Podcasts about union ave

Regional One President, Dr. Coopwood spoke to Ditch & Tim Van Horn on Memphis Morning News and gave details on the planning of the new Regional One Hospital campus on Union Ave. in the former Commercial Appeal property. The projected cost of the new hospital is 1.2 billion dollars. Dr. Coopwood also shared how he plans to fund the project and as a regional level one trauma center, is any of the cost expected to be paid by neighboring states.Support the show: https://www.newstalk989.com/personalities/memphis-morning-news/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jay Garvens reintroduces Colorado Springs to the Union Printers Home located at Pikes Peak & Union Ave. A building that has sat unused for years is being renovated and expanded into it’s new glory! In... The post THE UNION PRINTERS HOME – A RICH HISTORY AND A NEW BEGINNING – 8-03-2024 appeared first on Jay Garvens.

Jay Garvens reintroduces Colorado Springs to the Union Printers Home located at Pikes Peak & Union Ave. A building that has sat unused for years is being renovated and expanded into it's new glory! In... The post THE UNION PRINTERS HOME – A RICH HISTORY AND A NEW BEGINNING – 8-03-2024 appeared first on Jay Garvens.

Jay Garvens reintroduces Colorado Springs to the Union Printers Home located at Pikes Peak & Union Ave. A building that has sat unused for years is being renovated and expanded into it's new glory! In a 2 part special Jay will explain the long history of the printers home and the new vision of the amazing castle on the hill.

Jay Garvens reintroduces Colorado Springs to the Union Printers Home located at Pikes Peak & Union Ave. A building that has sat unused for years is being renovated and expanded into it's new glory! In a 2 part special Jay will explain the long history of the printers home and the new vision of the amazing castle on the hill.

Send us a Text Message.A preview of the 50th annual Kern County Basque Festival (Besta!) with guest Steve Gamboa, director of the Institute for Basque Studies at CSUB, Interim Associate Dean, School of Arts & Humanities, at CSUB and a member of the Board of Directors, Kern County Basque Club. If you've never attended, here's your chance to celebrate and experience Basque culture with food, dancing, music, and a kalimocho or two, or three! The Besta runs May 24-27, 2024 at the Kern County Basque Club, 2301 Union Ave., Bakersfield, CA 93307. FOR MORE INFO, VISIT: KCBASQUE.COM. Onda Pasa!*Intro contains audio from "Orson Welles in the Basque Country" (1955, BBC)**Episode also includes the following songs in order:- "Bagare" Basque Patriotic Song (unknown)- "Me Gustas Tu" (Manu Chao)- "Euzko Gudariak" (The Last Ensemble)- "FM 99:00 Dub Manifest" (Fermin Muguruza)- "Les mots d'ici" (Que Quio)- "Txoria Txori (Hegoak) Basque Anti-Francoist Song" (Mikel Laboa, Ez Dok Amairu)- "Clandestino" (Manu Chao)- "Sarri Sarri" (Kortatu)- "Erre Zenituzten" (Xabi Solano)- "El Ultimo Ska" (Kortatu)- "Karolina" (Luhartz)- "Mala Vida" (Mano Negra)- "Aldapan Gora" (Huntza)Sponsored by Chain Cohn Clark - Kern County's leading accident, injury, and workers' compensation law firm. Subscribe to Bakotunes at all podcast outlets and follow our socials!Instagram / More LinksContact: mattomunoz@gmail.com

Singles Going Around- Elvis at 706 Union Ave: Sun RecordingsTo sum up what Peter Guralnick once wrote- "If Elvis had never recorded after his 1955 session, those recordings would have been as legendary as the recordings of Robert Johnson". Because after the Sun recordings; RCA took the hillbilly out of him.*"My Happiness" (1953)"That's When Your Heartaches Begin" (1953)"That's All Right" (1954)"Blue Moon of Kentucky" (1954)"I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine" (1954)"Good Rockin' Tonight" (1954)"Milkcow Blues Boogie" (1954)"You're a Heartbreaker" (1954)"I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" (1955)"Baby Let's Play House" (1955)"Mystery Train" (1955)"I Forgot to Remember to Forget" (1955)"Blue Moon" (1954)"Just Because" (1954)"Tryin' to Get to You" (1955)"When It Rains, It Really Pours" (1955)taken from 45's and a EP*Thanks Mike

We'll hear music from these acts and talk about their upcoming concerts:• True Lions - JAN 21 as part of the 3rd Annual Krewe De Cryptic Parade at 1219 Union Ave in The West Bottoms• Jeune Premier Silambien Jr. with The Salvation Choir - JAN 27 at The Ship for an early all-ages show• MoonShroom - JAN 31 at recordBar with Supermassive Black Holes, Gullywasher, Kristin & Lucy Gray Hamilton• Say That Again - album release show on FEB 23 at The RinoWe'll also give new music from these acts a spin: Flight Attendant, Martay, Land Lion (featuring Ben Wendt), Decisive Drama, cxrrxnt, Stik Figa + Leonard Dstroy, and Use Your Atlas. 

BREAKING NEWS: You no longer have to drive to any One Knox Home matches, just take the BUS!Zack Roskop, owner and operator of Knox Brew Tours & Knox Brew Hub, sat down with us during the Forward Madison match to share how he hopes it adds to the soccer atmosphere in downtown Knoxville.Join us LIVE this Saturday at 5 p.m. at Knox Brew Hub (421 Union Ave) as we record a Pre-Match Show, with special guests, giveaways, & trivia! Then hop on the 6 or 6:30 p.m. bus to get to stadium to watch One Knox take on Northern Colorado Hailstorm.See y'all at the Hub!Thanks for listening! Subscribe to receive an email every time we post new Knox soccer content. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit knoxsoccerpodcast.substack.com

A house fire in 1909 near Union Ave and Hosking Rd killed an entire family. Was it an awful accident or something more sinister? This 114-year-old Bakersfield mystery will be explored in this episode.Visit the Notorious Bakersfield website: https://www.notoriousbakersfield.com/ Purchase Notorious Bakersfield merchandise here:https://www.etsy.com/shop/NotoriousBakersfieldEmail: notoriousbakersfield@gmail.comPurchas Notorious Bakersfield merchandise here:https://www.etsy.com/shop/NotoriousBakersfield

In Paul's prayer for the Philippians we learn that the gospel produces confident gratitude. www.coramdeonc.com Join us Sundays at 810 E. Union Ave. Morganton NC 28655

Order your Hellbender SC Shirt right here!The boys are back in town and they’re USL2 SOUTH CENTRAL DIVISION CHAMPS! First came a 7-1 victory over Southern Soccer Acamedy Kings and then with Asheville City tieing Tennessee SC, our Boys In Blue bring home their first conference silverware.This episode is jammed pack full of soccer goodness so press play, but keep your phones handy… We have plenty of opportunities for you to support the pod!WE HAVE POD MERCH! Get the Hellbender SC x Stranger Things mashup Tee, right here! (The order window is only open until July 21st, so get yours now! We need 22 of them to get it printed, so start Christmas shopping early!)Tag two friends on our Hellbender Instagram post, to be entered to win a FREE shirt!Head on over to Nothing Too Fancy on Union Ave or online. Use the promo code: KNOXSOCCERPOD for 10% off your entire purchase. (Just mention the podcast if you are shopping in person.)This recap episode is brought to you by Nothing Too Fancy.Nothing Too Fancy is a proud sponsor of the Knox Soccer Podcast! Locally owned and operated t-shirt boutique, NOTHING TOO FANCY is located in downtown Knoxville just off of Market Square. Celebrating their 10 year anniversary this Labor Day Weekend. Visit nothingtoofancy.com.Thank you to Nothing Too Fancy for supporting local soccer & the only local soccer podcast, US!This recap episode is also brought to you by Markman’s Diamonds & Fine Jewelry.Markman’s is a proud sponsor of the Knox Soccer Podcast and One Knoxville SC. Located at 6932 Kingston Pike, Markman’s has been Knoxville’s choice for diamonds and fine jewelry since 1976. Visit markmansdiamonds.com.Thank you to Markman’s for supporting local soccer & the only local soccer podcast, US!One last regular-season game on Tuesday then it’s THE PLAYOFFS. Don’t worry we’ll be there & we’re gunna tell you all about it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit knoxsoccerpodcast.substack.com

In this episode, Laurie interviews Jeremy Park, cityCURRENT CEO. Jeremy is highly motivated to help people achieve growth in their personal, business, and spiritual life by teaching the power of relationships and through volunteerism. Join us as we talk about:  ✔️ The power in understanding right relationships ✔️ The importance of shifting to grow  ✔️ How volunteerism is the mechanism for growth ✔️ Why giving leads to growth Jeremy C. Park is a corporate executive and philanthropist, an author of two books, a columnist and contributor to Forbes, producer, and host of television and radio shows and a podcast, and a sought-after speaker for transforming organizations and individuals into catalysts for their community.  Park is the CEO and catalyst behind cityCURRENT, an organization with a mission to power the GOOD. cityCURRENT is a partnership of more than one hundred businesses, including some of the world's largest employers, like FedEx, AutoZone, Verizon, Kroger, and Smith+Nephew that have joined forces and funds to make a difference. The organization has teams working in Memphis and Nashville, hosts more than 300 events each year for enrichment and community collaboration, produces an array of positive-oriented media, and financially and physically gives back to support nonprofits.  Jeremy C. Park  https://www.jeremycpark.com  Visit https://www.cityCURRENT.com to learn more.  cityCurrent owned by Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance  Lipscomb & Pitts Bldg 2670 Union Ave, Extended #100 Memphis, TN 38112  Giving for Growth book  https://store.bookbaby.com/book/Giving-for-Growth Connect With Us! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauriewithastory  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lauriewithastory  Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lauriewithstory  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lauriewithastory Https://www.lauriewithastory.com

It's a MV Knights thing babyy.. join me as I Vybe out with the Goat himself Mr. Retro Ruck a true Union Ave basketball pioneer if you ask me. We catching up talking about his new projects Still Earnin management, his

For this week’s #TuesdayTriplePlay, Craig takes you down a country road and features artists that go to the heart of country music. Songs FeaturedScott MacKay – Stupid Cupid (2021)Sample Track: "Opposites Attract"The Small Town Sinners – Union Ave. (2021)Sample Track: "Paid"Sturgill Simpson – Cuttin’ Grass – Vol.2 [The Cowboy Arms Sessions] (2020)Sample Track: "Brace For Impact (Live A Little)"Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/SchizoMusic)

Bay Area counties have set up locations as cooling centers and for wildfire smoke relief. Information and hours subject to change, and COVID precautions are required. Check local city offices for updated information. Last updated: Monday Sep 28, 12:30pm. For questions or updates, email Corinne Smith corinne@kpfa.org  Photo: National Weather Service Bay Area @NWSBayArea Alameda County Current List of Open Cooling Centers Pleasanton Senior Center, 5353 Sunol Rd Pleasanton Sunday Sep 27 – Monday Sep 28, 12:00 pm – 7:00 pm Information: (925) 872-9522 Alameda Free Library, 1550 Oak Street Alameda Hours 1:00 – 5:00 PM Robert Livermore Community Center, 4444 East Ave Livermore Sunday Sep 27, 12 Noon – 6pm; Monday Sep 28, 12 Noon – 5pm. Contact information: (925) 373-5760 Dublin Senior Center, 7600 Amador Valley Blvd Dublin Sunday, Sep 27 12:00pm – 8:00pm; Monday, Sep 28 12:00pm – 8:00pm; Tuesday, Sep 29 12:00pm – 8:00pm Dorothy Day House, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Berkeley Daily 10am – 6pm Contact Information: 510-705-1516 Contra Costa County Current list of open cooling centers in Contra Costa County.  Nick Rodriguez Community Center, 213 F Street, Antioch. Open Saturday, Sep 26 – Wednesday, Sep 30, from 12pm – 6 pm. Contact information: 925-776-3050 Antioch Water Park, 4701 Lone Tree Way, Antioch. Open Saturday, Sep 26, and Sunday, Sep 27, for family swimming sessions. Advanced reservations are required. Call (925) 776-3070 for more information or visit www.antiochca.gov. Brentwood Community Center, 35 Oak Street, Brentwood. Call for hours at 925-516-5444. Concord Senior Center, 2727 Parkside Circle, Concord. Open Sunday, Sep 27 – Wednesday, Sep 30, from 1pm – 6pm. Contact information: (925) 671-3320 Martinez Senior Center, 818 Green Street, Martinez. Open Sunday, Sep 27 –  Monday, Sep 28, from 1pm – 6 pm. Contact Information: (925) 370-8770 Contra Costa County's Employment and Human Services Department (EHSD) Office, 4545 Delta Fair Blvd., Antioch Open Monday, Sep 28 – Thursday, Oct 1, from 1 pm to 5 pm. The County's Employment and Human Services Department (EHSD) has a location to cool. Please note that during the COVID-19 shelter in place, EHSD's regular programs and services are NOT currently available at these offices. Sonoma County Sonoma County Office of Emergency Management is currently coordinating wildfire shelter locations and resources, locations and information subject to change, follow updates here. Evacuees can go to the following locations: Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds, 175 Fairgrounds Drive, Petaluma (accepting sheltering in cars and RVs. Not ready for congregant sheltering at this point.) Petaluma Veterans Building, 1094 Petaluma Blvd. South, Petaluma (Temporary Evacuation Point and shelter) Sonoma Raceway, 29355 Arnold Drive, Sonoma (Temporary Evacuation Point, car sheltering and camping) A Place to Play park, 2375 West Third Street in Santa Rosa (Temporary evacuation point, staff speak English or Spanish.) Finley Community Center, 2060 W College Ave, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 Opening now, hours TBD Contact information: 707-543-3733 For a map of current evacuation zones, click here. Napa County No information available. Santa Clara County Cooling center information here. Campbell Community Center, 1 W. Campbell Avenue, Campbell, CA 95008 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 28 from 1:00 pm – 9:00 pm Milpitas Senior Center, 40 N. Milpitas Blvd, Milpitas, CA 95035 Saturday, Sept. 26 – Monday, Sept. 28 from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm Morgan Hill Library, 660 W Main Ave, Morgan Hill, CA 95037 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Tuesday, Sept. 29, from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm No Library service provided Community Center,201 South Rengstorff Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94040 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 28 from 1:00 pm – 7:00 pm Mitchell Park Communit​y Center, 3700 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 28 from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm City of San Jose Camden Community Center, 3369 Union Ave., San Jose, CA 95124 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 30 from 1:00 pm – 9:00 pm Vietnamese American Community Center, 2072 Lucretia Ave., San Jose, CA 95122 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 30 from 1:00 pm – 9:00 pm Edenvale Branch Library Community Room, 2072 Lucretia Ave., San Jose, CA 95122 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 30 from 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm Joyce Ellington Branch Library Community Room, 491 E. Empire St., San Jose, CA 95112 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 30 from 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm Santa Clara Senior Center, 1303 Fremont Street, Santa Clara, CA 95050 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 28 from 2:00 pm – 8:00 pm Saratoga Library, 13650 Saratoga Ave., Saratoga, CA 95070​ Sunday, Sept. 27 – Monday, Sept. 28 from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm No Library service available Murphy Park Building, 260 N Sunnyvale Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086 Sunday, Sept. 27 – Wednesday, Sept. 30 from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm Solano County  Cooling Centers offered at all County Libraries during regular hours, usually 9am – 5pm. Check city offices for additional locations. Marin County No information available San Francisco San Francisco Weather Relief Centers information can be found here. The following locations are open Sunday Sep 27 – Monday Sep 28, from 10am – 5:30pm San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin Street Chinatown Branch Library, 1135 Powell Street Mission Bay Branch Library, 960 4th Street Southeast Community Facility, 1800 Oakdale Avenue San Mateo County San Mateo County libraries are available as cooling centers. Locations and operating hours may be found here.           The post Bay Area Cooling Centers for Sep 28 – Oct 1, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

What SGV cities are moving walking, bicycling, and active mobility projects forward? ActiveSGV’s Wes Reutimann touches base with Pasadena Disability and Accessibility Commissioner David Azevedo on the status of the valley’s first bi-directional, on-street protected bike/rollway, and how Commissioners and residents have been working together to ensure the final design meets the needs of people of all abilities. Part 2 of our mini-series on the state of active transportation in the SGV includes updates on the following cities.Baldwin ParkPasadenaSouth PasadenaClaremontProject info/images:SGV’s 3rd (installed) protected, on-street bike/rollway - Foothill Blvd, ClaremontPotentially the SGV’s 1st on-street, protected, two-way bike/rollway - Union Ave, PasadenaCitywide Bicycle Parking - South PasadenaActiveLab is made possible by the support of ActiveSGV members and the Liberty Hill Foundation. For more information about ActiveSGV, or to support our work, please visit activeSGV.org

This is a new series of interviews with musicians and interesting folks from NYC and other parts of the world. Hosted by drummer, Federico Ughi. Episode 2 is All the Talking with Matthew Putman, pianist, scientist, and 577 RECS' artist. INTRODUCTION 0:00 MATTHEW’S FIRST YEARS 1:46 FAMILY 2:24 MATTHEW’S PIANO TEACHER 4:38 MUSIC CAREERS 5:31 DANIEL CARTER 9:50 NEW ALBUM 16:08 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 17:40 NEW YORK 22:06 CORNELIA STREET CAFE 27:50 MUSIC RECOMMENDATION 32:20 Flesh Dialect from album Electric Telepathy Vol. 1 telepathicband.bandcamp.com/track/flesh-dialect Daniel Carter - Saxophones, Clarinet, Trumpet Patrick Holmes - Clarinet Matthew Putman - Keyboard Hilliard Greene - Bass Federico Ughi - Drums Music production and guitars by Stelios Mihas Matthew Putman plays the Forward Festival 2019 with the Telepathic Band on December 5th (see below) More about Matthew Putman: http://www.577records.com/matthew-putman Forward Festival 2019 #NYFORWARDFESTIVAL Dec 5th Union Pool/ 484 Union Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211 Dec 6th ShapeShifter Lab/18, Whitwell Place, Brooklyn, NY 11215 www.577records.com/forwardfestival www.facebook.com/events/2531352107097696 Thursday December 5th (Union Pool) 8pm Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II + On Ka’a Davis On Ka’a Davis - Guitar Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II - Drums 8:45pm Sarah Bernstein Solo Sarah Bernstein - violin, voice, electronics 9:30pm Telepathic Band Daniel Carter - Winds Patrick Holmes - Clarinet Matthew Putman - Keyboard Hilliard Greene - Bass Federico Ughi - Drums Friday December 6th (ShapeShifter Lab) 9:15pm Mary Anne Driscoll Daniel Carter - Winds Patrick Holmes - Clarinet Mary Anne Driscoll - Piano 9:45pm Daniel Carter, Watson Jennison, William Parker, Federico Ughi Daniel Carter - Winds Watson Jennison - Winds William Parker - Bass Federico Ughi - Drums 10:30pm No Land & Luke Stewart No Land - poetry Luke Stewart - bass 10:45pm Gerald Cleaver, HPrizm, Brandon Lopez Gerald Cleaver - Drums HPrizm - Electronics Brandon Lopez - Bass 577 Records is an independent record label based in Brooklyn, New York operating since 2001 577 Records Brooklyn, New York www.577records.com ©+℗ 2019

