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Along with Son House and Skip
James, Charley Patton is one of the three great well-heads of
the recorded blues. Patton's raw voice, abetted by the fact that
his throat was partially slashed by an jealous man one night
in 1933, has never been equaled. His frantic guitar-playing and
showmanship are what the young Robert Johnson offered to sell
his soul to emulate. Patton's songbook, which ranges from hard-edged
country blues to gospel laments to love ballads to hip-hop-like
rants against plantation masters and brutal cops, is one of the
most extraordinary in American music. Patton's blues are unique.
These are not songs of defeat and despereration, but songs of
rage, anger and the thirst for justice. They are the sound of
the blues as Nat Turner would have sang them. This lavish collection
by the late John Fahey's Revanant Records was 20 years in the
making. Yes, it's pricey, but worth it. After all, you'd be out
more money buying two tickets to a Springsteen concert and end
up not nearly as well-nourished.
The Colorado bluesman Otis
Taylor is Charley Patton's true descendent. His songs are rough-edged,
uncompromising and dark as the times. His guitar and electric
banjo playing has a brutal and menacing quality. This is the
blues as Stokley Carmichael or Robert Williams might've sang
them.
If you want to get a sense
of what it was like to spend a Friday night in a West Side blues
club as the Chicago blues was being reborn in the early 60s,
this is the record for you, featuring piano-player Sunnyland
Slim and JB Lenoir, the most militant blues singer of his generation.
Slim and Lenoir banter back and forth and rip through about 20
songs, getting help along the way from a young Michael Bloomfield
and an aging St. Louis Jimmy Oden, who at the time was sleeping
next to the water-heater in Muddy Waters' basement. Oden was
one of the great piano players of the 1940s, taking up where
Leroy Carr left off. But here Oden is relegated to harmonica.
Apparently, Slim feared that if he gave up his bench at the key,
he'd never be able to reclaim it. Tell me that Lenoir's voice
isn't the model for Chris Tucker's speedball falsetto in "Rush
Hour."
Generally, I don't have much
time for tribute albums, particularly when the tributee is still
around kicking ass. But I'm a sucker for almost any CD featuring
Iris Dement, which is why I picked up Tulare Dust. Iris's
cover of Big City is wonderful, but the real virtue of the cd
is to remind us of just how great and varied Haggard is as a
songwriter, mastering everything from lush country ballads to
driving rockabilly. It also reveals for all those humorless Hippies
who didn't get the joke in "Okie from the Muskogee"
that Merle has always been on the side of justice. I don't think
a white person has ever written a better civil rights song than
"Irma Thomas", sung with soul here by Barrance Whitfield.
And Dave Alvin's cover of the haunting "Kern River"
will make you cry. At least my eyes welled up. Then again I crumble
at the mere thought of the final scene of "Old Yeller".
The talented young Panamanian
piano player Danilo Perez infuses and revitalizes Monk standards
with Latin American rhythms. Perez's blazing version of "Bright
Mississippi", one of my favorite Monk compositions, rivals
the master's own recording.
When Hugh Masekela was six
years old, a package arrived at his home in South Africa from
Louis Armstrong. Inside was a present for the young prodigy:
one of Satchmo's trumpets. Armstrong had an unerring ear for
genius. This CD combines Masekela's brilliant first two albums
recorded shortly after he arrived in the states and a decade
before he went "pop". Here's the joyful sound of Zulu
rhythms meeting New Orleans R&B and siring a love child all
their own. Ooja Booja, indeed.
Jeffrey St. Clair's music writings (as well as CPers Ron
Jacobs, David Vest and Daniel Wolff) can be found in Serpents
in the Garden. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
Imagine Brian Wilson and Van
Dyke Parks disappearing into the studio with two tons of hash
-- and coming out six months later with a country album.
Les Lãutari de Clejani:
"Cîntec: 'Lelitã Circuimãreasã'"
Haunting gypsy music by ...
actually, I have no idea who these guys are. At some point I
downloaded this track off the Internet, and it seems to have
found a spot on my Mac's playlist right after the Everly Brothers.
