Sweet home Kokomo
Oct. 16th, 2003 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2Kokomo me baby
Kokomo me right
Kokomo your mama,
she'll be back tomorrow night
baby don't you wanna go?
Right on to Lemon Light City
Sweet home Kokomo
Over the weekend I pulled down all of my blues cds (a modest collection, 15 or 20 discs total) and ripped them to my hard drive.
Afterwards it occured to me that I didn't have my Mississippi John Hurt cd. It's missing. I've searched for it for two days but I can't find it.
Now, I have thousands of cds and many of them are scattered... but I can usually find whatever I'm looking for. There are only so many places to look. Most of my cds are sorted alphabetically into several genres (mostly "rock" "classical" and "folk", with several small unalphabetized sub-genres... "soundtracks" "blues" "Christmas" and "Various Artist/Misc collections". The cds that aren't sorted are stacked in front of my main shelves in the living room, or on the couch, or on the stereo, or in two or three places in the computer room. It's not hard to search through these.
But I can't find it. And the funny thing is, I thought I saw it recently up with my other blues cds, and until last week I hadn't touched those cds for months.
My round Celtic cross necklace is also missing. I wore it on Sunday or Monday but now I can't find it. I'm always VERY careful to place my watch, necklaces, etc in just a few places where I'll know to look for them later... but this time, it's not in any of those places. I'm sure it's around somewhere, but it's annoying when you can't find things that you know aren't really lost, just misplaced.
I got two cds in the mail on Tuesday, two of the ones I ordered. One was a double-disc collection of the best of Blind Blake. He's okay... interesting. Nothing too spectacular, just a good guitarist who plays a wide range of blues and other stuff like ragtime and even old-time music (he does a version of "In The Jailhouse Now" for example).
The other is much cooler... The Complete Bukka (Booker T Washington) White. Now, I said in an earlier lj post that Bukka was one of those blues musicians who died early... I was guessing that this was true, since I could get "The Complete Bukka White" on a single cd -- all 14 songs from two sessions, the second in 1940. This was before I'd read very much about him. But as it turns out, he didn't die young. In fact, he was "rediscovered" in the sixties and had a nice second career, recording a lot more music before his death.
He also recorded a bit of music before the 1940 sessions on my "Complete Bukka White". He recorded 14 songs in the early thirties, and then while he was in the Mississippi state penn, Alan Lomax recorded two songs from him. Alan might have recorded more but at the time that Bukka was incarcerated he had a hit song on the radio, and wasn't inclined to do recording sessions for free. He later recalled that he did two songs for Lomax "just to get him out of my face".
In any case, what we have here is a use of the word "Complete" that apparently means "everything he ever did, except for the stuff before and after that we don't really care about".
Bukka's 1940 session recordings are legendary, and for a good reason. The producer wanted something original, and when Bukka showed up with the usual blues standards and covers and slightly reworked versions of often-used songs, he refused to record them. Instead he put Bukka up in a Chicago hotel for two days with a meal ticket and ordered him to come up with something new.
The resulting twelve songs drew upon Bukka's own experiences, and dealt with subjects like his incarceration in prison, his mother's funeral, depression, and his love of gin. These were (and still are) some of the most personal blues ever recorded, and overall they paint a picture of Bukka's life at the time, and by extension the life of many black men at that time.
Bukka's later music in the sixties confirmed that he was a master of spinning yarns off the top of his head. Many bluesmen have sets of phrases memorized that they can pull up and throw into a song, and it seems spontaneous... but Bukka had the genius to tell entire stories in song that he made up on the spot. As he said, "I pulled all of my songs out of my head."
Good stuff.
When I discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell this weekend I knew I'd found what I was looking for. (Relatively) modern-day country blues played with fire and passion and skill. One of the blues giants like Skip James or Blind Willie Johnson, but cleanly recorded.
What I'm really looking for in the blues is stuff that has an edge... not the slickly produced modern blues that you hear from the likes of BB King, nor the hard-to-hear recordings from the 20's and 30's. Howlin' Wolf's music from the 50's is very close to what I like best... raw, powerful, unfiltered, unpredictable.
So last night I failed to work on my story again, instead launching myself on yet another online blues exploratory mission. I found out that there's a video from a 1964 (or 66? I forget) Newport Folk Festival that Alan Lomax recorded, which has Skip James, Bukka White, Son House, and Howlin' Wolf all sitting around talking and playing acoustic blues. Ooof. Now >THAT< I need to see!