This is a new series of interviews with musicians and interesting folks from NYC and other parts of the world. Hosted by drummer Federico Ughi. Episode 1 is All the Talking with Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II a.k.a Don McKenzie, drummer, and 577 RECS' artist. INTRODUCTION 0:00 DON’S FAMILY LOVE FOR MUSIC 1:48 RECORDS FROM RICK RUBIN 3:30 DON’S MOTHER AT STUDIO ONE, JAMAICA 4:10 DON’S UNCLE AND SANTANA 5:15 FAMILY MOVING TO BROOKLYN 6:48 ORNETTE COLEMAN 8:08 DON’S POLITICS 9:04 CECIL TAYLOR 11:00 NEW YORK 14:03 IMF 17:43 NYPD 19:05 RECORDING PLANS WITH ON KA’A DAVIS 21:01 More about Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II: http://www.577records.com/donald-sturge-anthony-mckenzie-ii Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II plays the Forward Festival 2019 with On Ka’a Davis on December 5th (see below) Forward Festival 2019 #NYFORWARDFESTIVAL Dec 5th Union Pool/ 484 Union Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211 Dec 6th ShapeShifter Lab/18, Whitwell Place, Brooklyn, NY 11215 www.577records.com/forwardfestival www.facebook.com/events/2531352107097696 Thursday December 5th (Union Pool) 8pm Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II + On Ka’a Davis On Ka’a Davis - Guitar Donald Sturge Anthony McKenzie II - Drums 8:45pm Sarah Bernstein Solo Sarah Bernstein - violin, voice, electronics 9:30pm Telepathic Band Daniel Carter - Winds Patrick Holmes - Clarinet Matthew Putman - Keyboard Hilliard Greene - Bass Federico Ughi - Drums Friday December 6th (ShapeShifter Lab) 9:15pm Mary Anne Driscoll Daniel Carter - Winds Patrick Holmes - Clarinet Mary Anne Driscoll - Piano 9:45pm Daniel Carter, Watson Jennison, William Parker, Federico Ughi Daniel Carter - Winds Watson Jennison - Winds William Parker - Bass Federico Ughi - Drums 10:30pm No Land & Luke Stewart No Land - poetry Luke Stewart - bass 10:45pm Gerald Cleaver, HPrizm, Brandon Lopez Gerald Cleaver - Drums HPrizm - Electronics Brandon Lopez - Bass 577 Records is an independent record label based in Brooklyn, New York operating since 2001 577 Records Brooklyn, New York www.577records.com ©+℗ 2019

Playlist: Brody Buster’s One Man Band, The Reason, The Daylights, Mad House Jump, Bobby Saxton, Trying To Make A Living, Myles Goodwyn, Sick And Tired (Of Being Sick And Tired), Doug Duffey And BADD, Have You Ever?, S.E. Willis And THe Willing, If You Don’t Want Me, The B. Christopher Band, Tried To Keep You Satisfied, Jeff Chaz, Blues Buffet, The McNaMarr Project, Cry With Me, Brad Heller, Time’s The Enemy, Janiva Magness, Fortunate Son, Lena & The Slide Brothers, Eldorado, Wentus Blues Band, Judgement Day, Miss Bix And The Blues Fix, Gotta Get Off This Ride, Raw Terra, Surf Song, Cass Clayton Band, You’ll See, Paul Gabriel, Maybe We Can Talk A While, Michael Bloom And The Blues Prophecy, I Ain’t Got The Blues, Ghalia, First Time I Died, Paul DesLauriers Band, Picked A Bad Day, Arsen Shomakhov, Women And Whiskey, Tennessee Redemption, You Don’t Love Me, Blues Meets Girl, Listen Up Boys, Lloyd Spiegel, The Hustle, Kerry Pastine and the Crime Scene, Goin’ For Broke, Giles Robson, Giles’ Theme, Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, New Year’s Eve, Toronzo Cannon, Ordinary Woman, Jimmy Carpenter, One Mint Julep, Bob Margolin, Dancer’s Boogie, Teresa James & The Rhythm Tramps, I Like It Like That, The Reverend Shawn Amos & The Brotherhood, Counting Down The Days, Ghost Town Blues Band, Soda Pop, Biscuit Miller & The Mix, Chicken Grease, Peter Poirier, Someday Baby, Troy Gonyea, (Do The ) Curl Up And Die, Chris “Bad News” Barnes, Cadillac, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: Black-eyed Sally's: Friday, John D’Amato Blues Band; Saturday, Chris “Bad News” Barnes w/Clarence Spady; Hartford. (860) 278 7427 41 Bridge Street Live: Friday, Popa Chubby; Collinsville. The Pine Loft: Sunday, Connecticut Blues Society Solo/Duo Challenge 2; Berlin. FTC Stage One: Saturday, Stanley Jordan plays Jimi Hendrix; Sunday, Bonnie Bishop; Fairfield. (203)-319-1404 Infinity Music Hall: Friday, Stanley Jordan plays Jimi Hendrix; Saturday, Willie Nile; Norfolk. Café 9: Sunday, John D'Amato (4 pm); Tuesday, Parkers Tangent, Gardant, Anthony Corps (Hanover); New Haven. (203)-789-8281 Note Kitchen & Bar: Thursday, Orb Mellon; Bethel. The Acoustic Café: Friday, Jamie Mclean Band w/Dharma Revival; Sunday, 20 Year Anniversary Party; Bridgeport. (203)-335-3655 BRYAC: Saturday, Cotton Gin and the Swamp Yankees; Bridgeport. Walrus + Carpenter: Friday, Cotton Gin and the Swamp Yankees; Black Rock. Gray Goose: Friday, Fake ID; Southport. Roger Sherman Inn: Saturday, Vinnie Ferrone; New Canaan. Dunville's: Saturday, Exit 43; Westport. Little Pub: Saturday, Sinergy; Wilton. Fast Eddie's: Saturday, Wendy May Band; New Milford. O'Neill's: - Saturday, Geoff Hartwell; Norwalk. Coalhouse Pizza: Saturday, Eran Troy Danner electric trio; Stamford. Bill's Seafood: Thursday, The Guy Zinda Band; Westbrook. Rustic Café: Friday, Terri and Someone Probably Bruce; East Lyme. Essex Village Gazebo: Saturday, Blues on the Rocks (2:30 pm); Essex. Donahue’s: Saturday, The Kathy Thompson Band; Madison. Country Tavern Café: Saturday, Low Maintenance; Guilford. Black Hall Outfitters: Sunday, Orb Mellon (3:30 pm); Westbrook. Black Bear Americana Music Fest 2019: Friday, Saturday, Sunday; Goshen. The Parrott Delaney Tavern: Friday, Eight to the Bar; New Hartford. Chicago Sam's: Friday, Jeff Pitchell And Texas Flood; Cromwell. Sunset Grille: Saturday, Eran Troy Danner, electric trio (1 pm); Watertown. Toyo Hibachi: Saturday, Skylark City Band; Colchester, The Downtown Coffee Shop: Saturday, Probably Terri Solo (10 am); Meriden. Tipping Chair Tavern: Monday, Shawn Taylor; Wednesday, Lee-Ann Lovelace & George Lesiw; Milldale. (860) 426-9688 The Hungry Tiger: Friday, Rick "6 Fingers" Wilber (6 pm); Friday, Neal Vitullo & The Vipers (9:30 pm); Saturday, Richie & The Red Hots (6 pm); Saturday, Ali Kat & the Revelators (9:30 pm); Manchester. (860) 649-1195 The Flying Monkey: Friday, Theresa Wright; Hartford. Balos Estiatorio: Wednesday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic; West Hartford. Smokin' With Chris: Saturday, Shawn Taylor; Southington. (860) 620-9133 Main Street Pint & Plate: Friday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic, Bristol. Kinsmen Brewing Co.: Sunday, TSC Acoustic; Milldale. Angry Chair: Thursday, Dan Stevens; Newington. The Brass Horse Café: Friday, Vitamin B-3;·Sunday, Rich Badowski Blues Band (3 pm); Barkhamsted. Phoenix Dining and Entertainment: Thursday, Neal & the Vipers; Pawcatuck. The Mohegan Sun (Wolf Den): Thursday, Terrapin; Uncasville. (888) 226-7711 The Stomping Ground: Saturday, Them Damn Ramblin' Gypsys (1 pm); Saturday, Professor Harp; Sunday, Hambone Relay (1 pm); Thursday, David Gans; Putnam. (860) 928-7900 New England Motorcycle Museum: Saturday, Carl Ricci & 706 Union Ave.; Vernon. Brass Works Brewing Company: Sunday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic (1:30 pm); Waterbury. The Hops Company: Thursday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic; Derby. Spotted Horse: Saturday, The B Side; Shelton. Maria V's: Friday, Tony Ferrigno Band Shelton. The Turning Point: Friday, Roy Book Binder; Sunday, Columbus Day Weekend PAL Music Festival; Piermont, NY The Falcon: Sunday, Uncommon Ground (11 am); Marlboro, NY. The Falcon Underground: Saturday, Emily Beck Band; Marlboro, NY SOFAR Sounds NYC: Friday, Adam Falcon; New York, NY Hudson River Cruises, Inc: Friday, Slam Allen Cruise (7 pm); Kingston, NY Emlin Theatre: Saturday, Amy Helm; Mamaroneck NY Theodores': Friday, Seth Rosenbloom; Saturday, The Racky Thomas Band; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Knickerbocker Café: Saturday, Sugar Ray and the Bluetones; Westerly. (401) 315-5070 Pjs Town Crier: Saturday, Six pack of Blues; Holland, MA The Andrea: Monday, Smorgashbord Band w/ Greg Sherrod (2 pm); Misquamicut Beach RI The Lake George Tavern: Friday, Ozzie Williams RRB; Wales MA Weekly Blues Events Black Eyed Sally’s: Liviu Pop Invitational w/Chris Vitarello (Thursday) Hartford. (860) 278-7427 The Hungry Tiger: Blues w/Dave Sadlowski (Tuesday) Manchester. (860) 649-1195 The Flying Monkey: David Stoltz Sunday Blues sg/TBA (4–7 pm) Hartford. Steak Loft: Greg Piccolo (Monday) Mystic O'Neill's: Geoff Hartwell (First Saturday) Norwalk The Falcon: Sunday Brunch w/TBA (11am); Marlboro, NY. Maple Tree: First Thursday’s Tim McDonald & Hally Jaeggi, Simsbury The Owl Shop: Planet Red (Tuesday) New Haven Nightingale's Acoustic Café: Dan Steven’s "Pickin' Parties" (Tuesday) Old Lyme Home: Rocky Lawrence (1st & 3rd Sunday) Branford Harvest Wine Bar: Guitar George and Willie (First Thursday) New Haven Crave: Rocky Lawrence (Thursday) Ansonia Hog River Brewing Co.: Wise Old Moon’s Twang Thursdays w/Orb Mellon Hartford. Knickerbocker Café: Let's Dance Wednesdays w/ The Cartells Westerly, RI Mulligans: Juke Box Bingo (2nd & 4th Thursday); Torrington. Mulligans: Bar Rated Trivia (Wednesdays) Torrington Tootzy Pasta Pizza: Murray The Wheel solo show (Wednesday) The Falcon Underground: Hudson Valley Singer/Songwriters, Host, Jason Gisser (First Wednesday) Marlboro, NY Vincent’s: Tuesday, Boogie Chillin'; Worcester. Weekly Jams The Hungry Tiger: Blues Jam w/ Tommy Whalen (Monday); Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Black Eyed Sally’s: Community Blues Jam w/ Ed Bradley (Wednesday); Hartford. (860) 278-7427 C J Sparrow Pub & Eatery: Ken Safety's Open Mic Show (Thursday); Cheshire The Hungry Tiger: Open Mic Jam Hosted Jimmy Photon & The Hungry Tiger All-Stars (Thursday) Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Club One Entertainment Complex: The Blues Jam (Sunday) Feeding Hills MA Fiddlers Green: Open Mic hosted by Jason Brownstein (Every other Fri) Stamford Maloneys Publick HOUSE: Musician's Hot Spot Open Mic w/Front Row Band (Sunday. 4 pm) Meriden The Buttonwood Tree: Terri and Rob Duo host the Open Mic (Monday) Middletown. Café 9: Original Blues Jam Session w/ TBA (Sunday) New Haven Tobacco Shed Cafe: Open Jam (Wednesday) Windsor Best Video: Second Wednesday Open Mic Hamden Turning Tide: Blues Jam w/Chris Leigh Band (First Sunday) New London The State House: Sunday Blues n' Brisket w/TBA (4 pm First Sunday) New Haven Bobby Q's: Featured Act followed by a jam, hosted by Ed Train (Friday) Norwalk Daddy Jack's: Acoustic blues w/Jim Koeppel (every other Thursday); New London Donahue's Beach Bar: Open Mic Wednesday w/Sandy or Frankie; Madison Fast Eddie's Billiards Café: Thursday Open Mic; New Milford Peaches On the Waterfront: Juke Joint Wednesdays w/Pro Jam Hosted By Ed Train Norwalk. Peaches On the Waterfront: Brunch with Vinnie Ferrone (Sunday 12-3 pm) Four Seasons By the Lake: Sunday Open Mic Jam; Stafford Guilford Country Tavern: Sandy Connolly’s Open Mic Night; (last Wednesday) Guilford Note Kitchen & Bar: 2JAM Acoustic Jam (Friday); Bethel. Note Kitchen & Bar: Open Mic Jam (Monday); Bethel. O'Briens Sports Pub and Rest: Open Mic with Piano hosted by Jonathan Chapman (Monday); Danbury Open Space: Open Mic Night (Wednesday); Hamden. Preston VFW: Jam w/ guest host TBA (Sunday); Preston The Andrea: Greg Sherrod Open Mic Beach Jam (Sunday) Misquamicut Beach. Sobieski John III Club: Wednesday, Open Mic w/TBA; Deep River. Spill the Beans Coffee House: Acoustic Open Mic w/Johnny I; (Thursday) Prospect (203) 758-7373 The Acoustic Café: Blues Jam hosted by Tom Crivellone (Monday) Bridgeport. (203)-335-3655 Stonehouse: Blues Jam sg/TBA (Sunday); Baltic. (860) 822-8877 Bongo Ron's Cigar & Lounge; Open Mic (Thursday) Old Saybrook, Strange Brew: Bill's Garage Jam/ Bill Thibault (Monday) Norwich. SeaGrape Café: The 5 O'Clocks Lamb Jam (Wednesday) Fairfield The Black Duck: Open Jam Hosted by Wendy May (Thursdays) Westport. Black Duck: Friday Jam Session 11 pm hosted by Ed Train; Westport The Black Sheep Tavern: Open Blues Jam w/ Greg Sherrod (Thursday) Niantic (860) 739-2041 O'Neils Bar: Acoustic open mic w/Dee Brown (Thursday) Bridgeport The Stomping Ground: Open Mic (Sunday) Putnam. (860) 928-7900 The State House: Open Jam first (Sunday of the month) New Haven Cady's Tavern: Rick Harrington Weekly Roadhouse Jam (Sunday) Chepachet RI Theodores’: Open Mic (Wednesday, Springfield, MA) ; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Still Bar: Blues Jam (Sunday) Agawam, MA Snow's Restaurant & Bar: Open mic (Sunday, Worcester, MA) Park Grill and Spirits: Two Left Blues Jam (Tuesday, Worcester, MA) Jillian’s: Open mic (Thursdays, Worcester, MA) Greendale's Pub: Jim's Blues Jam (Sunday, Worcester, MA) Greendale's Pub: Open mic (Tuesday, Worcester, MA) Greendale's Pub: Wackey Blues Jam (Wednesday, Worcester, MA) Boundary Brewhouse: Sunday Blues Jam (Pawtucket, RI) The Falcon Underground: Petey Hop's Roots & Blues Sessions (Third Wednesday) Marlboro, NY The Falcon Underground: Acoustic Open Mic Sessions w/Jason Gisser (first Wednesday) Marlboro, NY Lucy's Lounge: Petey Hop's acoustic open mic (Monday) Pleasantville, NY June's: CT Music Showcase Acoustic Open Mic (Monday) Killingworth. (860)-663-1292 The Bayou: Blues jam (Monday) Mount Vernon, NY https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

