26 posts tagged “blues”
John is a local musician and one of my guitar teachers. He's a nice fellow too. He just wrote to tell me he founded yet another band, this time a classic country string band in the vein of the Three Stripped Gears or Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers. Here's John's web site, please stop by!
The above tune is John's cover of a number by Charley Jordan, a superlative fingerpicker himself.
The Black Keys—Because it's about time some white hipster guys tried to play the blues. Nah, actually, I love 'em to death.
No editorial about the Catholic Church intended. I've just always been fascinated by stories of monks wrestling with temptation, sometimes literally (in their minds, at least) with the devil himself.
I imagine that each time I've brought up this song on my other blog, people thought I was kidding. Nope. Collected by John Lomax (Alan's dad) in 1936 at the State Farm prison in Virginia. Strothers, a medicine show veteran, was in his second year of imprisonment for murder. Bizarrely, the Library of Congress gave this song a classification as "erotica."
Nice little assessment of blues history from the coasts of Africa to the Mississippi Delta to Chicago (oh, and a few other cities). Using Muddy Waters' story as a touchstone, we meet the usual suspects. Palmer manages to be fannish without being adulatory to the point of nausea. Too bad he wasn't able to start a little earlier than 1979, by which point most of the blues greats were deceased. He also risks ascribing too much importance to the usual suspects—skipping over lesser-known talents for the sake of brevity, I'm sure—though he recognizes but doesn't place overly much importance on lineage (i.e., just because Robert Johnson taught you doesn't mean your kung-fu is necessarily the best, or even that you sound exactly like him). A little bit of the old whiteboy fascination with black voodoo blues sex magick power turns up here and there—remember, the blues are all about fucking and drinking... oh, and sometimes social protest, historical events, black culture not having to do with mojos and back doors, and other stuff—but otherwise Palmer restrains himself.
A quick read, but thick with information that will send you out to the music store the next day to round out your collection.
Note: Despite the above link, don't buy from the red-state bastards at Amazon.
Bill and Hayes Shepherd were a couple of Kentuckians and friends of Dock Boggs, and have much of Dock's intensity and skin-crawling feeling in their music. Sadly, while Bill and Hayes recorded with Dock and appear on many of his 78s, only one recording of the two men all by their lonesome exists, and it's in bad bad shape. But like many 78 recordings, the buzzes, hisses, and pops only make the music sound that much archaic and faraway. Enjoy.