From here I explored other blues dvds available at Amazon, and came across one entitled "Deep Blues". A blues historian, Robert Palmer, filmed this on a trip through Mississippi about ten years ago or so. He captured local country delta blues musicians performing at juke joints -- guys who were farmers and the like, doing this as their hobby, just like it was done in the 20's and 30's. None of the artists he recorded were familiar outside of their locale, but soon he was helping to change that. With his own label, Fat Possum Records, he recorded many of these blues artists. Some of them were able to quit their regular jobs and become full-time musicieans. Others were content to make a record and go back to what they were doing... or were even adverse to recording at all (Asie Payton's only recordings were live at a juke house -- he refused to enter a studio to record anything).
Anyway, many the artists on the Fat Possum label fall squarely into the type of blues I like -- either wild, rough-edged electric jukehouse blues like the best of Howlin' Wolf or equally wild acoustic blues in the manner of Mississippi Fred McDowell.
That some of these guys sound like McDowell is no accident -- several of them were neighbors of his, and learned directly from him. Some blues artists who were rediscovered in the sixties were adverse to teaching others -- Skip James, for example, was absolutely paranoid that people would steal from him, and went to great lengths to prevent people from learning how he tuned and played his guitar. But Fred McDowell was quite happy to teach others -- Bonnie Rait learned from him, for exmaple -- and he considered it his legacy that so many others would be playing his style of blues after he was dead. And it's happened exactly that way.
Some of the Fat Possum artists are quite eccentric. One, who calls himself T Model Ford, didn't learn to play guitar until he was 58, and wasn't recorded until he was 79, but he stomps and pounds and wails away with wild abandon. Another, Cedell Davis, has one of the weirdest and outlandish guitar styles around. His right hand has been crippled from polio since he was young, so he plays the guitar upside down, picking and strumming with his left hand and using a butter knife as a slide instrument with his right. What comes out are notes that are not simply bent, but often very off-key. Not all the notes he plays are off-key of course, but many or most of the slide notes that accent or punctuate the song are... they fly off in odd directions or shriek, quaver and die. It's very disconcerting but it actually kind of works.
The thing is that all of these artists are playing what I'd call "unsafe" music... the kind of wild music that makes up the best of rock, punk, and blues. Usually that kind of music is created by artists when they're young, and as they get older they lose their edge, forget what it was that made their music work. As an example, U2. Their early albumns are full of wild energy... as they lost that over the years, they lost a lot of what made them an interesting band.
What's interesting about these Fat Possum artists is that most of them are quite old -- in their sixties, seventies, even many in their eighties. Some of them only get one albumn recorded before their time is up. But despite that, their music has that edge that makes you sit up and take notice.
In any case, I think I'll be buying quite a few of these cds over the next few months.
And I just found my necklace.
Kokomo me right
Kokomo your mama,
she'll be back tomorrow night
baby don't you wanna go?
Right on to Lemon Light City
Sweet home Kokomo
Over the weekend I pulled down all of my blues cds (a modest collection, 15 or 20 discs total) and ripped them to my hard drive.
Afterwards it occured to me that I didn't have my Mississippi John Hurt cd. It's missing. I've searched for it for two days but I can't find it.
Now, I have thousands of cds and many of them are scattered... but I can usually find whatever I'm looking for. There are only so many places to look. Most of my cds are sorted alphabetically into several genres (mostly "rock" "classical" and "folk", with several small unalphabetized sub-genres... "soundtracks" "blues" "Christmas" and "Various Artist/Misc collections". The cds that aren't sorted are stacked in front of my main shelves in the living room, or on the couch, or on the stereo, or in two or three places in the computer room. It's not hard to search through these.
But I can't find it. And the funny thing is, I thought I saw it recently up with my other blues cds, and until last week I hadn't touched those cds for months.
My round Celtic cross necklace is also missing. I wore it on Sunday or Monday but now I can't find it. I'm always VERY careful to place my watch, necklaces, etc in just a few places where I'll know to look for them later... but this time, it's not in any of those places. I'm sure it's around somewhere, but it's annoying when you can't find things that you know aren't really lost, just misplaced.
I got two cds in the mail on Tuesday, two of the ones I ordered. One was a double-disc collection of the best of Blind Blake. He's okay... interesting. Nothing too spectacular, just a good guitarist who plays a wide range of blues and other stuff like ragtime and even old-time music (he does a version of "In The Jailhouse Now" for example).
The other is much cooler... The Complete Bukka (Booker T Washington) White. Now, I said in an earlier lj post that Bukka was one of those blues musicians who died early... I was guessing that this was true, since I could get "The Complete Bukka White" on a single cd -- all 14 songs from two sessions, the second in 1940. This was before I'd read very much about him. But as it turns out, he didn't die young. In fact, he was "rediscovered" in the sixties and had a nice second career, recording a lot more music before his death.
He also recorded a bit of music before the 1940 sessions on my "Complete Bukka White". He recorded 14 songs in the early thirties, and then while he was in the Mississippi state penn, Alan Lomax recorded two songs from him. Alan might have recorded more but at the time that Bukka was incarcerated he had a hit song on the radio, and wasn't inclined to do recording sessions for free. He later recalled that he did two songs for Lomax "just to get him out of my face".