Playlist: The Mighty Soul Drivers, I’m Qualified, Shaun Murphy, Thang For You, Giles Robson, Damn Fool Way, Morblus, Jungle Night, Charlie Wooten Project, Tell Me A Story, Bruce Katz, Praise House, Annika Chambers, In The Basement, Bobby Rush, Shake Til’ You Get Enough, JP Soars, Crow’s Nest, Billy Price, We’re In Love, Professor Louie And TheCrowmatix, Funky Steampunk Blues, Dudley Taft, Back To You, Altered Five Blues Band, Ten Thousand Watts, Coco Montoya, Witness Protection, Pascal Bokar, Everytime I See You There, Polly O’Keary and the Rhythm Method, Hard Act To Follow, The Nick Moss Band feat. Dennis Gruenling, Cutting The Monkey’s Tail, Joanne Broh, Let’s Work On It, Misty Blues, Chicago To Memphis, Donna Hourigan & The Lucky Lips Band, I Can’t Be Sure, Moonshine Society, The One Who Got Away, Tweed, Tweed Is Here, Freddie Roulette, Red Tide, Eliza Neals, Bitten By The Blues feat. Popa Chubby, Gracie Curran, Ernestine, Alex Lopez, I Will Miss You, Diana Rein, Worth, Blues Meets Girl, Nightgown, Vince Agwada, Quicksand, James Harman, Lady Luck, Vaneese Thomas, Legacy Of Pain, Mark Hummel, Senor Blues, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts: Saturday, Blues and Views Festival; Sunday, Blues and Views Festival; Westport. Goshen Fair: Saturday, Jr Krauss and the Shakes (12 pm); Sunday, Christine Ohlman w/The James Montgomery Band (6:30); Goshen. Rothbard Ale + Larder: Friday, Cottin Gin and the Swamp Yankees; Sunday, Bard Alley Blues with CGSY (3 pm); Westport, Sunset Grille: Saturday, The Beatniks (2 pm); Norwalk. Black Duck: Saturday, Big Chief & The Midnight Groove; Westport. Redding Roadhouse: Saturday, Otis and the Hurricanes; Redding. (203) 938-3388 LaVita Gustosa: Saturday, Terri and Rob Duo (2 pm); E. Haddam. (860) 873-8999 Infinity Music Hall: Sunday, Neville Jacobs; Monday, Labor Day BBQ Buffet; Norfolk. The Old Lyme Inn: Wednesday, Dan Stevens w/ the Mellow Men; Old Lyme. (860) 434-2600 Bill's Seafood: Monday, Johnny & The East Coast Rockers (2 pm); Westbrook. Florence Griswold Museum: Thursday, Dan Stevens; Old Lyme. Alfa’s Bar and Grill: Saturday, Howie (Eldridge) & The Soul Potatoes; Milford. Café 9: Friday, Snake Hill Blues (5 pm); Wednesday, Sarah Potenza w/ Lee-Ann Lovelace & George Lesiw; Monday, End of Summer Blues BBQ w/ George Baker Band; New Haven. (203)-789-8281 Penny Lane Pub: Saturday, Dan Stevens; Old Saybrook. 860-388-9646 Haddam Neck Fair: Saturday, Kerry Powers (4 pm); Saturday, Someone You Can Xray (8 pm); Sunday, Gospel Music (11 am); East Hampton. Shank's: Sunday, Dan Stevens (2 pm); Clinton. Branford Green: Saturday, Creamery Station (10 am); Jen Durkin’s Steal Your Funk; Delusions of Grandeur; The 2nd Annual Love is Louder & National Overdose Awareness Day; Branford. Black-eyed Sally's: Friday, The Redliners; Saturday, Kosher Kid & The Incredible Amplifires; Hartford. (860) 278 7427 Thomas Hooker Brewery at Colt: Thursday, The Coffee Grinders; Hartford. Balos: Friday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic; West Hartford. Hawk Ridge Winery: Monday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic (2 pm); Watertown. Wallingford Farmers Market: Saturday, Terri and Rob Duo Host an Open Mic (9:30 am); Wallingford. Donovan's Reef Reef Restaurant & Catering: Friday, The VOID; Branford. Murphy's Pub: Friday, Kathy Thompson Band; Saturday, RGB Band; Newtown. The Brass Horse Café: Friday, Rich Badowski Blues Band; Sunday, Jr Krauss and the Shakes (3 pm); Barkhamsted. Cambridge Brew House: Friday, The Coffee Grinders; Saturday, Jeff Blaney; Granby. 860-653-2738 White Pines Campground: Saturday, Carl Ricci and 706 Union Ave; Barkhamsted. Smokin' With Chris: Saturday, Shawn Taylor; Southington. (860) 620-9133 The Stomping Ground: Sunday, The How; Putnam. (860) 928-7900 Daddy Jack’s: Saturday, The Lonnie Gasperini Organ Trio; New London. The Steak Loft: Friday, Kosher Kid; Mystic. (860)-536-2661 Phoenix Dining and Entertainment: Saturday, Sacred Fire - A Tribute to Santana; Pawcatuck. The Captain Daniel Packer Inn: Friday, Dan Stevens; Mystic. M/Bar: Friday, Shawn Taylor (4 pm); Mystic. Rocks 21: Saturday, Sue Menhart Band; Mystic. Daryl's House: Friday, RUMOURS - Fleetwood Mac Tribute (night two); Saturday, RUMOURS - Fleetwood Mac Tribute (night three); Wednesday, Davy Knowles; Thursday, Dylan Doyle Band Plus Jules Olson; Pawling, NY (845) 289-0185 The Falcon: Monday, Cindy Cashdollar & The Syncopators; Marlboro, NY. Pete's Saloon: Friday, The Gil Parris Band; Elmsford, NY Towne Crier Café: Saturday, Anthony Geraci and the Boston Blues All-Stars; w/sg Fishkill George; Beacon, NY Garcia’s at The Capitol Theatre: Wednesday, Jaimoe's Jasssz Band; Port Chester, NY Theodores': Saturday, George T. Gregory Band; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Knickerbocker Café: ; Westerly. (401) 315-5070 Plainridge Park Casino: Sunday, The Barley Hoppers (4 pm); Plainville, MA Burr's Hill Park: Saturday, The Barley Hoppers (2 pm); Warren, RI The Andrea: Saturday, Johnny and The East Coast Rocker's (1 pm); Westerly, RI Ninegret Road: Friday, Rhythm & Roots; Saturday, Rhythm & Roots; Sunday, Rhythm & Roots; Charlestown, RI https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

Playlist: Nikki Hill, Tell The Next World, The Tearaways, Manchester Girl, Roberto Morbioli Trio, My Baby’s Gone, Jeff Pitchell, It Comes To Me Naturally, Aldwin London, Funny How Time Slips Away, Alex Lopez, Woe Is Me, Eliza Neals, Pawn Shop Blues feat. Popa Chubby, Billie Williams, Cold November, Jeff Dale & The South Woodlawners, Good Luck Woman, Griff Hamlin And The Single Barrel Blues Band, Nothing Better, Vince Agwada, Hard-Headed Woman, Charlie Wooten Project, I Don’t Know, Delbert McClinton, Let’s Get Down Like We Used To Do, Cheyenne James, Lay Me Down, Tullie Brae, Break These Chains, Mark Cameron, Ridin The Rails, Jersey Swamp Cats, Dance All Night, Zac Harmon, Honey Pleez, Billy Branch And The Sons Of The Blues, Boom Boom Out Go The Lights, Alice Howe, You Just Never Know, Paula Harris, Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby, Kat Riggins, Try Try Again, Michael Lee, Can’t Kick You, Mindi Abair and the Boneshakers, Mess I’m In, The Forty Fours, Howlin’, Sunday Wilde & The 1 Eyed Jacks, I Guess I Didn’t Hear You, Ben Levin, Load Off My Back, Savoy Brown, Ain’t Gonna Worry, Diana Rein, In The Chill Of The Night, James Harman, Barking Up The Wrong Tree, Franklin Brothers, I’ve Been To The Waters, Gracie Curran, Stay Up, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: Black-eyed Sally's: Friday, Gracie Curran & the High Falutin Band; Hartford. (860) 278 7427 FTC Warehouse: Friday, Robert Randolph & the Family Band with Donna the Buffalo; Fairfield. (203)-319-1404 The Mohegan Sun (Wolf Den): Saturday, Big Bad VooDoo Daddy; Uncasville. (888) 226-7711 Mystic River Park: Blue Monday w/Sugar Rayand the Bluetones /Duke Robillard; Mystic. State House: Saturday, The Bobby Torello Band, Lucy's Neighbor; New Haven. Coal House Pizza: Friday, Eran Troy Danner, electric trio; Stamford. BRYAC: Friday, Balkun Brothers; Bridgeport. Tony's at The J House: Saturday, The 5 o'clocks; Greenwich. Paradise Green Park: Tuesday, Jake Kulak & the Low Down; Stratford Summer Concerts, Stratford. Rizzuto's Oyster Bar & Restaurant: Sunday, The 5 o'clocks (5 pm); Westport. Note Kitchen & Bar: Sunday, OL’ MOOSE (4:30 pm); Bethel. Bohemian High Good Vibes Festival: Saturday, Howie and the Soul Potatoes w/Paul Gabriel and more; Milford. The Beachcomber: Friday, The VOID; Milford. Fowler Field Rotary Pavilion: Friday, Kathy Thompson Band Harbor Lights Summer Concert Series; Milford. Beer Garden: Friday, B Side; Stamford. Old Post Tavern: Friday, Fake ID; Fairfield. J House: Saturday, The 5 O'Clocks; Riverside. Gray Goose: Saturday, The B Side – Southport. The Hideaway: Saturday, Wendy May & Friends; Ridgefield. Spotted Horse: Saturday, Fake ID; Westport. Constitution Park in Liberty Square: Sunday, J and The B Sides; Norwalk. Tiernans: Thursday, Red Ball Express; Stamford. Veterans Field Lions Club Pavilion: Wednesday, Creamery Station (6 pm); Sharon. Noble Jay Brewing Co.: Saturday, Dan Stevens (5 pm); East Lyme. The Old Lyme Inn: Wednesday, Dan Stevens (6 pm) with the Mellow Men; Old Lyme. Madison Beach Hotel: Friday, Jake Kulak; Madison. Daddy Jack’s: Friday, Dave Fields; New London. Donahue’s: Friday, The Bernadettes; Madison. Lenny's: Saturday, Steamroller; Branford. Donovan's Reef: Saturday, The VOID; Branford. Grindstone Tavern: Saturday, Regulators; Collinsville. The Brass Horse Café: Sunday, Sara Ashleigh Band (3 pm); Barkhamsted. South Whitney Pizza: Monday, Mark Hennessy's "Big 60" Birthday Bash with Orb Melon Trio. (7pm); Hartford. The Old State House: Tuesday, Balkun Brothers (12 pm); Hartford. Revolutions Bowling and Lounge: Saturday, An Evening with Jeff Pitchell; South Windsor. Ferry Park: Wednesday, TSC Acoustic (5 pm); Rocky Hill. South Whitney Pizza: Monday, Orb Mellon; Hartford. The Hungry Tiger: Wednesday, Ali Kat & Geoff Willard; Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Hanging Hills Brewery: Sunday, Orb Mellon (3 pm); Hartford. 3rd Annual Music on the Farm: Sunday, Jeff Pitchell and Texas Flood (4:30 pm); Bristol. Strykers Café: Saturday, The Second Chance; Berlin. Smokin' With Chris: Saturday, Chris D'Amato & Billy Bileca Duo; Southington. (860) 620-9133 Tipping Chair Tavern: Saturday, Tom “The Suit” Forst (5 pm); Milldale. (860) 426-9688 Walnut Hill Park: Monday, Kathy Thompson Band; New Britain. Hawks Landing: Saturday, Lori and The Legends; Southington. The Phoenix: Sunday, Kim Trusty; Pawxatuck. Chamard Vineyards: Saturday, Terri and Rob Duo (4 pm); Clinton. (860) 664-0299 Priam Vineyards: Friday, UnWINED Concert: The Red Hots (6 pm); Colchester. 860-267-8520 The Steak Loft: Friday, Johnny and The East Coast Rockers; Mystic. (860)-536-2661 Washington Park: Friday, F & Blues Band; Groton. Saltwater Farm Vineyard: Thursday, Shawn Taylor (5 pm); Stonington. 860-415-9072 The Stomping Ground: Friday, Pat Halpin and the 351s; Saturday, The Quins; Wednesday, Mark Milloff (of The Cannibal Ramblers); Putnam. (860) 928-7900 Davis Park: Thursday, The Coffee Grinders (6 pm); Danielson. The Strange Brew Pub: Thursday, Jerry Garcia B-Day Bash Jam; Norwich. Gina Marie's Family Restaurant: Saturday, Patty and Bill (6 pm); Hebron. M•A•G’s Pizza Bar & Grill: Thursday, The Elwood Blues Band; Seymour. Dee-Mans Bar & Grill: Sunday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic (4 pm); Naugatuck. Daryl's House Club: Sunday, Jason Gisser Band; Pawling NY The Turning Point: Wednesday, James Hunter Duo; Piermont, NY The Falcon: Thursday, Bruce Katz Band & Solo Piano CD; Marlboro, NY. The Falcon Underground: Thursday, Slam Allen Solo; Marlboro, NY Pete's Saloon: Friday, The Gil Parris Band; Elmsford, NY Theodores': Friday, A Ton of Blues; Saturday, Sweet Daddy Cool Breeze; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Knickerbocker Café: Friday, Delta Generators; Westerly. (401) 315-5070 Cady’s Tavern: Friday, Mike Crandall / Neal Vitullo; Chepachet, RI Fort Hill Brewing Co.: Sunday, Dan Stevens (3 pm); Easthampton, MA American Legion Post No 266: Friday, Rich Badowski Band; Granby, MA Perks & Corks: Friday, Dan Stevens; Wednesday, Shawn Taylor; Westerly. Foster Old Home Days: Saturday, The Barley Hoppers (1 pm); Foster Center, RI Lake George Tavern: Saturday, Carl Ricci & 706 Union Ave. (4 pm); Wales, MA Habitat For Humanity: Saturday, Cee Cee & the Riders (12 pm); West Greenwich, RI https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

  Episode thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins, and is part one of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” by the Cheers.  —-more—- Clarification While editing tonight’s podcast I noticed something I didn’t make clear. I talk about “Movie Magg” by Carl Perkins being about riding a mule to the cinema, but in the song he uses the word “horse” rather than mule. Perkins’ family, in real life, had a mule when he wrote the song, and that was what he was writing about, even though the song lyric is “horse”. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For copyright reasons, that might not be available in North America, so here’s a Spotify playlist of the same recordings. Much of the information here comes from Go Cat Go! The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, by Carl Perkins and David McGee. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. There are many compilations available of Perkins’ Sun recordings. This double-CD one seems as good as any. All Perkins’ early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Perkins’ work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript   Today’s episode is, in effect, part one of a three-part story, looking at the repercussions of Elvis Presley’s move from Sun Records, and the birth of rockabilly. As when I did my recent Chess Records trilogy, all of these episodes should stand alone, but you might find it interesting to listen back to this one after the next two. While Elvis Presley had moved from Sun to RCA, that didn’t mean that Sam Phillips had given up on recording rock and roll music. Far from it. With the amount of money that RCA had paid for Elvis’ contract, Sun Records was for the first time on a completely secure footing, and now Phillips could really begin work on making the music that would come to define his legacy. Because now, Sun Records shifted almost entirely from being a blues label to being a rockabilly label. We’ve not talked much about rockabilly as a genre, and that’s because until now we’ve only heard one person performing it. But while Elvis was arguably the first rockabilly artist, it wasn’t until Elvis had left Sun that the floodgates opened, and Sam Phillips started producing the records that defined the genre as a genre, rather than as the work of a single individual. The rockabilly sound was, in essence, created in Sun studios. And rockabilly is one of those sounds that purists, at least, insist had a very, very specific meaning. It had to have slapback echo on the vocals, it had to have an electric lead guitar and slapback bass. It basically had to have all the elements of Elvis’ very earliest records. You could add a few other elements, like piano or drums — mostly because anything else would exclude Jerry Lee Lewis — but no horns or strings, no backing vocals, nothing that would take away from the very primitive sound. And no steel guitar or fiddle, either — that would tip it over into country. There were, of course, other people who produced rockabilly records, and we’ll look at some of them as the next couple of years go on. But when they did, they were all copying the sound that Sam Phillips created. Because after Elvis stopped recording for Sun, Sam Phillips and his small staff discovered enough young, exciting, musicians that Sun Records was assured a place in music history, even though its biggest artist was gone. The first of the new artists Phillips discovered was someone who came to Sun when Elvis was still on the label — a young man named Carl Perkins. Perkins, like many of the pioneers of rock and roll music, had grown up dirt-poor. His parents were sharecroppers, who were illiterate enough that they misspelled their own surname on his birth certificate (they spelled it Perkings, but he always used Perkins in later life. His family had been so poor that when young Carl, inspired by listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, asked if he could have a guitar, his parents couldn’t afford one, and so his father made him one from a cigar box and a broom handle. However, young Carl got good enough that soon his dad bought him a real guitar. He was so poor that when he broke strings, he had to tie them together because he couldn’t afford new ones, and he ended up developing a unique guitar style — bending strings to get different notes rather than fretting them normally — to avoid the knots in the strings, which hurt his fingers. When he was fourteen, Perkins wrote his first song, and it again shows just how poor he was. Listen to the lyrics to “Movie Magg”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Movie Magg”] That’s about going to the cinema *riding on a mule*. Because in the time and place where Perkins grew up, it was actually considered slightly classier to ride a mule to the cinema than to take a car, because if anyone *did* have a car, it was one that was so broken down and rusted that it was actually less impressive than a mule. All of Perkins’ early work is like that, rooted in a poverty far deeper than almost anyone listening to this podcast will be able to understand. It’s music based in the country music he heard growing up, and it’s music that could only be made by someone who spent his childhood picking cotton for pennies an hour in order to help his family survive. When Perkins had learned to play the guitar well enough to play lead, he taught his brother Jay to play rudimentary rhythm parts. Jay loved music as much as Carl did, but the two brothers had slightly different tastes in country music. Carl was a massive fan of the inventor of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, who sang high, driving, harmony-filled songs of longing: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] Jay, on the other hand, preferred Ernest Tubb’s low, honky tonk, music: [Excerpt: Ernest Tubb, “Tomorrow Never Comes”] They taught their younger brother Clayton to play a little bass, even though he wasn’t a music lover especially — Clayton loved drinking and fighting and not much else. But he had a reasonable sense of rhythm, so they could teach him the three places to put his fingers on most country songs, and let him figure out the rest with practice. Their friend Fluke Holland joined on drums, and the Perkins Brothers Band was born. The Perkins brothers spent the next several years honing their craft playing some of the roughest bars in Tennessee. They had to develop an ability to play dance music for venues where it was customary to buy two bottles of beer at a time — one to drink, and one to smash over someone else’s head — you didn’t want to use an empty bottle for your smashing, as there was no weight to them, but a full bottle of beer would put someone out of commission very quickly. So they very quickly developed a style that was rooted in honky-tonk music, but which was totally oriented around getting people dancing. It had elements of bluegrass, Western Swing, the blues, and anything else that could possibly be used to get a crowd of drunks dancing, if you only had two guitars, a double bass, and a drum kit. Both Carl and Jay would take turns singing lead, and when they ran out of songs to perform, Carl would improvise new ones around standard chord changes. He had the ability to improvise words and music off the top of his head — and he’d remember a good chorus or a good line and reuse it, so these improvised songs slowly became standard, structured, parts of their set. They were soon able to make a full-time living playing music for bars full of angry drunk men, and for several years they did just that, starting from before it was even legal for them to enter the bars they were playing. They had no ambition to do anything else — they were just glad to be earning a living doing something that was fun. Slowly but surely, Carl Perkins started to carve out a unique sound for the band, at least on the songs that he wrote and sang. He didn’t know what it was that he was doing, but he knew it was different, and that no-one else was doing anything like it. Until one day he heard someone who was: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] When Carl Perkins heard Elvis singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the radio, he knew that there was someone else who was out there doing the same kind of thing as him. He was even singing a song by Carl’s favourite, Bill Monroe. If this Elvis Presley kid could become a star making that kind of music, maybe so could Carl himself. He and his brothers went to see Elvis live and while Jay and Clayton took a dislike to Elvis — deciding that because he paid any attention to his appearance he must be gay, and therefore in their opinion worthy of nothing but contempt — Carl saw something else. He determined right then that he was going to go to Sun Records and demand an audition. If they would put that Elvis boy’s records out, then surely they would put his out too? The Perkins Brothers Band all piled into a single car, and drove down to Memphis, to 706 Union Ave. They went in to see the people at Sun Records — and were turned away. Marion Keisker told them that they weren’t auditioning right then, and that they didn’t need any new singers. When Carl Perkins told her that they sounded a bit like Elvis, she was even more dismissive — they didn’t need another Elvis. They’d already got one. They trudged back despondently to the car, deciding that their dream of stardom was at an end. But as they were doing so, a Cadillac pulled up and a man got out of it. They decided that the only person who would be driving a Cadillac to that studio must be the owner of the record label, so they went over to him and told him what had happened. And Sam Phillips agreed with Keisker. He wasn’t after anyone else right now. He had enough acts. And Carl was devastated. According to Perkins, Phillips later told him “I couldn’t say no. Never have I [seen] a pitifuller-looking fellow as you looked when I said, ‘I’m too busy to listen to you.’ You overpowered me.” He relented, and told them that he’d give them a quick listen, but it had to be quick as he was busy that day. They went into the studio and started running through their set. They got through a verse of the first song, and Phillips stopped them. He wasn’t interested in anything like that. They started another song. Again, Phillips stopped them and said he wasn’t interested. They were about to go home, but then Carl asked if he could try just one more song. He started up that song he had written when he was fourteen, “Movie Magg”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Movie Magg”] The band joined in, and as they played through the song, Carl noticed something. Sam Phillips hadn’t stopped them from playing. He sat through the whole thing, listening intently. When they got to the end, he said that if they came back with a few more songs that sounded like that, they might just be worth recording. The band were pleased, but Phillips also said something else, to Carl alone, that was more worrying. He told Carl that there was no place for any lead vocals by his brother Jay. “There’s already one Ernest Tubb in the world. No-one needs another one.” Without them having fully realised it at the time, the Perkins Brothers Band had now become Carl Perkins and his band. When they came back a few weeks later, they had worked out a few more songs. Phillips put out “Movie Magg”, backed with a ballad Carl had written, “Turn Around”, but he didn’t put these out on Sun. Rather, he put them out on a new label, Flip, that didn’t pay union scale. Flip only put out records around Tennessee, and the idea was that these would be audition records — Phillips would see how the records would do locally, without paying full royalties and without paying expensive shipping costs or for a large print run. Phillips was in financial trouble at the time, and he was trying to find ways to cut costs. “Movie Magg” did well enough on Flip that for the next Carl Perkins single, Phillips moved him on to Sun Records proper. This followed the same formula as the first single, pairing an uptempo A-side with a B-side ballad in the Hank Williams vein. The A-side, “Gone Gone Gone”, was one of Carl’s improvised songs — every take of it was different, although they were all based around the same basic idea, which was riffing on the old phrase, “It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that”. [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, “Gone Gone Gone”] “Gone Gone Gone” wasn’t a hit, but it sold well enough, and Phillips arranged for Perkins to go out on tour, on a bill with Elvis and another new Sun signing, Johnny Cash. It was on this tour that Cash made a suggestion to Perkins that would change Perkins’ life. Cash remembered a fellow serviceman, a black man named C.V. Wright, had referred to his service issue shoes as “blue suede shoes”, and he told Perkins that he should write a song about that. Perkins dismissed the idea. What the hell did he know about shoes, anyway? And what kind of song could you write about them? The idea was ridiculous. The tour went well, apart from one incident — Perkins and Presley had been talking about their mutual love for the song “Only You”, and that inspired Perkins to add the song to his own setlist. [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Only You”] That irritated Presley, who had been planning to perform the song himself the same night, and Presley felt that Perkins’ performance had upstaged him. The two remained friends, but would never perform on the same bill again. Elvis did, however, take Carl out clothes shopping, and show him how to dress in a more sophisticated manner on stage. Shortly after that tour, Perkins was performing another show, when he noticed someone in the audience berating his date, “Don’t step on my suedes!” He started thinking about what kind of person would find his shoes so important, and started thinking about pride, and about people who don’t have anything. The idea merged with Cash’s mention of blue suede shoes, and Perkins found himself one night getting out of bed, playing his electric guitar unplugged, so as not to disturb his wife, and writing a song he called “Blue Swade Shoes” — he spelled “suede” s w a d e, because he didn’t know how the word was spelled. Two days later, on December 19, 1955, he was in the studio recording it: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] Perkins was certain that this was going to be it. This was his breakthrough record. But at the same time he was getting depressed about his prospects. He had a wife and kids to support, and he was earning so little money from his music that he was having to do farm work as a side job in order to make enough money to buy his kids Christmas presents. The people at this side job were often astonished that “that singer fella” was there. Everyone around knew him from his stage shows, and they all knew he’d put out records. Surely he was rich now, and didn’t need to be doing such menial work? He was at a low, and that didn’t get better when he finally got his complimentary copies of his new single. They arrived through the post and, as often happened with records at that time, they’d got smashed into bits. He wanted to have his own copies of the record, of course, so he went into town to the shop that sold records, and asked for a copy. He was horrified at what he saw. Instead of a proper record — a big ten inch thing with a tiny little hole in the middle, made out of shellac — he was confronted with something only seven inches across, made of some kind of plastic, and with a big hole in the middle. He explained that no, he wanted his record, and the store owner replied that this was his record. He came home with this little floppy thing and cried, explaining to his wife that they’d messed up his record in some way, and that he was ruined. Eventually they figured out that this was OK, and that what the store owner had told Carl had been correct — these new vinyl records were apparently what all the kids wanted instead of what Carl thought of as real records. “Blue Suede Shoes” was an obvious hit, but the B-side, “Honey Don’t”, got more than a little airplay as well: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Honey Don’t”] “Blue Suede Shoes” was such a smash hit that Steve Sholes of RCA called Sam Phillips, worried. When he’d signed Elvis, had he backed the wrong horse? Phillips assured Sholes that he hadn’t. As it turned out, “Blue Suede Shoes” and Elvis’ first single for RCA, “Heartbreak Hotel”, were racing up the charts at the same time as each other. “Heartbreak Hotel” ended up at number one, and “Blue Suede Shoes” at number two, and both were crossover hits, making the top two in both pop and country and the top five in R&B. “Blue Suede Shoes” was so popular, in fact, that at one point it was being performed simultaneously on two different TV shows — at the same time as Carl Perkins was appearing on the Ozark Jubilee, his very first TV appearance, Presley was on Stage Show on another network, performing his cover version of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blue Suede Shoes”] Presley’s version wasn’t released as a single until a few months later — they’d come to a gentleman’s agreement that he wouldn’t affect Perkins’ sales — but it was put out as the opening track on Presley’s first album, and as a track on an EP. When Presley’s version finally came out as a single, towards the end of the year, it made the top twenty and brought in further royalties for Perkins. Perkins’ version of “Blue Suede Shoes” and Elvis’ had a few crucial differences other than just their performer. Perkins’ version is more interesting rhythmically at the start — it has a stop-time introduction which essentially puts it into six-four time before settling into four-four. Elvis, on the other hand, stayed with a four-four beat all the way through. Elvis’ performance is all about keeping up a sense of urgency, while Perkins is about building up tension and release. Listen first of all to Elvis’ introduction: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blue Suede Shoes”] “Well, it’s one for the money,” BAM, “two for the show”, BAM… that’s a record that’s all about that initial urgency. Now listen to Perkins’: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] It seems to stall after every line, as if it’s hesitant, as if he doesn’t really want to get started. But at the same time that gives it a rhythmic interest that isn’t there in Presley’s version. Perkins’ original is the more sophisticated, musicianly, record. Most cover versions since have followed Presley’s version, with the notable exception of John Lennon’s live cover version from 1969, which follows the pattern of Perkins’. Unfortunately, Perkins’ career was then derailed in a tragic accident. On his way to perform on the Perry Como Show on TV, Perkins’ car hit a truck. The truck driver was killed, and Perkins and his brother Jay were both hospitalised. They got better, but their career had lost momentum — and by the time they were completely well, Sam Phillips was rather more interested in his next big thing. Phillips did, however, get Perkins a Cadillac of his own, like the one Perkins had been impressed by when he first met Phillips. He told Perkins that he’d planned to do this for the first Sun Records artist to have a million-seller, which “Blue Suede Shoes” was. Perkins was less impressed when he found out that the Cadillac wasn’t a gift, but had been paid for out of Perkins’ royalties, and that eventually started a lifelong series of royalty disputes between the two men, with Perkins never believing he had received all the money that was rightfully his. Perkins would never have another hit as a performer, and his career would be defined by that one song, but he continued making great records, and in a few weeks’ time we’ll be taking a look at another of them, and at what happened in the studio when a couple of people came to visit while he was recording. Those future records would include some that would inspire some of the most important musicians in the world, and would rightfully become classics. But it’s “Blue Suede Shoes” which ensured his place in music history, and which sixty-three years later, more than any other record, sums up that point in 1956 when two country boys from Tennessee were chasing each other up the charts and defining the future of rock and roll.

