver and tour manager, which meant he always ended up feeling somewhat inhibited, and he started drinking heavily to try to lose some of those inhibitions. Shortly after the recording of "Evil Hearted You", the group went on their first American tour, though on some dates they were unable to play as Gomelsky had messed up their work permits -- one of several things about Gomelsky's management of the group that irritated them. But they were surprised to find that they were much bigger in the US than in the UK. While the group had only released singles, EPs, and the one live album in the UK, and would only ever put out one UK studio album, they'd recorded enough that they'd already had an album out in the US, a compilation of singles, B-sides, and even a couple of demos, and that had been picked up on by almost every garage band in the country. On one of the US gigs, their opening act, a teenage group called the Spiders, were in trouble. They'd learned every song on that Yardbirds album, and their entire set was made up of covers of that material. They'd gone down well supporting every other major band that came to town, but they had a problem when it came to the Yardbirds. Their singer described what happened next: "We thought about it and we said, 'Look, we're paying tribute to them—let's just do our set.' And so, we opened for the Yardbirds and did all of their songs. We could see them in the back and they were smiling and giving us the thumbs up. And then they got up and just blew us off the stage—because they were the Yardbirds! And we just stood there going, 'Oh…. That's how it's done.' The Yardbirds were one of the best live bands I ever heard and we learned a lot that night." That band, and later that lead singer, both later changed their name to Alice Cooper. The trip to the US also saw a couple of recording sessions. Gomelsky had been annoyed at the bad drum sound the group had got in UK studios, and had loved Sam Phillips' drum sound on the old Sun records, so had decided to get in touch with Phillips and ask him to produce the group. He hadn't had a reply, but the group turned up at Phillips' new studio anyway, knowing that he lived in a flat above the studio. Phillips wasn't in, but eventually turned up at midnight, after a fishing trip, drunk. He wasn't interested in producing some group of British kids, but Gomelsky waved six hundred dollars at him, and he agreed. He produced two tracks for the group. One of those, "Mr. You're a Better Man Than I", was written by Mike Hugg of Manfred Mann and his brother: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Mister, You're a Better Man Than I"] The backing track there was produced by Phillips, but the lead vocal was redone in New York, as Relf was also drunk and wasn't singing well -- something Phillips pointed out, and which devastated Relf, who had grown up on records Phillips produced. Phillips' dismissal of Relf also grated on Beck -- even though Beck wasn't close to Relf, as the two competed for prominence on stage while the rest of the band kept to the backline, Beck had enormous respect for Relf's talents as a frontman, and thought Phillips horribly unprofessional for his dismissive attitude, though the other Yardbirds had happier memories of the session, not least because Phillips caught their live sound better than anyone had. You can hear Relf's drunken incompetence on the other track they recorded at the session, their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'", the song we covered way back in episode forty-four. Rearranged by Samwell-Smith and Beck, the Yardbirds' version built on the Johnny Burnette recording and turned it into one of the hardest rock tracks ever recorded to that point -- but Relf's drunk, sloppy, vocal was caught on the backing track. He later recut the vocal more competently, with Roy Halee engineering in New York, but the combination of the two vocals gives the track an unusual feel which inspired many future garage bands: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] On that first US tour, they also recorded a version of Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man" at Chess Studios, where Diddley had recorded his original. Only a few weeks after the end of that tour they were back for a second tour, in support of their second US album, and they returned to Chess to record what many consider their finest original. "Shapes of Things" had been inspired by the bass part on Dave Brubeck's "Pick Up Sticks": [Excerpt: Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Pick Up Sticks"] Samwell-Smith and McCarty had written the music for the song, Relf and Samwell-Smith added lyrics, and Beck experimented with feedback, leading to one of the first psychedelic records to become a big hit, making number three in the UK and number eleven in the US: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Shapes of Things"] That would be the group's last record with Giorgio Gomelsky as credited producer -- although Samwell-Smith