In any case, what we have here is a use of the word "Complete" that apparently means "everything he ever did, except for the stuff before and after that we don't really care about".
Bukka's 1940 session recordings are legendary, and for a good reason. The producer wanted something original, and when Bukka showed up with the usual blues standards and covers and slightly reworked versions of often-used songs, he refused to record them. Instead he put Bukka up in a Chicago hotel for two days with a meal ticket and ordered him to come up with something new.
The resulting twelve songs drew upon Bukka's own experiences, and dealt with subjects like his incarceration in prison, his mother's funeral, depression, and his love of gin. These were (and still are) some of the most personal blues ever recorded, and overall they paint a picture of Bukka's life at the time, and by extension the life of many black men at that time.
Bukka's later music in the sixties confirmed that he was a master of spinning yarns off the top of his head. Many bluesmen have sets of phrases memorized that they can pull up and throw into a song, and it seems spontaneous... but Bukka had the genius to tell entire stories in song that he made up on the spot. As he said, "I pulled all of my songs out of my head."
Good stuff.
When I discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell this weekend I knew I'd found what I was looking for. (Relatively) modern-day country blues played with fire and passion and skill. One of the blues giants like Skip James or Blind Willie Johnson, but cleanly recorded.
What I'm really looking for in the blues is stuff that has an edge... not the slickly produced modern blues that you hear from the likes of BB King, nor the hard-to-hear recordings from the 20's and 30's. Howlin' Wolf's music from the 50's is very close to what I like best... raw, powerful, unfiltered, unpredictable.
So last night I failed to work on my story again, instead launching myself on yet another online blues exploratory mission. I found out that there's a video from a 1964 (or 66? I forget) Newport Folk Festival that Alan Lomax recorded, which has Skip James, Bukka White, Son House, and Howlin' Wolf all sitting around talking and playing acoustic blues. Ooof. Now >THAT< I need to see!
From here I explored other blues dvds available at Amazon, and came across one entitled "Deep Blues". A blues historian, Robert Palmer, filmed this on a trip through Mississippi about ten years ago or so. He captured local country delta blues musicians performing at juke joints -- guys who were farmers and the like, doing this as their hobby, just like it was done in the 20's and 30's. None of the artists he recorded were familiar outside of their locale, but soon he was helping to change that. With his own label, Fat Possum Records, he recorded many of these blues artists. Some of them were able to quit their regular jobs and become full-time musicieans. Others were content to make a record and go back to what they were doing... or were even adverse to recording at all (Asie Payton's only recordings were live at a juke house -- he refused to enter a studio to record anything).
Anyway, many the artists on the Fat Possum label fall squarely into the type of blues I like -- either wild, rough-edged electric jukehouse blues like the best of Howlin' Wolf or equally wild acoustic blues in the manner of Mississippi Fred McDowell.
That some of these guys sound like McDowell is no accident -- several of them were neighbors of his, and learned directly from him. Some blues artists who were rediscovered in the sixties were adverse to teaching others -- Skip James, for example, was absolutely paranoid that people would steal from him, and went to great lengths to prevent people from learning how he tuned and played his guitar. But Fred McDowell was quite happy to teach others -- Bonnie Rait learned from him, for exmaple -- and he considered it his legacy that so many others would be playing his style of blues after he was dead. And it's happened exactly that way.
Some of the Fat Possum artists are quite eccentric. One, who calls himself T Model Ford, didn't learn to play guitar until he was 58, and wasn't recorded until he was 79, but he stomps and pounds and wails away with wild abandon. Another, Cedell Davis, has one of the weirdest and outlandish guitar styles around. His right hand has been crippled from polio since he was young, so he plays the guitar upside down, picking and strumming with his left hand and using a butter knife as a slide instrument with his right. What comes out are notes that are not simply bent, but often very off-key. Not all the notes he plays are off-key of course, but many or most of the slide notes that accent or punctuate the song are... they fly off in odd directions or shriek, quaver and die. It's very disconcerting but it actually kind of works.
The thing is that all of these artists are playing what I'd call "unsafe" music... the kind of wild music that makes up the best of rock, punk, and blues. Usually that kind of music is created by artists when they're young, and as they get older they lose their edge, forget what it was that made their music work. As an example, U2. Their early albumns are full of wild energy... as they lost that over the years, they lost a lot of what made them an interesting band.
What's interesting about these Fat Possum artists is that most of them are quite old -- in their sixties, seventies, even many in their eighties. Some of them only get one albumn recorded before their time is up. But despite that, their music has that edge that makes you sit up and take notice.
In any case, I think I'll be buying quite a few of these cds over the next few months.
And I just found my necklace.