  Episode thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins, and is part one of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots" by the Cheers.  ----more---- Clarification While editing tonight's podcast I noticed something I didn't make clear. I talk about "Movie Magg" by Carl Perkins being about riding a mule to the cinema, but in the song he uses the word "horse" rather than mule. Perkins' family, in real life, had a mule when he wrote the song, and that was what he was writing about, even though the song lyric is "horse". Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For copyright reasons, that might not be available in North America, so here's a Spotify playlist of the same recordings. Much of the information here comes from Go Cat Go! The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, by Carl Perkins and David McGee. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. There are many compilations available of Perkins' Sun recordings. This double-CD one seems as good as any. All Perkins' early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Perkins' work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn't.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript   Today's episode is, in effect, part one of a three-part story, looking at the repercussions of Elvis Presley's move from Sun Records, and the birth of rockabilly. As when I did my recent Chess Records trilogy, all of these episodes should stand alone, but you might find it interesting to listen back to this one after the next two. While Elvis Presley had moved from Sun to RCA, that didn't mean that Sam Phillips had given up on recording rock and roll music. Far from it. With the amount of money that RCA had paid for Elvis' contract, Sun Records was for the first time on a completely secure footing, and now Phillips could really begin work on making the music that would come to define his legacy. Because now, Sun Records shifted almost entirely from being a blues label to being a rockabilly label. We've not talked much about rockabilly as a genre, and that's because until now we've only heard one person performing it. But while Elvis was arguably the first rockabilly artist, it wasn't until Elvis had left Sun that the floodgates opened, and Sam Phillips started producing the records that defined the genre as a genre, rather than as the work of a single individual. The rockabilly sound was, in essence, created in Sun studios. And rockabilly is one of those sounds that purists, at least, insist had a very, very specific meaning. It had to have slapback echo on the vocals, it had to have an electric lead guitar and slapback bass. It basically had to have all the elements of Elvis' very earliest records. You could add a few other elements, like piano or drums -- mostly because anything else would exclude Jerry Lee Lewis -- but no horns or strings, no backing vocals, nothing that would take away from the very primitive sound. And no steel guitar or fiddle, either -- that would tip it over into country. There were, of course, other people who produced rockabilly records, and we'll look at some of them as the next couple of years go on. But when they did, they were all copying the sound that Sam Phillips created. Because after Elvis stopped recording for Sun, Sam Phillips and his small staff discovered enough young, exciting, musicians that Sun Records was assured a place in music history, even though its biggest artist was gone. The first of the new artists Phillips discovered was someone who came to Sun when Elvis was still on the label -- a young man named Carl Perkins. Perkins, like many of the pioneers of rock and roll music, had grown up dirt-poor. His parents were sharecroppers, who were illiterate enough that they misspelled their own surname on his birth certificate (they spelled it Perkings, but he always used Perkins in later life. His family had been so poor that when young Carl, inspired by listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, asked if he could have a guitar, his parents couldn't afford one, and so his father made him one from a cigar box and a broom handle. However, young Carl got good enough that soon his dad bought him a real guitar. He was so poor that when he broke strings, he had to tie them together because he couldn't afford new ones, and he ended up developing a unique guitar style -- bending strings to get different notes rather than fretting them normally -- to avoid the knots in the strings, which hurt his fingers. When he was fourteen, Perkins wrote his first song, and it again shows just how poor he was. Listen to the lyrics to "Movie Magg": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Movie Magg"] That's about going to the cinema *riding on a mule*. Because in the time and place where Perkins grew up, it was actually considered slightly classier to ride a mule to the cinema than to take a car, because if anyone *did* have a car, it was one that was so broken down and rusted that it was actually less impressive than a mule. All of Perkins' early work is like that, rooted in a poverty far deeper than almost anyone listening to this podcast will be able to understand. It's music based in the country music he heard growing up, and it's music that could only be made by someone who spent his childhood picking cotton for pennies an hour in order to help his family survive. When Perkins had learned to play the guitar well enough to play lead, he taught his brother Jay to play rudimentary rhythm parts. Jay loved music as much as Carl did, but the two brothers had slightly different tastes in country music. Carl was a massive fan of the inventor of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, who sang high, driving, harmony-filled songs of longing: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Blue Moon of Kentucky"] Jay, on the other hand, preferred Ernest Tubb's low, honky tonk, music: [Excerpt: Ernest Tubb, "Tomorrow Never Comes"] They taught their younger brother Clayton to play a little bass, even though he wasn't a music lover especially -- Clayton loved drinking and fighting and not much else. But he had a reasonable sense of rhythm, so they could teach him the three places to put his fingers on most country songs, and let him figure out the rest with practice. Their friend Fluke Holland joined on drums, and the Perkins Brothers Band was born. The Perkins brothers spent the next several years honing their craft playing some of the roughest bars in Tennessee. They had to develop an ability to play dance music for venues where it was customary to buy two bottles of beer at a time -- one to drink, and one to smash over someone else's head -- you didn't want to use an empty bottle for your smashing, as there was no weight to them, but a full bottle of beer would put someone out of commission very quickly. So they very quickly developed a style that was rooted in honky-tonk music, but which was totally oriented around getting people dancing. It had elements of bluegrass, Western Swing, the blues, and anything else that could possibly be used to get a crowd of drunks dancing, if you only had two guitars, a double bass, and a drum kit. Both Carl and Jay would take turns singing lead, and when they ran out of songs to perform, Carl would improvise new ones around standard chord changes. He had the ability to improvise words and music off the top of his head -- and he'd remember a good chorus or a good line and reuse it, so these improvised songs slowly became standard, structured, parts of their set. They were soon able to make a full-time living playing music for bars full of angry drunk men, and for several years they did just that, starting from before it was even legal for them to enter the bars they were playing. They had no ambition to do anything else -- they were just glad to be earning a living doing something that was fun. Slowly but surely, Carl Perkins started to carve out a unique sound for the band, at least on the songs that he wrote and sang. He didn't know what it was that he was doing, but he knew it was different, and that no-one else was doing anything like it. Until one day he heard someone who was: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Blue Moon of Kentucky"] When Carl Perkins heard Elvis singing "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the radio, he knew that there was someone else who was out there doing the same kind of thing as him. He was even singing a song by Carl's favourite, Bill Monroe. If this Elvis Presley kid could become a star making that kind of music, maybe so could Carl himself. He and his brothers went to see Elvis live and while Jay and Clayton took a dislike to Elvis -- deciding that because he paid any attention to his appearance he must be gay, and therefore in their opinion worthy of nothing but contempt -- Carl saw something else. He determined right then that he was going to go to Sun Records and demand an audition. If they would put that Elvis boy's records out, then surely they would put his out too? The Perkins Brothers Band all piled into a single car, and drove down to Memphis, to 706 Union Ave. They went in to see the people at Sun Records -- and were turned away. Marion Keisker told them that they weren't auditioning right then, and that they didn't need any new singers. When Carl Perkins told her that they sounded a bit like Elvis, she was even more dismissive -- they didn't need another Elvis. They'd already got one. They trudged back despondently to the car, deciding that their dream of stardom was at an end. But as they were doing so, a Cadillac pulled up and a man got out of it. They decided that the only person who would be driving a Cadillac to that studio must be the owner of the record label, so they went over to him and told him what had happened. And Sam Phillips agreed with Keisker. He wasn't after anyone else right now. He had enough acts. And Carl was devastated. According to Perkins, Phillips later told him “I couldn’t say no. Never have I [seen] a pitifuller-looking fellow as you looked when I said, ‘I’m too busy to listen to you.’ You overpowered me.” He relented, and told them that he'd give them a quick listen, but it had to be quick as he was busy that day. They went into the studio and started running through their set. They got through a verse of the first song, and Phillips stopped them. He wasn't interested in anything like that. They started another song. Again, Phillips stopped them and said he wasn't interested. They were about to go home, but then Carl asked if he could try just one more song. He started up that song he had written when he was fourteen, "Movie Magg": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Movie Magg"] The band joined in, and as they played through the song, Carl noticed something. Sam Phillips hadn't stopped them from playing. He sat through the whole thing, listening intently. When they got to the end, he said that if they came back with a few more songs that sounded like that, they might just be worth recording. The band were pleased, but Phillips also said something else, to Carl alone, that was more worrying. He told Carl that there was no place for any lead vocals by his brother Jay. "There's already one Ernest Tubb in the world. No-one needs another one." Without them having fully realised it at the time, the Perkins Brothers Band had now become Carl Perkins and his band. When they came back a few weeks later, they had worked out a few more songs. Phillips put out "Movie Magg", backed with a ballad Carl had written, "Turn Around", but he didn't put these out on Sun. Rather, he put them out on a new label, Flip, that didn't pay union scale. Flip only put out records around Tennessee, and the idea was that these would be audition records -- Phillips would see how the records would do locally, without paying full royalties and without paying expensive shipping costs or for a large print run. Phillips was in financial trouble at the time, and he was trying to find ways to cut costs. "Movie Magg" did well enough on Flip that for the next Carl Perkins single, Phillips moved him on to Sun Records proper. This followed the same formula as the first single, pairing an uptempo A-side with a B-side ballad in the Hank Williams vein. The A-side, "Gone Gone Gone", was one of Carl's improvised songs -- every take of it was different, although they were all based around the same basic idea, which was riffing on the old phrase, "It must be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that". [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, "Gone Gone Gone"] "Gone Gone Gone" wasn't a hit, but it sold well enough, and Phillips arranged for Perkins to go out on tour, on a bill with Elvis and another new Sun signing, Johnny Cash. It was on this tour that Cash made a suggestion to Perkins that would change Perkins' life. Cash remembered a fellow serviceman, a black man named C.V. Wright, had referred to his service issue shoes as "blue suede shoes", and he told Perkins that he should write a song about that. Perkins dismissed the idea. What the hell did he know about shoes, anyway? And what kind of song could you write about them? The idea was ridiculous. The tour went well, apart from one incident -- Perkins and Presley had been talking about their mutual love for the song "Only You", and that inspired Perkins to add the song to his own setlist. [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Only You"] That irritated Presley, who had been planning to perform the song himself the same night, and Presley felt that Perkins' performance had upstaged him. The two remained friends, but would never perform on the same bill again. Elvis did, however, take Carl out clothes shopping, and show him how to dress in a more sophisticated manner on stage. Shortly after that tour, Perkins was performing another show, when he noticed someone in the audience berating his date, "Don't step on my suedes!" He started thinking about what kind of person would find his shoes so important, and started thinking about pride, and about people who don't have anything. The idea merged with Cash's mention of blue suede shoes, and Perkins found himself one night getting out of bed, playing his electric guitar unplugged, so as not to disturb his wife, and writing a song he called "Blue Swade Shoes" -- he spelled "suede" s w a d e, because he didn't know how the word was spelled. Two days later, on December 19, 1955, he was in the studio recording it: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] Perkins was certain that this was going to be it. This was his breakthrough record. But at the same time he was getting depressed about his prospects. He had a wife and kids to support, and he was earning so little money from his music that he was having to do farm work as a side job in order to make enough money to buy his kids Christmas presents. The people at this side job were often astonished that "that singer fella" was there. Everyone around knew him from his stage shows, and they all knew he'd put out records. Surely he was rich now, and didn't need to be doing such menial work? He was at a low, and that didn't get better when he finally got his complimentary copies of his new single. They arrived through the post and, as often happened with records at that time, they'd got smashed into bits. He wanted to have his own copies of the record, of course, so he went into town to the shop that sold records, and asked for a copy. He was horrified at what he saw. Instead of a proper record -- a big ten inch thing with a tiny little hole in the middle, made out of shellac -- he was confronted with something only seven inches across, made of some kind of plastic, and with a big hole in the middle. He explained that no, he wanted his record, and the store owner replied that this was his record. He came home with this little floppy thing and cried, explaining to his wife that they'd messed up his record in some way, and that he was ruined. Eventually they figured out that this was OK, and that what the store owner had told Carl had been correct -- these new vinyl records were apparently what all the kids wanted instead of what Carl thought of as real records. "Blue Suede Shoes" was an obvious hit, but the B-side, "Honey Don't", got more than a little airplay as well: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Honey Don't"] "Blue Suede Shoes" was such a smash hit that Steve Sholes of RCA called Sam Phillips, worried. When he'd signed Elvis, had he backed the wrong horse? Phillips assured Sholes that he hadn't. As it turned out, "Blue Suede Shoes" and Elvis' first single for RCA, "Heartbreak Hotel", were racing up the charts at the same time as each other. "Heartbreak Hotel" ended up at number one, and "Blue Suede Shoes" at number two, and both were crossover hits, making the top two in both pop and country and the top five in R&B. "Blue Suede Shoes" was so popular, in fact, that at one point it was being performed simultaneously on two different TV shows -- at the same time as Carl Perkins was appearing on the Ozark Jubilee, his very first TV appearance, Presley was on Stage Show on another network, performing his cover version of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Blue Suede Shoes"] Presley's version wasn't released as a single until a few months later -- they'd come to a gentleman's agreement that he wouldn't affect Perkins' sales -- but it was put out as the opening track on Presley's first album, and as a track on an EP. When Presley's version finally came out as a single, towards the end of the year, it made the top twenty and brought in further royalties for Perkins. Perkins' version of "Blue Suede Shoes" and Elvis' had a few crucial differences other than just their performer. Perkins' version is more interesting rhythmically at the start -- it has a stop-time introduction which essentially puts it into six-four time before settling into four-four. Elvis, on the other hand, stayed with a four-four beat all the way through. Elvis' performance is all about keeping up a sense of urgency, while Perkins is about building up tension and release. Listen first of all to Elvis' introduction: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Blue Suede Shoes"] "Well, it's one for the money," BAM, "two for the show", BAM... that's a record that's all about that initial urgency. Now listen to Perkins': [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] It seems to stall after every line, as if it's hesitant, as if he doesn't really want to get started. But at the same time that gives it a rhythmic interest that isn't there in Presley's version. Perkins' original is the more sophisticated, musicianly, record. Most cover versions since have followed Presley's version, with the notable exception of John Lennon's live cover version from 1969, which follows the pattern of Perkins'. Unfortunately, Perkins' career was then derailed in a tragic accident. On his way to perform on the Perry Como Show on TV, Perkins' car hit a truck. The truck driver was killed, and Perkins and his brother Jay were both hospitalised. They got better, but their career had lost momentum -- and by the time they were completely well, Sam Phillips was rather more interested in his next big thing. Phillips did, however, get Perkins a Cadillac of his own, like the one Perkins had been impressed by when he first met Phillips. He told Perkins that he'd planned to do this for the first Sun Records artist to have a million-seller, which "Blue Suede Shoes" was. Perkins was less impressed when he found out that the Cadillac wasn't a gift, but had been paid for out of Perkins' royalties, and that eventually started a lifelong series of royalty disputes between the two men, with Perkins never believing he had received all the money that was rightfully his. Perkins would never have another hit as a performer, and his career would be defined by that one song, but he continued making great records, and in a few weeks' time we'll be taking a look at another of them, and at what happened in the studio when a couple of people came to visit while he was recording. Those future records would include some that would inspire some of the most important musicians in the world, and would rightfully become classics. But it's "Blue Suede Shoes" which ensured his place in music history, and which sixty-three years later, more than any other record, sums up that point in 1956 when two country boys from Tennessee were chasing each other up the charts and defining the future of rock and roll.