had been doing all the actual production work -- as the group were becoming increasingly annoyed at Gomelsky's ideas for promoting them, which included things like making them record songs in Italian so they could take part in an Italian song contest. Gomelsky was also working them so hard that Beck ended up being hospitalised with what has been variously described as meningitis and exhaustion. By the time he was out of the hospital, Gomelsky was fired. His replacement as manager and co-producer was Simon Napier-Bell, a young dilettante and scenester who was best known for co-writing the English language lyrics for Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me": [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me"] The way Napier-Bell tells the story -- and Napier-Bell is an amusing raconteur, and his volumes of autobiography are enjoyable reads, but one gets the feeling that he will not tell the truth if a lie seems more entertaining -- is that the group chose him because of his promotion of a record he'd produced for a duo called Diane Ferraz and Nicky Scott: [Excerpt: Diane Ferraz and Nicky Scott, "Me and You"] According to Napier-Bell, both Ferraz and Scott were lovers of his, who were causing him problems, and he decided to get rid of the problem by making them both pop stars. As Ferraz was Black and Scott white, Napier-Bell sent photos of them to every DJ and producer in the country, and then when they weren't booked on TV shows or playlisted on the radio, he would accuse the DJs and producers of racism and threaten to go to the newspapers about it. As a result, they ended up on almost every TV show and getting regular radio exposure, though it wasn't enough to make the record a hit. The Yardbirds had been impressed by how much publicity Ferraz and Scott had got, and asked Napier-Bell to manage them. He immediately set about renegotiating their record contract and getting them a twenty-thousand-pound advance -- a fortune in the sixties. He also moved forward with a plan Gomelsky had had of the group putting out solo records, though only Relf ended up doing so. Relf's first solo single was a baroque pop song, "Mr. Zero", written by Bob Lind, who had been a one-hit wonder with "Elusive Butterfly", and produced by Samwell-Smith: [Excerpt: Keith Relf, "Mr. Zero"] Beck, meanwhile, recorded a solo instrumental, intended for his first solo single but not released until nearly a year later. "Beck's Bolero" has Jimmy Page as its credited writer, though Beck claims to be a co-writer, and features Beck and Page on guitars, session pianist Nicky Hopkins, and Keith Moon of the Who on drums. John Entwistle of the Who was meant to play bass, but when he didn't show to the session, Page's friend, session bass player John Paul Jones, was called up: [Excerpt: Jeff Beck, "Beck's Bolero"] The five players were so happy with that recording that they briefly discussed forming a group together, with Moon saying of the idea "That will go down like a lead zeppelin". They all agreed that it wouldn't work and carried on with their respective careers. The group's next single was their first to come from a studio album -- their only UK studio album, variously known as Yardbirds or Roger the Engineer. "Over Under Sideways Down" was largely written in the studio and is credited to all five group members, though Napier-Bell has suggested he came up with the chorus lyrics: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Over Under Sideways Down"] That became the group's fifth top ten single in a row, but it would be their last, because they were about to lose the man who, more than anyone else, had been responsible for their musical direction. The group had been booked to play an upper-class black-tie event, and Relf had turned up drunk. They played three sets, and for the first, Relf started to get freaked out by the fact that the audience were just standing there, not dancing, and started blowing raspberries at them. He got more drunk in the interval, and in the second set he spent an entire song just screaming at the audience that they could copulate with themselves, using a word I'm not allowed to use without this podcast losing its clean rating. They got him offstage and played the rest of the set just doing instrumentals. For the third set, Relf was even more drunk. He came onstage and immediately fell backwards into the drum kit. Only one person in the audience was at all impressed -- Beck's friend Jimmy Page had come along to see the show, and had thought it great anarchic fun. He went backstage to tell them so, and found Samwell-Smith in the middle of quitting the group, having finally had enough. Page, who had turned down the offer to join the group two years earlier, was getting bored of just being a session player and decided that being a pop star seemed more fun. He immediately volunteered himself as the group's new bass player, and we'll see how that played out in a future episode...
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