  Episode thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins, and is part one of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” by the Cheers.  —-more—- Clarification While editing tonight’s podcast I noticed something I didn’t make clear. I talk about “Movie Magg” by Carl Perkins being about riding a mule to the cinema, but in the song he uses the word “horse” rather than mule. Perkins’ family, in real life, had a mule when he wrote the song, and that was what he was writing about, even though the song lyric is “horse”. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For copyright reasons, that might not be available in North America, so here’s a Spotify playlist of the same recordings. Much of the information here comes from Go Cat Go! The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, by Carl Perkins and David McGee. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. There are many compilations available of Perkins’ Sun recordings. This double-CD one seems as good as any. All Perkins’ early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Perkins’ work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?  Transcript   Today’s episode is, in effect, part one of a three-part story, looking at the repercussions of Elvis Presley’s move from Sun Records, and the birth of rockabilly. As when I did my recent Chess Records trilogy, all of these episodes should stand alone, but you might find it interesting to listen back to this one after the next two. While Elvis Presley had moved from Sun to RCA, that didn’t mean that Sam Phillips had given up on recording rock and roll music. Far from it. With the amount of money that RCA had paid for Elvis’ contract, Sun Records was for the first time on a completely secure footing, and now Phillips could really begin work on making the music that would come to define his legacy. Because now, Sun Records shifted almost entirely from being a blues label to being a rockabilly label. We’ve not talked much about rockabilly as a genre, and that’s because until now we’ve only heard one person performing it. But while Elvis was arguably the first rockabilly artist, it wasn’t until Elvis had left Sun that the floodgates opened, and Sam Phillips started producing the records that defined the genre as a genre, rather than as the work of a single individual. The rockabilly sound was, in essence, created in Sun studios. And rockabilly is one of those sounds that purists, at least, insist had a very, very specific meaning. It had to have slapback echo on the vocals, it had to have an electric lead guitar and slapback bass. It basically had to have all the elements of Elvis’ very earliest records. You could add a few other elements, like piano or drums — mostly because anything else would exclude Jerry Lee Lewis — but no horns or strings, no backing vocals, nothing that would take away from the very primitive sound. And no steel guitar or fiddle, either — that would tip it over into country. There were, of course, other people who produced rockabilly records, and we’ll look at some of them as the next couple of years go on. But when they did, they were all copying the sound that Sam Phillips created. Because after Elvis stopped recording for Sun, Sam Phillips and his small staff discovered enough young, exciting, musicians that Sun Records was assured a place in music history, even though its biggest artist was gone. The first of the new artists Phillips discovered was someone who came to Sun when Elvis was still on the label — a young man named Carl Perkins. Perkins, like many of the pioneers of rock and roll music, had grown up dirt-poor. His parents were sharecroppers, who were illiterate enough that they misspelled their own surname on his birth certificate (they spelled it Perkings, but he always used Perkins in later life. His family had been so poor that when young Carl, inspired by listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, asked if he could have a guitar, his parents couldn’t afford one, and so his father made him one from a cigar box and a broom handle. However, young Carl got good enough that soon his dad bought him a real guitar. He was so poor that when he broke strings, he had to tie them together because he couldn’t afford new ones, and he ended up developing a unique guitar style — bending strings to get different notes rather than fretting them normally — to avoid the knots in the strings, which hurt his fingers. When he was fourteen, Perkins wrote his first song, and it again shows just how poor he was. Listen to the lyrics to “Movie Magg”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Movie Magg”] That’s about going to the cinema *riding on a mule*. Because in the time and place where Perkins grew up, it was actually considered slightly classier to ride a mule to the cinema than to take a car, because if anyone *did* have a car, it was one that was so broken down and rusted that it was actually less impressive than a mule. All of Perkins’ early work is like that, rooted in a poverty far deeper than almost anyone listening to this podcast will be able to understand. It’s music based in the country music he heard growing up, and it’s music that could only be made by someone who spent his childhood picking cotton for pennies an hour in order to help his family survive. When Perkins had learned to play the guitar well enough to play lead, he taught his brother Jay to play rudimentary rhythm parts. Jay loved music as much as Carl did, but the two brothers had slightly different tastes in country music. Carl was a massive fan of the inventor of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, who sang high, driving, harmony-filled songs of longing: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] Jay, on the other hand, preferred Ernest Tubb’s low, honky tonk, music: [Excerpt: Ernest Tubb, “Tomorrow Never Comes”] They taught their younger brother Clayton to play a little bass, even though he wasn’t a music lover especially — Clayton loved drinking and fighting and not much else. But he had a reasonable sense of rhythm, so they could teach him the three places to put his fingers on most country songs, and let him figure out the rest with practice. Their friend Fluke Holland joined on drums, and the Perkins Brothers Band was born. The Perkins brothers spent the next several years honing their craft playing some of the roughest bars in Tennessee. They had to develop an ability to play dance music for venues where it was customary to buy two bottles of beer at a time — one to drink, and one to smash over someone else’s head — you didn’t want to use an empty bottle for your smashing, as there was no weight to them, but a full bottle of beer would put someone out of commission very quickly. So they very quickly developed a style that was rooted in honky-tonk music, but which was totally oriented around getting people dancing. It had elements of bluegrass, Western Swing, the blues, and anything else that could possibly be used to get a crowd of drunks dancing, if you only had two guitars, a double bass, and a drum kit. Both Carl and Jay would take turns singing lead, and when they ran out of songs to perform, Carl would improvise new ones around standard chord changes. He had the ability to improvise words and music off the top of his head — and he’d remember a good chorus or a good line and reuse it, so these improvised songs slowly became standard, structured, parts of their set. They were soon able to make a full-time living playing music for bars full of angry drunk men, and for several years they did just that, starting from before it was even legal for them to enter the bars they were playing. They had no ambition to do anything else — they were just glad to be earning a living doing something that was fun. Slowly but surely, Carl Perkins started to carve out a unique sound for the band, at least on the songs that he wrote and sang. He didn’t know what it was that he was doing, but he knew it was different, and that no-one else was doing anything like it. Until one day he heard someone who was: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] When Carl Perkins heard Elvis singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the radio, he knew that there was someone else who was out there doing the same kind of thing as him. He was even singing a song by Carl’s favourite, Bill Monroe. If this Elvis Presley kid could become a star making that kind of music, maybe so could Carl himself. He and his brothers went to see Elvis live and while Jay and Clayton took a dislike to Elvis — deciding that because he paid any attention to his appearance he must be gay, and therefore in their opinion worthy of nothing but contempt — Carl saw something else. He determined right then that he was going to go to Sun Records and demand an audition. If they would put that Elvis boy’s records out, then surely they would put his out too? The Perkins Brothers Band all piled into a single car, and drove down to Memphis, to 706 Union Ave. They went in to see the people at Sun Records — and were turned away. Marion Keisker told them that they weren’t auditioning right then, and that they didn’t need any new singers. When Carl Perkins told her that they sounded a bit like Elvis, she was even more dismissive — they didn’t need another Elvis. They’d already got one. They trudged back despondently to the car, deciding that their dream of stardom was at an end. But as they were doing so, a Cadillac pulled up and a man got out of it. They decided that the only person who would be driving a Cadillac to that studio must be the owner of the record label, so they went over to him and told him what had happened. And Sam Phillips agreed with Keisker. He wasn’t after anyone else right now. He had enough acts. And Carl was devastated. According to Perkins, Phillips later told him “I couldn’t say no. Never have I [seen] a pitifuller-looking fellow as you looked when I said, ‘I’m too busy to listen to you.’ You overpowered me.” He relented, and told them that he’d give them a quick listen, but it had to be quick as he was busy that day. They went into the studio and started running through their set. They got through a verse of the first song, and Phillips stopped them. He wasn’t interested in anything like that. They started another song. Again, Phillips stopped them and said he wasn’t interested. They were about to go home, but then Carl asked if he could try just one more song. He started up that song he had written when he was fourteen, “Movie Magg”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Movie Magg”] The band joined in, and as they played through the song, Carl noticed something. Sam Phillips hadn’t stopped them from playing. He sat through the whole thing, listening intently. When they got to the end, he said that if they came back with a few more songs that sounded like that, they might just be worth recording. The band were pleased, but Phillips also said something else, to Carl alone, that was more worrying. He told Carl that there was no place for any lead vocals by his brother Jay. “There’s already one Ernest Tubb in the world. No-one needs another one.” Without them having fully realised it at the time, the Perkins Brothers Band had now become Carl Perkins and his band. When they came back a few weeks later, they had worked out a few more songs. Phillips put out “Movie Magg”, backed with a ballad Carl had written, “Turn Around”, but he didn’t put these out on Sun. Rather, he put them out on a new label, Flip, that didn’t pay union scale. Flip only put out records around Tennessee, and the idea was that these would be audition records — Phillips would see how the records would do locally, without paying full royalties and without paying expensive shipping costs or for a large print run. Phillips was in financial trouble at the time, and he was trying to find ways to cut costs. “Movie Magg” did well enough on Flip that for the next Carl Perkins single, Phillips moved him on to Sun Records proper. This followed the same formula as the first single, pairing an uptempo A-side with a B-side ballad in the Hank Williams vein. The A-side, “Gone Gone Gone”, was one of Carl’s improvised songs — every take of it was different, although they were all based around the same basic idea, which was riffing on the old phrase, “It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that”. [Excerpt, Carl Perkins, “Gone Gone Gone”] “Gone Gone Gone” wasn’t a hit, but it sold well enough, and Phillips arranged for Perkins to go out on tour, on a bill with Elvis and another new Sun signing, Johnny Cash. It was on this tour that Cash made a suggestion to Perkins that would change Perkins’ life. Cash remembered a fellow serviceman, a black man named C.V. Wright, had referred to his service issue shoes as “blue suede shoes”, and he told Perkins that he should write a song about that. Perkins dismissed the idea. What the hell did he know about shoes, anyway? And what kind of song could you write about them? The idea was ridiculous. The tour went well, apart from one incident — Perkins and Presley had been talking about their mutual love for the song “Only You”, and that inspired Perkins to add the song to his own setlist. [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Only You”] That irritated Presley, who had been planning to perform the song himself the same night, and Presley felt that Perkins’ performance had upstaged him. The two remained friends, but would never perform on the same bill again. Elvis did, however, take Carl out clothes shopping, and show him how to dress in a more sophisticated manner on stage. Shortly after that tour, Perkins was performing another show, when he noticed someone in the audience berating his date, “Don’t step on my suedes!” He started thinking about what kind of person would find his shoes so important, and started thinking about pride, and about people who don’t have anything. The idea merged with Cash’s mention of blue suede shoes, and Perkins found himself one night getting out of bed, playing his electric guitar unplugged, so as not to disturb his wife, and writing a song he called “Blue Swade Shoes” — he spelled “suede” s w a d e, because he didn’t know how the word was spelled. Two days later, on December 19, 1955, he was in the studio recording it: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] Perkins was certain that this was going to be it. This was his breakthrough record. But at the same time he was getting depressed about his prospects. He had a wife and kids to support, and he was earning so little money from his music that he was having to do farm work as a side job in order to make enough money to buy his kids Christmas presents. The people at this side job were often astonished that “that singer fella” was there. Everyone around knew him from his stage shows, and they all knew he’d put out records. Surely he was rich now, and didn’t need to be doing such menial work? He was at a low, and that didn’t get better when he finally got his complimentary copies of his new single. They arrived through the post and, as often happened with records at that time, they’d got smashed into bits. He wanted to have his own copies of the record, of course, so he went into town to the shop that sold records, and asked for a copy. He was horrified at what he saw. Instead of a proper record — a big ten inch thing with a tiny little hole in the middle, made out of shellac — he was confronted with something only seven inches across, made of some kind of plastic, and with a big hole in the middle. He explained that no, he wanted his record, and the store owner replied that this was his record. He came home with this little floppy thing and cried, explaining to his wife that they’d messed up his record in some way, and that he was ruined. Eventually they figured out that this was OK, and that what the store owner had told Carl had been correct — these new vinyl records were apparently what all the kids wanted instead of what Carl thought of as real records. “Blue Suede Shoes” was an obvious hit, but the B-side, “Honey Don’t”, got more than a little airplay as well: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Honey Don’t”] “Blue Suede Shoes” was such a smash hit that Steve Sholes of RCA called Sam Phillips, worried. When he’d signed Elvis, had he backed the wrong horse? Phillips assured Sholes that he hadn’t. As it turned out, “Blue Suede Shoes” and Elvis’ first single for RCA, “Heartbreak Hotel”, were racing up the charts at the same time as each other. “Heartbreak Hotel” ended up at number one, and “Blue Suede Shoes” at number two, and both were crossover hits, making the top two in both pop and country and the top five in R&B. “Blue Suede Shoes” was so popular, in fact, that at one point it was being performed simultaneously on two different TV shows — at the same time as Carl Perkins was appearing on the Ozark Jubilee, his very first TV appearance, Presley was on Stage Show on another network, performing his cover version of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blue Suede Shoes”] Presley’s version wasn’t released as a single until a few months later — they’d come to a gentleman’s agreement that he wouldn’t affect Perkins’ sales — but it was put out as the opening track on Presley’s first album, and as a track on an EP. When Presley’s version finally came out as a single, towards the end of the year, it made the top twenty and brought in further royalties for Perkins. Perkins’ version of “Blue Suede Shoes” and Elvis’ had a few crucial differences other than just their performer. Perkins’ version is more interesting rhythmically at the start — it has a stop-time introduction which essentially puts it into six-four time before settling into four-four. Elvis, on the other hand, stayed with a four-four beat all the way through. Elvis’ performance is all about keeping up a sense of urgency, while Perkins is about building up tension and release. Listen first of all to Elvis’ introduction: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Blue Suede Shoes”] “Well, it’s one for the money,” BAM, “two for the show”, BAM… that’s a record that’s all about that initial urgency. Now listen to Perkins’: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] It seems to stall after every line, as if it’s hesitant, as if he doesn’t really want to get started. But at the same time that gives it a rhythmic interest that isn’t there in Presley’s version. Perkins’ original is the more sophisticated, musicianly, record. Most cover versions since have followed Presley’s version, with the notable exception of John Lennon’s live cover version from 1969, which follows the pattern of Perkins’. Unfortunately, Perkins’ career was then derailed in a tragic accident. On his way to perform on the Perry Como Show on TV, Perkins’ car hit a truck. The truck driver was killed, and Perkins and his brother Jay were both hospitalised. They got better, but their career had lost momentum — and by the time they were completely well, Sam Phillips was rather more interested in his next big thing. Phillips did, however, get Perkins a Cadillac of his own, like the one Perkins had been impressed by when he first met Phillips. He told Perkins that he’d planned to do this for the first Sun Records artist to have a million-seller, which “Blue Suede Shoes” was. Perkins was less impressed when he found out that the Cadillac wasn’t a gift, but had been paid for out of Perkins’ royalties, and that eventually started a lifelong series of royalty disputes between the two men, with Perkins never believing he had received all the money that was rightfully his. Perkins would never have another hit as a performer, and his career would be defined by that one song, but he continued making great records, and in a few weeks’ time we’ll be taking a look at another of them, and at what happened in the studio when a couple of people came to visit while he was recording. Those future records would include some that would inspire some of the most important musicians in the world, and would rightfully become classics. But it’s “Blue Suede Shoes” which ensured his place in music history, and which sixty-three years later, more than any other record, sums up that point in 1956 when two country boys from Tennessee were chasing each other up the charts and defining the future of rock and roll.

“What's going to fill the (daily print newspaper) gap? I think what we're seeing happening in Memphis is actually very encouraging, seeing entrepreneurial, startup local journalism efforts going on. . .” We sat down with revered columnist and former Commercial Appeal Viewpoint Editor David Waters for a little bit of reminiscing about 495 Union Ave., for a discussion about journalism's survival in today's world and about his important new efforts with the University of Memphis – The Institute for Public Service Reporting.

Conscious Light offers a penetrating glimpse into the remarkable life and enlightened teachings of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and his work to establish a way of ultimate spiritual realization for everyone. It draws on extensive archival film, photography, and audio recordings, as well as interviews with students who lived with Avatar Adi Da and continue to practice the way that he revealed. Peter Harvey-Wright is an award-winning filmmaker who spent most of his working life in Australia in the theatre, film and television industry – on both sides of the camera or stage. After graduating from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Film and Television Production and a post graduate Bachelor of Education, Peter taught theatre, film and television production, then lectured in Film History and managed the Production Department in the Early Childhood Faculty of Melbourne University, producing many short documentaries. lythe Massey is an award-winning documentarian who specialized in creating short films for global non-profits for fifteen years. She interviewed hundreds of people from over 20 countries for stories that encapsulate transformation, peace, and the sacred. Mitchell has interviewed numerous students and devotees in the Adi Da Community over the past 20 years such as scholars James Steinberg, Carolyn Lee, and musicians Byron Duckwall and John Wubbenhorst which can be found at our Amazon store. The film can be seen in NYC on Sat., Feb. 23,7pm at UnionDocs, 322 Union Ave., Williamsburg.  For tix, go to: www.consciouslightfilm.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/abwmitchellrabin/support

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "That's All Right Mama" by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more----     Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Elvis' 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis' five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as "Bear Cat" and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I've relied on three books here more than any others. The first is "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. which I've recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books -- they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips' ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I'm sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I'm coming from, but I'm aware that this will be some people's first episode. There's a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh'Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people's music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show... The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music -- and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn't have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He'd hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of "My Kind of Carrying On" by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn't sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say "Cause You're Always On My Mind" by Wiley Barkdull, or "Twice the Loving" by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up -- the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he'd started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he'd initially realised, he'd decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he'd have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as "Rocket 88", the record he'd leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin' Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he'd ever recorded. Howlin' Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam's studio before he'd started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he'd recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he'd been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties -- if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We've already seen this with "Good Rockin' Tonight", where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like "Caldonia". And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to "Hound Dog". There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin' Tonight” -- "Mr Hound Dog's in Town" [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog's In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase "hound dog", you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips' view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips' telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and "wrote" "Bear Cat". Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of "Hound Dog", and there's not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips' experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips' new record label, Sun. [excerpt of "Bear Cat" by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became -- "Bear Cat" eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else's song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he'd had a solid hit with "Bear Cat", and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn't buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that -- if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people's music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they'd start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys -- Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been -- he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro -- and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips' intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips' assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who'd come in to the studio, she thought she'd found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that's how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music's history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who "discovered" Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker's side. However, even there, it's hard to see from Elvis' original recording -- versions of "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that's what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn't have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn't know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He'd hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they'd all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn't really part of the group. He'd thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things -- he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn't cause any fires when he worked on people's wiring. He didn't have many friends -- and no close friends at all -- and many of those he did have didn't even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source -- the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He'd go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King -- young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky's on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn't someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either -- rather, he was someone who didn't fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn't own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He'd hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing -- and specifically what is known euphemistically as "Southern Gospel", but which really means "white Gospel". And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That's a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it -- and it's also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that's the gospel music we're talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there's another gospel music as well -- "Southern Gospel" or "quartet gospel". That music is -- or at least was at the time we're talking about -- almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren't attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it's performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", the Blackwood Brothers] That's the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that's a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson's version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley's favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them -- but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He'd take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn't have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself -- Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he'd been working with. In their cases it was because they'd been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips' case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else's. He didn't know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin' Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips' book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn't try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty's. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn't impressed... or at least, he *thought* he wasn't impressed. But at the same time... there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn't quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on "That's All Right Mama", a song originally recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over -- he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song "That's All Right Mama" was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson's classic "Black Snake Moan": [excerpt: "Black Snake Moan", Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in "If I Get Lucky". He then came up with the melody for what became "That's All Right", but recorded it with different lyrics as "Mean Ol' Frisco Blues": [excerpt: "Mean Old Frisco Blues", Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to "That's All Right", and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: "Dirt Road Blues", Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded "That's All Right Mama" itself: [excerpt "That's All Right Mama", Arthur Crudup] Crudup's records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That's All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn't follow that template. Elvis' version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music -- it's taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black's slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup's version. It still doesn't, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for "a white man who could sing like a black one", he hadn't found it. Listening now, it's definitely a "rock and roll" record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a "hillbilly" record. [excerpt “That's All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley's singing which is different from most of the country music at the time -- there's a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it's what's needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre -- Bill Monroe's bluegrass song "Blue Moon of Kentucky": [excerpt: Bill Monroe "Blue Moon of Kentucky"] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they'd reworked "That's All Right Mama". There's nothing to these tracks but Elvis' strummed acoustic, Black's clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore's rudimentary electric guitar fills -- and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips' echo. Phillips had a simple system he'd rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he'd done it. The room he was recording in didn't have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn't use just one tape recorder -- though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember -- he used two. He didn't do multitracking like Les Paul -- rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe's bluegrass music -- a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn't be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis' mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn't tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis' race – most people had assumed, since Phillips' show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands -- at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I've seen claims, though I don't know how true they are, that Crudup's total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band's first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley's stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we've mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed -- he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic -- and even when he wasn't, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn't keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it's hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we'll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

  Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “That’s All Right Mama” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—-     Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Elvis’ 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis’ five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as “Bear Cat” and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I’ve relied on three books here more than any others. The first is “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. which I’ve recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick — Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Last Train to Memphis. The latter is the first volume of Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books — they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips’ ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I’m sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I’m coming from, but I’m aware that this will be some people’s first episode. There’s a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh’Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people’s music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show… The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music — and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn’t have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He’d hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of “My Kind of Carrying On” by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn’t sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say “Cause You’re Always On My Mind” by Wiley Barkdull, or “Twice the Loving” by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up — the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he’d started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he’d initially realised, he’d decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he’d have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as “Rocket 88”, the record he’d leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin’ Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he’d ever recorded. Howlin’ Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam’s studio before he’d started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he’d recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he’d been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties — if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We’ve already seen this with “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like “Caldonia”. And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to “Hound Dog”. There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin’ Tonight” — “Mr Hound Dog’s in Town” [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog’s In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase “hound dog”, you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips’ view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips’ telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and “wrote” “Bear Cat”. Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of “Hound Dog”, and there’s not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips’ experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips’ new record label, Sun. [excerpt of “Bear Cat” by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became — “Bear Cat” eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else’s song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he’d had a solid hit with “Bear Cat”, and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn’t buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that — if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people’s music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they’d start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys — Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been — he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro — and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips’ intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips’ assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who’d come in to the studio, she thought she’d found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that’s how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music’s history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who “discovered” Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker’s side. However, even there, it’s hard to see from Elvis’ original recording — versions of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”, were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that’s what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn’t have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” — Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn’t know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He’d hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block — Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they’d all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn’t really part of the group. He’d thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things — he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn’t cause any fires when he worked on people’s wiring. He didn’t have many friends — and no close friends at all — and many of those he did have didn’t even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source — the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentacostal church he attended (a white Pentacostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He’d go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King — young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky’s on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn’t someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either — rather, he was someone who didn’t fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn’t own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He’d hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing — and specifically what is known euphemistically as “Southern Gospel”, but which really means “white Gospel”. And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That’s a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it — and it’s also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that’s the gospel music we’re talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there’s another gospel music as well — “Southern Gospel” or “quartet gospel”. That music is — or at least was at the time we’re talking about — almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren’t attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it’s performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, the Blackwood Brothers] That’s the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that’s a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson’s version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley’s favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them — but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He’d take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn’t have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself — Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he’d been working with. In their cases it was because they’d been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips’ case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else’s. He didn’t know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin’ Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips’ book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn’t try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty’s. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn’t impressed… or at least, he *thought* he wasn’t impressed. But at the same time… there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn’t quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on “That’s All Right Mama”, a song originally recorded by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over — he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song “That’s All Right Mama” was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson’s classic “Black Snake Moan”: [excerpt: “Black Snake Moan”, Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in “If I Get Lucky”. He then came up with the melody for what became “That’s All Right”, but recorded it with different lyrics as “Mean Ol’ Frisco Blues”: [excerpt: “Mean Old Frisco Blues”, Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to “That’s All Right”, and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: “Dirt Road Blues”, Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded “That’s All Right Mama” itself: [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama”, Arthur Crudup] Crudup’s records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That’s All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn’t follow that template. Elvis’ version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music — it’s taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black’s slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup’s version. It still doesn’t, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for “a white man who could sing like a black one”, he hadn’t found it. Listening now, it’s definitely a “rock and roll” record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a “hillbilly” record. [excerpt “That’s All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley’s singing which is different from most of the country music at the time — there’s a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it’s what’s needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre — Bill Monroe’s bluegrass song “Blue Moon of Kentucky”: [excerpt: Bill Monroe “Blue Moon of Kentucky”] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they’d reworked “That’s All Right Mama”. There’s nothing to these tracks but Elvis’ strummed acoustic, Black’s clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore’s rudimentary electric guitar fills — and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips’ echo. Phillips had a simple system he’d rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he’d done it. The room he was recording in didn’t have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn’t use just one tape recorder — though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember — he used two. He didn’t do multitracking like Les Paul — rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on “Blue Moon of Kentucky” it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe’s bluegrass music — a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn’t be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis’ mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn’t tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis’ race – most people had assumed, since Phillips’ show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands — at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I’ve seen claims, though I don’t know how true they are, that Crudup’s total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band’s first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley’s stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we’ve mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed — he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic — and even when he wasn’t, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn’t keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it’s hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we’ll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.  

Black-Eyed & Blues Show 343 Air Date October 17, 2018 Playlist: Eliza Neals, 10,000 Feet Below, Mike Zito, I Wouldn’t Treat A Dog (The Way You Treat Me), Bernard Allison, Backdoor Man, Ally Venable Band, Devil’s Son (feat Gary Hoey), Karen Lawrence, It’s All About You (Live), Brooks Forsyth, Anna Lee, Eric McFadden, Love Come Rescue Me, Tomislav Goluban, Locked Heart, Grip Weeds, Mr. Nervous, Gaetano Letizia, You Can’t Do That, Peter V Blues Band, Blue Monday, The Smoking Flowers, Here For You Now, Ron Spencer Band, Fine Fine Woman, Sandy Carroll, Movin’ On, Dave Keller, Old Tricks, JP Williams Blues Band, Bluesman Tonight, David Lumsden And Friends, Raised Me Right feat Mary Jo Curry, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Church Clothes, Diane Durrett & Soul Suga, Butters In The Skillet, Sean Chambers, Black Eyed Susie, David Julia, Somethin Ain’t Right, Bob Margolin, Dallas, Lindsay Beaver, What A Fool You’ve Been, Paula Harris, I Play Dirty, Miss Lily Moe, Sammy The Rabbit, Jeff Slate, Babylon, Mick Kolassa & The Taylor Made Blues Band, Whiskey In The Morning, Travelin’ Blue Kings, I Don’t Wanna Stop, Detonics, The Rat, Kirk Fletcher, Hold On, Jim Allchin, Enough Is Enough, Chris Bergson Band, Pedal Tones, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: BLUES SCHEDULE WEEKLY REPORT 10/19 thru 10/25 BAND VENUE LOCATION FRIDAY 10/19 VITAMIN B-3 THE HIDEAWAY RIDGEFIELD THE COLBY'S MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY ED TRAIN UNDERGROUND JAM BLACK DUCK (11 PM) WESTPORT TONY FERRIGNO OLD POST TAVERN FAIRFIELD SCREAMING EAGLE BAND/COBALT EXP OLD WELL TAVERN SIMSBURY MICHAEL CLEARY BAND TIPPING CHAIR TAVERN MILLDALE ORB MELLON KINSMEN BREWING CO MILLDALE JEFF PITCHELL & TEXAS FLOOD HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER BALKUN BROTHERS MAIN PUB MANCHESTER SUE FOLEY THE COLONY WOODSTOCK BLUES ON THE ROCKS CLINTON COUNTRY CLUB CLINTON ERAN TROY DANNER (SOLO) PARADISE HILLS VINEYARD (5 PM) WALLINGFORD SHINY LAPEL TRIO HARBOUR HOUSE MYSTIC ERAN TROY DANNER THE ROCK GARDEN WATERTOWN CARL RICCI & 706 UNION AVE 350 GRILL SPRINGFIELD MA SARA ASHLEIGH BAND SKYBOX SOUTHWICK MA RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS PERKS AND CORKS WESTERLY RI 2JAM NOTE KITCHEN BETHEL COLE MORSON BAND THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA DELTA GENERATORS CHAN'S WOONSOCKET RI ROBERTO MORBIOLI BAND W LIVIU CANOE CLUB MIDDLETOWN SATURDAY 10/20 CHRIS BERGSON BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD JAKE KULAK & LOW DOWN MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY JJ GREY FTC WAREHOUSE FAIRFIELD LIVIU POP & FRIENDS CAMBRIDGE BREW PUB GRANBY FAT CITY ROCKERS THE BLACK DUCK WESTPORT ELLE SERA VERACIOUS BREWERY TAP ROOM MONROE STOMP BOX RELICS JUDY'S STAMFORD JAY WILLIE BAND MURPHY'S PUB NEWTOWN SACRED FIRE/MURRAY THE WHEEL CRYSTAL BEES SOUTHINGTON JEFF PITCHELL & TEXAS FLOOD WHS REMEMBERANCE WETHERSFIELD THE COFFEE GRINDERS WINDING TRAILS FARMINGTON ORB MELLON WITCHDOCTOR BREWING CO (6:30) SOUTHINGTON FRONT ROW BAND (UNPLUGGED) BAR LOUIE WEST HARTFORD STEVE POLEZONIS TRIO MYSTIC MARRIOTT GROTON RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS DANIEL PACKER INN MYSTIC PROF HARP STOMPING GROUND PUTNAM CHRIS LEIGH BAND CC OBRIEN'S PAWCATUCK CROSSEYED CAT (SRV TRIBUTE) SHAMROCK PUB WATERBURY ERAN TROY DANNER (ACOUSTIC) HOWARD'S CAFÉ WATERBURY DYLAN DOYLE BAND THE FALCON (MAIN STAGE) MARLBORO NY RYAN HARTT & THE BLUE HEARTS THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA BLUE DEVIL BLUEZ THE SOUTHWICK INN SOUTHWICK MA ARLO GUTHRIE COLLEGE ST MUSIC HALL NEW HAVEN NEAL VITULLO & THE VIPERS CHAN'S WOONSOCKET RI WEST END GROOVE PARROTT DELANEY TAVERN NEW HARTFORD SIX PACK OF BLUES CITY SPORTS GRILLE VERNON TERRI AND ROB DUO HIGHER GROUND (11 AM) EAST HADDAM ACOUSTIC OPEN MIC THE PARISH HALL BRISTOL BEYOND PURPLE WITH JIMI BELL HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER SUNDAY 10/21 CTBS SOLO DUO CHALLENGE PINE LOFT BERLIN SUE FOLEY BRIDGE STREET LIVE COLLINSVILLE MARTIN BARRE BAND INFINITY MUSIC HALL HARTFORD TSC (ACOUSTIC) KINSMEN BREWING CO (2 PM) MILLDALE ERIN HARPE & THE DELTA SWINGERS STOMPING GROUND PUTNAM JOHNNY AND THE EAST COAST ROCKERS DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR MADISON ERAN TROY DANNER (ACOUSTIC) BRASS WORKS BREWING (1:30 PM) WATERBURY CEE CEE & THE RIDERS RATHSKELLER (3 PM) CHARLESTOWN RI DAVID STOLTZ FLYING MONKEY (4 TO 7 PM) HARTFORD CHERYL TRACY ACOUSTIC BRUNCH CANOE CLUB MIDDLETOWN ROCKY LAWRENCE HOME RESTAURANT (5 TO 8 PM) BRANFORD FRONT ROW BAND LOS MARIACHIS (4 PM) SOUTHINGTON WHAMMER JAMMER OPEN MIC VFW PRESTON BLUES JAM STONEHOUSE BAR BALTIC RICK HARRINGTON JAM CADY'S TAVERN CHEPACHET RI BLUES AND BEYOND OPEN MIC THE STILL BAR AGAWAM MA JIM'S BLUES JAM GREENDALE'S PUB WORCESTER MA PURE AMERICANA THE MAIN PUB MANCHESTER BLUES JAM BOUNDARY BREWHOUSE PAWTUCKET RI OPEN MIX STOMPING GROUND (7 PM) PUTNAM MONDAY 10/22 GREG PICCOLO STEAK LOFT (7 PM) MYSTIC TUXEDO JUNCTION BILL'S SEAFOOD (7 PM) WESTBROOK GEOFF WILLARD OPEN MIC HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER TERRI AND ROB DUO PARADE GROUNDS (6:30 PM) WALLINGFORD OPEN MIC JAM NOTE KITCHEN BETHEL JONATHAN CHAPMAN OPEN MIC O BRIEN'S SPORTS BAR DANBURY BILL'S ALL STAR GARAGE JAM STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH PERKS AND CORKS OPEN MIC PERKS AND CORKS WESTERLY RI TUESDAY 10/23 TOMMY WHALEN AND RAGGED EDGE WATERFRONT HOLYOKE SUE FOLEY WITH BOB CRELIN CAFÉ NINE NEW HAVEN SONNY LANDRETH KATY OLD SABROOK BRANDT TAYLOR BAND LENNY'S BRANFORD RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS NIGHTINGALES CAFÉ (PICKIN PARTY) OLD LYME GEORGE BAKER & WILLIE MOORE WATERS EDGE SUNSET BAR WESTBROOK CHERYL TRACY OPEN MIC WAXY O'CONNOR PLAINVILLE WEDNESDAY 10/24 COMMUNITY BLUES JAM BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD FRIENDS DAY THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS BEE & THISTLE (5 PM) OLD LYME SUE FOLEY KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI OPEN MIC CANOE CLUB MIDDLETOWN DAVE STOLTZ (ACOUSTIC) AVON OLD FARMS HOTEL AVON CHERYL TRACY OPEN MIC VERO CUCINO MIDDLETOWN THURSDAY 10/25 FELIX CAVALIERE & GENE CORNISH RIDGEFIELD PLAYHOUSE RIDGEFIELD LIVIU POP INVITATIONAL BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD ROCKY LAWRENCE THE CRAVE (6:30 PM) ANSONIA DAVE STOLTZ OLD FARMS HOTEL AVON LEO BOOGIE (SOLO) WAVERLY CHESHIRE KEN SAFETY OPEN MIC CJ SPARROW CHESHIRE JIMI PHOTON JAM HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER OPEN MIC FAST EDDIE'S BILLARD'S NEW MILFORD DAVE COSTA'S OPEN MIC CAMBRIDGE BREW PUB GRANBY WENDY MAY OPEN MIC THE BLACK DUCK WESTPORT GREG SHERROD OPEN MIC THE BLACK SHEEP NIANTIC DEE BROWN OPEN MIC O'NEIL'S BAR BRIDGEPORT TAMARACK OPEN MIC TAMARACK LODGE (6"30 TO 10 PM) VOLUNTOWN PINE LOFT OPEN MIC PINE LOFT PIZZARIA BERLIN https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

Black-Eyed & Blues Show 339 Air Date September 19, 2018 Playlist: Erin Harpe & The Delta Swingers, Voodoo Blues, Eric Lindell, Shot Down, Sully & The Souljahs, Best Damn Fool, Delta Moon, Long Way To Go, Josh Smith, Your Love (Is Making Me Whole), Colin James, Ooh Baby Hold Me, Dennis Herrera, You Stole My Heart, Quaker City Night Hawks, Medicine Man, Taylor Barton, Chaos, Rachelle Coba, No Deals, Gina Sicilia, Sugar, Amanda Fish, Not Again, Keith Stone with Red Gravy, Blue Eyed Angel, Jeff McCarty, Love, Kara Grainger, Living With Your Ghost, Billy Hector, Alabama Bound, Paul Dougherty, Your Pants, Tom Hambridge, This End Of The Road, Karen Lawrence and Blue By Nature, Big Harp George, Just Calm Yourself, MAWD, Wandering Eye, Scott Sharrard, Tell The Truth, Wildcat O’Halloran, Saturday Night Fish Fry, Cheryl Arena, Blow My Blues Away, Doug Deming & The Jewel Tones feat Dennis Gruenling, An Eye For An Eye, Kim Wilson, No Love In My Heart, Kim Wilson, Ninety-nine, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: This Week’s Blues. The blues schedule is as up to date as possible, but it's always a good idea to call the club to confirm, also you might want to check the starting time. The listed shows run from Friday, September 21 until Thursday, September 27. The Ridgefield Playhouse: Tuesday, Buddy Guy; Ridgefield. (203) 438-5795 41 Bridge Street Live: Friday, Popa Chubby; Collinsville. Black-eyed Sally's: Friday, Doug Deming & the Jewel Tones; Saturday, N.E. Blues Harmonica Showcase; Hartford. (860) 278 7427 The Bijou Theatre: Saturday, George T. Gregory / Leo Boogie; Bridgeport. Maple Tree Café: Saturday, Carl Ricci and 706 Union Ave; Simsbury. Infinity Music Hall: Saturday, Sacred Fire and Bell Bottom Blues- a night honoring Santana and Clapton; Hartford. Infinity Music Hall: Saturday, Bettye LaVette; Norfolk. Cafe Nine: Tuesday, Eric Lindell; New Haven FTC Warehouse: Friday, End of Summer Jam; Fairfield. (203)-319-1404 Rothbard Ale + Larder: Friday, Super Dope; Saturday, The Red Planet; Westport, Mulligans: Saturday, Corey Michael Rieman; Torrington. Brookfield Indian Motorcycle: Saturday, Jake Kulak & the LowDown (1:30 pm); Brookfield. Downtown Milford Farmers' Market: Saturday, Xray Lite (9 am); Milford. The Spotted Horse Tavern: Friday, B Side Band; Westport. Windmill: Friday, Tony Ferrigno; Stratford. Best Video: Saturday, Anne Marie Menta Band; Hamden. The Hideaway: Saturday, Otis and the Hurricanes; Ridgefield. Good Samaritan Mission: Saturday, Mental Health Band; Danbury. Peaches On the Waterfront: Sunday, Brunch with Vinnie Ferrone; Norwalk. East Rock Concert Series: Sunday, Lydia Brittan; New Haven. Woodwinds: Thursday, Jeff Pitchell & Friends; Branford. Woodbury Brewing Company: Friday, Kathy Thompson Band; Woodbury 203-405-3811 The Pit Stop: Saturday, Blue Collar Band; Milford. Fowler Pavillion: Friday, Oktoberfest -(5:30-10 pm); Saturday, Oktoberfest (6-10 pm); Milford. Old Post Tavern: Saturday, Sinergy; Fairfield. The Captain Daniel Packer Inn: Tuesday, Rocky Lawrence; Mystic. Higher Grounds: Sunday, Terri and Rob Duo (10 am); East Haddam. Paradise Hills Vineyard & Winery: Friday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic; Wallingford. (203) 284-0123 The Hungry Tiger: Saturday, Richie & the Red Hot Blues Band; (6pm); Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Still Hill Brewery: Friday, Dan Stevens’; Rocky Hill. (203) 405-3811. Ferry Park: Wednesday, TSC Acoustic (5 pm); Rocky Hill. Sonny's Place: Sunday, Jeff Pitchell and Texas Flood; Somers. Hilltop Restaurant:, Friday, Patty Tuite Group Willington. Back East Brewery: Friday, TSC Acoustic (5 pm); Bloomfield. Kinsmen Brewing Co.: Sunday, Terri & Rob Duo (2 pm); Milldale. Witchdoctor Brewing: Saturday, Dean Cardinale, Acoustic; Southington. Smokin' With Chris: Friday, Grayson Hugh & Polly Messer; Southington. (860) 620-9133 Yarde House Tavern: Friday, Jeff Pitchell; Enfield. (860) 254 5778 The Steak Loft: Friday, Sue Menhart Band; Mystic. (860)-536-2661 The Stomping Ground: Saturday, Blue Honey; Sunday, Marwan Maurice (1 pm); Putnam. (860) 928-7900 Brick & Basil: Friday, Ms. Marci & the Lovesick Hounds (5 30 pm); Norwich. Daryl's House: Friday, NRBQ; Pawling, NY (845) 289-0185 The Falcon Main: Friday, The Harlem Blues Project featuring Clarence Spady; Sunday, Uncommon Ground (11 am); Marlboro, NY. (845) 236-7970 The Falcon Underground: Friday, JB's Go-Go Boogaloo Dance Party; Marlboro, NY. (845) 236-7970 The Turning Point: Sunday, Rick Ilowite and Andy Cohen; Thursday, Bobby Di Blasio Band; Piermont, NY Theodores': Friday, The Mike Crandall Band; Saturday, Murali Coryell; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Knickerbocker Café: Friday, Lois Greco Band; Wednesday, THE FOUNDERS; Westerly. (401) 315-5070 Greendales: Friday, Sara Ashleigh Band; Worcester, MA Rally's Sports Bar: Saturday, Six Pack of Blues; Westfield, MA. The Tapped Apple: Saturday, Dan Stevens’; Westerly, RI (401) 637-4946 Charlestown Rathskeller: Sunday, Cee Cee & the Riders (3 pm); Charlestown RI. (401) 792-1000 Papa Bob's Entertainment Hall: Saturday, Blue Devil Bluez; Becket, MA As the following events change frequently, it is a good idea to confirm. Weekly Blues Events Black Eyed Sally’s: Liviu Pop Invitational w/TBA (Thursday) Hartford. (860) 278-7427 The Hungry Tiger: Blues w/ Dave Sadloski (Tuesday) Manchester. (860) 649-1195 The Flying Monkey: David Stoltz Sunday Blues (4–7 pm) Hartford. Steak Loft: Greg Piccolo Monday Waters Edge Sunset Bar & Grill: Guitar George Baker and Willie Moore (Tuesday) Westbrook The Mattabesett Canoe Club: The Cheryl Tracy Acoustic Brunch On The River (Sunday 11am-2pm) Middletown Lenny's: Brandt Taylor /Tony D / Jon Peckman / Jay Wiggin Band (Tuesday) Branford Avon Old Farms Hotel in the Seasons Restaurant: Dave Stoltz solo acoustic, (Wednesday & Thursday) Avon The Owl Shop: Planet Red (Tuesday) New Haven Nightingale's Acoustic Café: Dan Steven’s "Pickin' Parties" (Tuesday) Old Lyme Home: Rocky Lawrence (1st & 3rd Sunday) Branford Crave: Rocky Lawrence (Thursday) Ansonia Knickerbocker Café: Let's Dance Wednesdays w/ The Keepers Westerly, RI Waverley: Leo Boogie [solo] (Thursday) Cheshire La Luna: Leo Boogie [solo] Friday & Saturday) Mystic Tootzy Pasta Pizza: Murray The Wheel solo show (Wednesday) Waypointe Farmer's Market: NOLA Beatniks in residency (11-3) Guilford Weekly Jams The Hungry Tiger: Blues Jam w/ Gene Donaldson (Monday); Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Black Eyed Sally’s: Community Blues Jam w/TBA (Wednesday); Hartford. (860) 278-7427 Cafe Nine Blues Jam: Hosted by TBA (Sunday); New Haven. (203) 789-8281 C J Sparrow Pub & Eatery: Ken Safety's Open Mic Show (Thursday); Cheshire Los Mariachis: Open Mic w/ Mitch Leighton and the Front Row Band; (Sunday, 4 pm), Southington The Hungry Tiger: Open Mic Blues Jam Hosted by The Hammerdown All-Stars; (Thursday) Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Daddy Jack's: Acoustic blues hosted by Jim Koeppel (every other Thursday); New London Donahue's Beach Bar: Open Mic Wednesday w/Sandy or Frankie; Madison Fast Eddie's Billiards Café: Thursday Open Mic; New Milford Four Seasons By the Lake: Sunday Open Mic Jam; Stafford Guilford Country Tavern: Sandy Connolly’s Open Mic Night; (last Wednesday of month) Guilford Higher Grounds: Saturday, Terri and Rob Duo; (11 am); East Haddam. Infinity Music Hall Norfolk: Open Mic w/Andy Attanasio (Wednesday) Norfolk Note Kitchen & Bar: 2JAM Acoustic Jam (Friday); Bethel. Note Kitchen & Bar: Open Mic Jam (Monday); Bethel. O'Briens Sports Pub and Rest: Open Mic with Piano hosted by Jonathan Chapman (Monday); Danbury Open Space: Open Mic Night (Wednesday); Hamden. Preston VFW: Jam w/ guest host (Sunday); Preston Sobieski John III Club: Wednesday, Open Mic w/TBA; Deep River. Spill the Beans Coffee House: Acoustic Open Mic w/Johnny I; (Thursday) Prospect (203) 758-7373 Stonehouse: Blues Jam /TBA (Sunday); Baltic. (860) 822-8877 Strange Brew: Bill's Garage Jam/ Bill Thibault (Monday) Norwich. The Acoustic: Open mic (Tuesday) Bridgeport. (203) 335-3655 The Black Duck: Open Jam Hosted by Wendy May (Thursdays) Westport. Black Duck: Friday Jam Session 11 pm hosted by Ed Train; Westport The Black Sheep Tavern: Open Blues Jam w/ Greg Sherrod (Thursday) Niantic (860) 739-2041 O'Neils Bar: Acoustic open mic w/Dee Brown Bridgeport The Buttonwood Tree: Open Mic Host TBA (Monday) Middletown The Canoe Club: Open Mic (Wednesday) Middletown Bristol Polish Club: Friday, Open Mic The Frosty Mug: Cheryl Tracy Open Jam New Britain The Old Well Tavern: The Blues Jam (6-9) (Alternate Sunday) Simsbury The Parish Hall: Acoustic Open Mic (Saturday) Bristol The Stomping Ground: Open Mic (Sunday) Putnam. (860) 928-7900 Vero Cucino: Cheryl Tracy open mic (Wednesday) Middletown Waxy O’Connor’s: Cheryl Tracy Open Jam (Tuesday) Plainville Yantic Inn: Open Mic (Wednesday) Yantic Cady's Tavern: Rick Harrington Weekly Roadhouse Jam (Sunday, Chepachet RI) Theodores’: Open Mic (Wednesday, Springfield, MA) ; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Still Bar: Blues and Beyond open mic (Sunday) Agawam, MA Snow's Restaurant & Bar: Open mic (Sunday, Worcester, MA) Park Grill and Spirits: Two Left Blues Jam (Tuesday, Worcester, MA) Jillian’s: Open mic (Thursdays, Worcester, MA) Greendale's Pub: Jim's Blues Jam (Sunday, Worcester, MA) Greendale's Pub: Open mic (Tuesday, Worcester, MA) Greendale's Pub: Wackey Blues Jam (Wednesday, Worcester, MA) Boundary Brewhouse: Sunday Blues Jam (Pawtucket, RI) The Falcon Underground: Petey Hop's Roots & Blues Sessions (Third Wednesday) Marlboro, NY June's: CT Music Showcase Acoustic Open Mic (Monday) Killingworth. (860)-663-1292 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

Wow, it's been a great three years at our Union Ave. location! Now, we're moving on. Just as God used Cross Parallel to transform the old casino building into a place of spiritual transformation, God can transform your life as well. Into a new identity. Pastor Tony details how God can change our lives for the better. For more information about our move, find us at @crossparallelpueblo on Facebook and Instagram.

Playlist: Blue Devil Bluez, Give Me A Reason, Velvet Starlings, Borrowed Time, KLEZ, Here Right Now, Matheus Mendes, Juke House, Big Harp George, Down To The Rite Aid, Vanja Sky, Bad Penny, Jeremiah Johnson, Straightjacket, Kat Riggins, Try Try Again, Brigitte Purdy, My Kinda Blues, Dennis Jones Band, Hot Sauce, Karen Lawrence, I Had It All Wrong, Damon Fowler, Hold Me Tight, Billie and the Kids, You Ain’t Pleasing Me, Little Victor, graveyard Boogie, Benny And The FlyByNiters, Two Dollar Woman, The Little Red Rooster Blues Band, Thrift Shop Rubbers, Big Apple Blues, Hudson Breeze, Vanessa Collier, Sweatin’ Like A Pig, Singin’ Like An Angel, The Bennett Brothers, Blues #9, The Bruce Katz Band, The Bun, J.P. Soars, Dog Catcher, Travis Bowlin, Don’t Lead Me On, Markey Blue Ric Latina Project, Red Room, The Proven Ones, Wild Again, Matty T Wall, Shake It, Eric Johanson, Live Oak, Eric McFadden, While You Was Gone, Biscuit Miller, She Likes To Boogie, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: WEDNESDAY 8/1 WALTER TROUT - FAIRFIELD THEATER COMPANY, FAIRFIELD. ALEXIS P SUTER - CITY WINERY (The Loft), NEW YORK CITY. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS with THE MELLOW MEN - OLD LYME INN (6 PM), OLD LYME. ERAN TROY DANNER (Electric Trio) - TOWN GREEN, LITCHFIELD. Summer Concert Series 6:30 to 8:30 PM. BLUES ALLEY - HOLLOW PARK, WOODBURY Summer concert Series 8 PM. VRBE - PUB ON PARK, CRANSTON RI COMMUNITY BLUES JAM - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. FRIENDS DAY OPEN MIC - THEODORE'S, SPRINGFIELD MA. EVAN GOODROW - STOMPING GROUND, PUTNAM. FREE FUNK WEDNESDAY - ARCH STREET TAVERN, HARTFORD. ROLLING ON THE RIVER JAM - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. BATTLE OF THE BANDS - ATRIUM LOUNGE (8 PM), FOXWOOD CASINO. SANDY CONNOLLY OPEN MIC - DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR & GRILL (8:30 PM), MADISON. COYOTE RIVER BAND - HOWARD T BROWN PARK ( Rock the Docks), NORWICH. CARMINE'S OPEN MIC - CARMINE'S RESTAURANT, EAST HARTFORD. THURSDAY 8/2 LIVIU INVITATIONAL - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. Liviu with Roberto Morbioli and Dave Anderson JON BATISTE (Road to Newport) - KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER, WESTERLY RI ROCKY LAWRENCE - THE CRAVE (6:30 TO 9:30 PM). ANSONIA. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS - CT RIVER MUSEUM (5:30 PM), ESSEX. JESSE COLIN YOUNG - KATY, OLD SAYBROOK. VINCE THOMPSON - STEAK LOFT (7 TO 10 PM), MYSTIC. OUTLAWS - NARROWS CENTER, FALL RIVER MA. ELECTRIC LADY feat GEORGE LOGAN - BIJOU THEATRE, BRIDGEPORT. BLUES TRAVELER - AT JONATHAN EDWARDS, NORTH STONINGTON. JIM KOEPPEL - DADDY JACKS, NEW LONDON. CREAMERY STATION - R'EVOLUTION SPORTS BAR, NASHUA NH. ERAN TROY DANNER (Acoustic Solo) - OUZO BLUE (8 PM), WATERTOWN. JERRY GARCIA BIRTHDAY BASH - STRANGE BREW PUB, NORWICH. KYLE TACY - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN. SACRED FIRE (Santana Tribute) - DARYL'S HOUSE, PAWLING NY. KEN SAFETY OPEN MIC - CJ SPARROWS, CHESHIRE. JIMI PHOTON'S JAM - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. DAVE COSTA'S OPEN MIC - CAMBRIDGE BREW PUB, GRANBY. GREG SHERROD OPEN MIC - BLACK SHEEP, NIANTIC. WENDY MAY, BLACK DUCK, WESTPORT. TAMARACK OPEN MIC - TAMARACK LODGE (6:30 TO 9:30 PM), VOLUNTOWN. OPEN MIC AT THE BISTRO - INFINITY HALL, NORFOLK. HUNT HILL FARM JAM - HUNT HILL FARM (7:30 PM), NEW MILFORD. FRIDAY 8/3 TOMMY WHALEN AND FRIENDS - MAPLE TREE CAFE, SIMSBURY. THE REDLINERS - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. SEAN CHAMBERS - CHAN'S, WOONSOCKET RI. JOHNNY MARINO AND BLUESHEAD - THEODORE'S, SPRINGFIELD MA. THE COFFEE GRINDERS - STILL HILL BREWERY (Bldg C Unit 8 at 4:30 PM), ROCKY HILL LUTHER "GUITAR JR" JOHNSON / BLUE HONEY - IRON HORSE, NORTHAMPTON MA. ROBERTO MORBIOLI - CANOE CLUB, MIDDLETOWN Roberto with Liviu Pop and Steve Bigelow. MIKE BLOOMER AND RICH BADOWSKI - MAIN STREET (6 TO 8 PM), STAFFORD SPRINGS. JOSE FELICIANO / PEABO BRYSON - SHABOO STAGE (Jillson Square), WILLIMANTIC. JEN DURKIN & THE BUSINESS - STRANGE BREW PUB, NORWICH. ERAN TROY DANNER (Electric Trio) - PAINTED PONY, BETHLEHEM. ALI KAT AND THE REVELATORS - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. GREEN EYED LADY - THE HIDEAWAY, RIDGEFIELD. SOUTHERN RAIN - SOUTHWICK INN, SOUTHWICK. SHAWN TAYLOR ( Acoustic ) - FALCON RIDGE FOLK FESTIVAL (4:15 PM), HILLSDALE NY. SNAKE HILL BLUES - CAFE NINE (5 TO 7 PM), NEW HAVEN. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS - COVERSIDE (7 PM), SOUTH BRISTOL ME. FIRST FRIDAY - DOWNTOWN NORWICH, NORWICH. MT CARMEL ITALIAN FESTIVAL - PARK AVENUE, ENFIELD. SATURDAY 8/4 STAFFORD SPRINGS BLUES FESTIVAL - HYDE PARK (12 TO 7 pm), STAFFORD SPRINGS Biscuit Miller & the Mix, Bruce Katz Band, Erin Harpe & the Delta Swingers, The Coffee Grinders Carl Ricci and 706 Union Ave, Joe Moss Band with Sean Chambers. SHABOO REUNION - JILLSON SQUARE (3:30 pm), WILLIMANTIC David Foster Shaboo All Star Revue, James Montgomery, Christine Ohlman, Mike Finnigan, Bruce John, Uptown Horns Get the Led Out at 7 PM. BARNFUL OF BLUES (Granite State Blues Society) - YOUTH CENTER ( Rt 13), NEW BOSTON, NH. Veronica Lewis, Toni Lynn Washington, Anthony Geraci & Hipnotics and more. BISCUIT MILLER & THE MIX - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. BALKUN BROTHERS - MAIN PUB, MANCHESTER. LANCE LOPEZ - CHAN'S, WOONSOCKET RI. ROBERTO MORBIOLI with LIVIU POP - TOWN GREEN (5:30 PM, ) SIMSBURY. SHINY LAPEL TRIO - BILL'S SEAFOOD (7:30 PM), WESTBROOK. BLUES ALLEY - BLACKSTONE IRISH PUB, SOUTHINGTON. SHAKEDOWN - STAFFORD PALACE, STAFFORD SPRINGS. DAN WATSON - HARBOUR HOUSE, MYSTIC. ALEX CHILTON / BIG STAR / BOX TOPS - CAFE NINE, NEW HAVEN. LISA MARIE - DADDY JACKS, NEW LONDON. TABOR BLUES BAND JAM - TOWN GREEN (5:30 PM)BRANFORD. CREAMERY STATION - FAMTASIA (Family Campout), CANDIA NH DEAD SEASONS & SLYNE & FAMILY STONED - KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER, WESTERLY RI SATISFACTION (Stones Tribute) - INFINITY MUSIC HALL, NORFOLK. WISE OLD MOON - DARYL'S HOUSE, PAWLING NY. ERAN TROY DANNER with MARTY Q - CHIPPANEE GOLF CLUB (7 TO 9 PM), BRISTOL. AVENUE GROOVE - DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR - MADISON. 2 SHOTS OF BLUE - THE HIDEAWAY, RIDGEFIELD. BANGCREEK PUPPIES with FICTION - THE ACOUSTIC CAFE, BRIDGEPORT. RON JONES PIG ROAST - CADY'S TAVERN, CHEPACHET RI ANNUAL BLOCK PARTY - SOUTHWICK INN, SOUTHWICK MA. SUNDAY 8/5 LANCE LOPEZ (6 PM) / CHRIS LEIGH (4:30) - HYGIENIC ART PARK, NEW LONDON. ROCKIN JOHNNY BURGIN - NARRAGANSETT CAFE (4 TO 7 PM), JAMESTOWN RI. SHINY LAPEL TRIO -DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR (4:30 TO 8:30 PM), MADISON. 4 BARREL BILLY - BILL'S SEAFOOD (3:30 TO 7 PM), WESTBROOK. GALACTIC feat ERICA FALLS - FAIRFIELD THEATER COMPANY, FAIRFIELD. ERAN TROY DANNER ( Acoustic Solo) - HAWK RIDGE WINERY (2 TO 5 PM), WATERTOWN. PURE AMERICANA - MAIN PUB, MANCHESTER. BRASSHORSE BLUES - BRASS HORSE (3 TO 7 PM), BARKHAMSTED. GREG SHERROD JAM - THE ANDREA (8 TO 11 PM), MISQUAMICUT RI. STONEHOUSE JAM feat DANNY DRAHER - STONEHOUSE BAR ( 3 TO 6 PM), BALTIC. FRONT ROW BAND OPEN MIC (Musicians Hot Spot) - BLUE PLATE TAVERN (4 PM), PLAINVILLE. WHAMMER JAMMER OPEN MIC - VFW, PRESTON. BLUES AND BEYOND OPEN MIC - THE STILL BAR, AGAWAM MA Jam hosted by Steve, Jason and Paulski. RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS - BLUE (7 PM), PORTLAND ME STOMPING GROUND OPEN MIC - STOMPING GROUND (7 PM), PUTNAM. MONDAY 8/6 JAKE KULAK & LOW DOWN -THE SODA FACTORY, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. TUXEDO JUNCTION (Swing Band) - BILL'S SEAFOOD (7 PM), WESTBROOK. GREG PICCOLO - STEAK LOFT (7 PM), MYSTIC. LEE-ANN LOVELACE - THE CRAVE, ANSONIA. MARK PARADIS OPEN MIC - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. BILL'S GARAGE ALL STAR JAM - STRANGE BREW PUB, NORWICH. PERKS AND CORKS OPEN MIC - PERKS AND CORKS, WESTERLY RI. TUESDAY 8/7 TOMMY HALEN AND RAGGED EDGE - WATERFRONT, HOLYOKE MA. JEFF BLANEY - MAIN PUB, MANCHESTER. DAVE SADLOSKI - HUNGRY TIGER, MANCHESTER. MICHAEL PALIN'S OTHER ORCHESTRA - BLACK EYED SALLY'S, HARTFORD. UNPLUGGED ACOUSTIC OPEN MIC - STRANGE BREW PUB, NORWICH. DAN STEVENS - MUSIC NOW SHOWCASE (4 PM), iCRV INTERNET DAN STEVENS - NIGHTINGALES CAFE (Pickin Party at 6 pm), OLD LYME. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

We're BACK! After a brief holiday hiatus TT & GG return to give a catch up on life, our namesake Oprah's phenomenal Golden Globes Speech, the uproar on the H&M ad campaign, a HILARIOUS hoe tale and some L's of 2018. We also announce our special guest Rob Hill Sr. for our live show on Jan 23rd at the J&R Symposium (1148 Union Ave., Brooklyn, NY. Cop your tickets on our website www.theoprahroseshow.com. There are only a few left so don't miss out, it's going to be a good one!!! Questions, comments, feedback and of course hoe-tails please hit us up! Email - theoprahroseshow@gmail.com Instagram - @theoprahroseshow Twitter - @theoprahroseshow www.theoprahroseshow.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theoprahroseshow/support

In this episode of Memphis Type History: The Podcast, Caitlin chats with Mark Fleischer, the man behind Storyboard Memphis. We talk most about Union and Madison Avenues, so that makes this show another good ol' piece of Memphis street history for ya!   When Mark first came to Memphis, he luckily landed in Midtown, an area which sparked a deep interest in everything about Memphis history. Being relatively new to the city, he has an outsider point-of-view that helps him put a fresh eye on everything he learns about the city. Mark pretty much immediately dives right into the longtime Memphis controversy over where the Midtown borders are... and Caitlin chose not to weigh in, not one bit. According to Mark, it comes down to iffy geographic borders and the "Midtown mindset," which he describes as activist, eclectic, and diverse... with a belief that they have a say in what happens in their neighborhood and how it develops. Here's the really shocking thing for all you Midtowners – you weren't always in Midtown. In fact, just a few decades ago, you would've been living in East Memphis. Elsewhere in this interview, Caitlin learned that Mark is extremely unimpressed by Union Avenue. But he still appreciates the rich history of the street anyway. Back in the 1880s/1890s, Crump held out on putting a trolley line on Union, even though they went up and down other main streets, in hopes of putting in city-owned tracks (rather than a line owned by private companies like the others were). Before this happened, the city created a new plan that called for the widening of Union so that it would be the main thoroughfare out east... and the Peabody-like feel of the street was changed. In recent times, city planning desires are sounding like a look back to the early days of Union when it was walkable and bikeable, which it was until as recently as the '60s when it was widened again. We then discuss the aspects of Union that lack a sense of place... something that he feels got lost along the way in Union's long lifespan. If you go down Union today, you can still find some older, 20s and 30s storefronts, but you've gotta look closely. There are few of them and they're off the road because this street was built for car traffic, which means parking areas (although, of course, these spots are not as plentiful for today's traffic). Listen in to find out which corners to go explore... both on and off of Union Ave! Mark also talks about Madison and how it compares to Union... the former is curved to match the old street car lines that were installed there, as opposed to Union which was built for vehicle traffic. You get the same curvature in Cooper-Young too! Finally, come along with us for a meandering little trip down Madison, full of fits and starts that tell the history of Memphis and demonstrates a strong sense of place. Last but not least is a charming story Mark uncovered about a late 1800s/early 1900s Memphis character, Christopher Hottum. Hottum owned a saloon at 119 Madison and was a major daredevil. He once jumped off a bridge because everyone said he'd die if he did it. He promoted the last legal bareknuckle fight in Mississippi, too. Why did Mark find out about him? His tax man asked for a history of his home, and lo' and behold, this guy built it! Hottum is just one example of what Mark calls the "mythic quality" of Memphis. We end with a few fun rapid-fire questions that Mark handled like a total pro. You'll learn which Memphis neighborhood he'd stay in for all eternity, what Memphis street name he'd make his own, and more! For full show notes, go to memphistypehistory.com/union  

Join us for Episode 68 with stylist and fashion editor Corey Stokes (@coreytstokes) as we wrap up 2017. (2018 bitch let's be great!) We discuss personal highs and lows of 2017, threesomes with friends (Is it a good idea?), our favorite albums/movies, and what we're looking forward to seeing in 2018 ("Slashing" - wearing multiple hats and doing multiple things). #owningandhoning We're taking a brief hiatus for the holiday and we'll be back on Jan 10th. In the meantime, be sure to get your tickets for our llive show with a wine tasting on Jan. 23rd at the J&R Symposium (1148 Union Ave., Brooklyn, NY) for more info and tickets, check out www.theoprahroseshow.com/. Limited slots left so make sure to get your tickets! Questions, comments, feedback, and make sure to rate to show! Email - theoprahroseshow@gmail.com Instagram - @theoprahroseshow Twitter - @oprahroseshow www.theoprahroseshow.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theoprahroseshow/support

Join TT and GG for Episode 67 featuring music executive and all around boss Shari Bryant. We discuss how she got her start in the music industry at 15 with Roc-A-Fella Records, her lifestyle female empowerment brand - Pinkest LUV, our love of Jay-Z, dating (of course) and more inspirational gems. Be sure to join our live show with a wine tasting on Jan. 23rd at the J&R Symposium (1148 Union Ave., Brooklyn, NY) for more info and tickets, check out www.theoprahroseshow.com/. Limited slots left so make sure to get your tickets! Questions, comments, feedback, and make sure to rate to show! Email - theoprahroseshow@gmail.com Instagram - @theoprahroseshow Twitter - @oprahroseshow www.theoprahroseshow.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theoprahroseshow/support

Join TT and GG for Episode 66 as we discuss GG's new relationship, explain uncertainties from the last episode, and answer listener submitted stories and questions. Be sure to join our live show on Jan. 23rd at the J&R Symposium (1148 Union Ave., Brooklyn, NY) for more info and tickets, check out www.theoprahroseshow.com/. Limited slots left so make sure to get your tickets! Questions, comments, feedback, and make sure to rate to show! Email - theoprahroseshow@gmail.com Instagram - @theoprahroseshow Twitter - @oprahroseshow www.theoprahroseshow.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theoprahroseshow/support

This is our second episode as an independent radio station. This was done live in the studio. And it was a very nice blessed hour interview with Maddie Ridgeway. Maddie has a lot of passion and belief in what she does. Her organization is called "Urban Impact" and it was a wonderful hour and blessing to hear what she believes God put on her heart to follow and help/assist her community, in North Pittsburgh. Please listen and share with everyone (this can't be stressed enough, to please share. We never know who will be touched to help). It was an inspiring hour to hear about her life, her love for dancing, her love for Jesus and to help these kids and to be there for her community. Right now she needs help to raise her salary as an urban missionary. This is a wonderful vision. Have a beautiful and blessed day, May God chase you down with favor in your life. Personal Webpage: http://uifpgh.orgYou want to click “Join Us” go down to “Donate”When that page comes up then select “Give to an Urban Missionary”You will see “Urban Missionary” Pull down menu and select the name “Maddie Ridgeway”801 Union Ave, 4th flrPittsburgh, PA 15212Hosts: Mary Phillips & Ken TownshendShow: Worship Cafe Inspirations Radio ShowRadio Network: WCIR - Worship Cafe Inspirations Radio Network

This is our second episode as an independent radio station. This was done live in the studio. And it was a very nice blessed hour interview with Maddie Ridgeway. Maddie has a lot of passion and belief in what she does. Her organization is called "Urban Impact" and it was a wonderful hour and blessing to hear what she believes God put on her heart to follow and help/assist her community, in North Pittsburgh. Please listen and share with everyone (this can't be stressed enough, to please share. We never know who will be touched to help). It was an inspiring hour to hear about her life, her love for dancing, her love for Jesus and to help these kids and to be there for her community. Right now she needs help to raise her salary as an urban missionary. This is a wonderful vision. Have a beautiful and blessed day, May God chase you down with favor in your life. Personal Webpage: http://uifpgh.org You want to click “Join Us” go down to “Donate” When that page comes up then select “Give to an Urban Missionary” You will see “Urban Missionary” Pull down menu and select the name “Maddie Ridgeway” 801 Union Ave, 4th flr Pittsburgh, PA 15212 Hosts: Mary Phillips & Ken Townshend Show: Worship Cafe Inspirations Radio Show Radio Network: WCIR - Worship Cafe Inspirations Radio Network

Run Time: 26:20 Michael Tetreault, Editor of Concierge Medicine Today, The American Journal of Retail Medicine and The DPC Journal Meet with Dr. Phil Baker, Custodian of Good Shepherd Pharmacy (GSP). GSP is a Membership Pharmacy, Where Everyone Qualifies and Prescriptions Are Made Affordable. Phil's Story ... "I love serving people as a pharmacist. I enjoy getting to know them and helping them with their health issues.However, I began to be troubled by many aspects of how pharmacies run, specifically the high cost of medications for the poor. I pondered and prayed on those issues to see if there might be another way to help patients that would solve some of the problems endemic in the current system. I'm a devout Christian who loves to apply my profession to serving patients rather than trying to profit from them. I knew that my core values as a Christian had to inform my solution, but that it also had to be a working business model to survive. What I came to is a completely new business model for operating a pharmacy: a membership-based pharmacy. This model has been wildly successful for businesses like Costco and for “boutique medicine” doctors, so I knew it could work in a pharmacy setting. The customers, members of the pharmacy, pay a monthly membership fee. In return, they are able to purchase their prescriptions at cost—with no markup, saving them hundreds of dollars per month. I do not accept or bill insurance. My pharmacy includes these key components of the Christian mandate to care for others, especially the poor and needy." 1. The pharmacy includes a nonprofit charity that dispenses prescription medications to low income uninsured members for free. 2. The charity pharmacy is paid for by the paying customers who are members of the pharmacy. This new business model is the best answer for the problem of pharmacist reimbursement for cognitive services because it completely circumvents insurance. Our services are marketed directly to the patient. If you're interested in learning more about how you can use this new business model, I'd love to connect. If you are an investor looking for a solid business opportunity that blesses the lives of everyone involved with the project, let's chat. Questions? Call or visit us at: https://www.goodsheprx.com/ 1256 Union Ave 3rd Floor, Memphis, TN 38104 Email: info@goodshephealth.com P: 877-521-6337 | F: 877-830-2923 | Monday-Friday: 9a.m.-4p.m. www.ConciergeMedicineToday.org www.DirectPrimaryCare.com www.DocPreneurPress.org

Jade Harrell with Charley Johnson, Owner of Charley's Body Shoppe about the Jason Johnson Memorial Walk and Community Awareness event Sat. Sept. 26, 2015 7 a.m. registration 8 a.m. Walk beginning at Charley's Body Shoppe located at 5017 Maffit Ave. Walkers will proceed east on Maffit to Union Ave. south to Forest Park. Participants will return to CBS studios for a light repasts afterwards. To register, make donations or to volunteer, call 314-367-2307 or go to www.charleysbodyshoppe.com.

15-09-12-100.3FM the BEAT-AIR UMSL BRIDGE PRGM Jade Harrell with Natissia S. Small, Assistant Dean of Students and Director within the Division of Student Affairs, University of Missouri-St. Louis Since its inception in 1986, the University of Missouri-St. Louis Louis Bridge Program has provided exemplary college access services to the St. Louis community. Bridge remains one of the most successful and widely emulated models, providing unique and comprehensive year-round precollegiate programming for St. Louis area high school students and parents. Student participants represent public and private high school institutions throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. http://www.umsl.edu/precollegiate/Program%20Opportunities/index.html CHARLEYS BODY SHOPPE Jade Harrell with Charley Johnson, Owner of Charley's Body Shoppe about the Jason Johnson Memorial Walk and Community Awareness event Sat. Sept. 26, 2015 7 a.m. registration 8 a.m. Walk beginning at Charley's Body Shoppe located at 5017 Maffit Ave. Walkers will proceed east on Maffit to Union Ave. south to Forest Park. Participants will return to CBS studios for a light repasts afterwards. To register, make donations or to volunteer, call 314-367-2307 or go to www.charleysbodyshoppe.com.

Jade Harrell with Charley Johnson, Owner of Charley's Body Shoppe about the Jason Johnson Memorial Walk and Community Awareness event Sat. Sept. 26, 2015 7 a.m. registration 8 a.m. Walk beginning at Charley’s Body Shoppe located at 5017 Maffit Ave. Walkers will proceed east on Maffit to Union Ave. south to Forest Park. Participants will return to CBS studios for a light repasts afterwards. To register, make donations or to volunteer, call 314-367-2307 or go to www.charleysbodyshoppe.com.

15-09-12-100.3FM the BEAT-AIR UMSL BRIDGE PRGM Jade Harrell with Natissia S. Small, Assistant Dean of Students and Director within the Division of Student Affairs, University of Missouri-St. Louis Since its inception in 1986, the University of Missouri-St. Louis Louis Bridge Program has provided exemplary college access services to the St. Louis community. Bridge remains one of the most successful and widely emulated models, providing unique and comprehensive year-round precollegiate programming for St. Louis area high school students and parents. Student participants represent public and private high school institutions throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. http://www.umsl.edu/precollegiate/Program%20Opportunities/index.html CHARLEYS BODY SHOPPE Jade Harrell with Charley Johnson, Owner of Charley's Body Shoppe about the Jason Johnson Memorial Walk and Community Awareness event Sat. Sept. 26, 2015 7 a.m. registration 8 a.m. Walk beginning at Charley’s Body Shoppe located at 5017 Maffit Ave. Walkers will proceed east on Maffit to Union Ave. south to Forest Park. Participants will return to CBS studios for a light repasts afterwards. To register, make donations or to volunteer, call 314-367-2307 or go to www.charleysbodyshoppe.com.