For half a minute I thought I was still listening to Roots
, and that the Everlys had been a bit more experimental than
I'd remembered.
I don't know much about Townsend
either, except that he was one of the leading guitarists and
pianists in the St. Louis blues scene of the '20s and '30s. This
disc was recorded much later, in 1979, but it has the same vivid,
mysterious, earthy yet ethereal feel as the best prewar acoustic
blues.
There's a deep strain of blues
in Wilson's jazz singing as well. Indeed, along with James Blood
Ulmer, Jon Spencer, and not many others, she's one of the few
widely recognized musicians taking the genre in new directions.
That's clearest when she sings songs by Robert Johnson and Mississippi
Fred McDowell, but it comes through as well in her pop covers:
"The Weight," "Wichita Lineman," even "Waters
of March."
I've been pulling out a lot
of my old Kinks albums since Ray Davies released a solo CD last
month. I won't bore you by reeling off all of them, but I'll
put in a good word for this underrated effort from 1972. It's
a double LP, with the first disc recorded in the studio and the
second recorded in concert. Aside from the famous "Celluloid
Heroes" and the not-so-famous "Sitting in My Hotel,"
the studio half stays in the same country-and-jazz mode as the
group's previous release -- Muswell Hillbillies, still
their best record -- but now the New Orleans influence includes
some Meters-style funk along with the more traditional sounds
heard on the earlier album. The live half is sloppy fun, with
the horn-enhanced band breaking into "Baby Face" and
"The Banana Boat Song" as well as some the familiar
Kinks material.
I don't know who Dale is supposed
to be, but there is a guy named Dan playing a guitar on this
mostly instrumental Batman album for kids. The real news,
though, is who's on organ: It's jazz legend Sun Ra and white
bluesman Al Kooper, doing a little anonymous hack work while
members of their usual bands sit in on the other instruments.
No, really.
Since I just spent three days
on a
riverboat with a few of these artists, I thought I'd give
some of their CDs a listen, starting with one I've already included
in a previous playlist, and ending with something so far out
of right field it might have landed in left.
The coolest man on earth,
with a smile for everyone he meets, stepping out on a fabulous
solo project, with mellow but brilliant versions of Charlie Parker's
seldom-heard "Diverse" and my all-time favorite version
of Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz."
Charmaine is Charles' daughter,
and in terms of sheer talent she may be the Neville-est of them
all. Whether deconstructing "Yellow Submarine" (in
a performance that would have dropped Sun Ra's jaw open), or
subversively re-inventing Mardi Gras standards, or getting in
the face of people who think it's enough to be "sympathetic"
with the plight of the down and out (on "Can You Tell Me"),
she's in a class all her own.
Most people have no idea what
she went through during Katrina, since only the London Times
and perhaps no more than one American paper carried her story
in depth, and she was also subjected to some right-wing "swift-boating."
Every American needs to read the story of her experience ("How
We Survived the Flood" [http://www.counterpunch.org/neville09072005.html]).
A nation in bad trouble would do well to listen to this woman.
If I were Michael Moore, or Ken Burns, I would make sure it did.
I'm going to suggest that you
buy all three of these CDs directly from Charmaine's web site,
where you'll also find links to sax player Reggie Houston's solo
CDs.
The unlikeliest of blues circuit
stars, and the co-founder of Sapphire -- the Uppity Blues Women,
who proved that not only do middle-aged white women get the blues,
they can sing them with credibility and play them with class.
Rabson's own credibility comes not only from her deep knowledge
of blues history (is there ANY piano player whose work she doesn't
know?), but from her rock solid sense of time (thus making it
no surprise when she tells you
The Texas roadhouse song-writer
par excellence, a fine, fine drummer, and the vocalist Stevie
Ray Vaughan modeled himself after. But let's face it: no one
sings Bramhall like Bramhall.
By the way, if you ever want
to know how good a drummer is, try taking him to the paddlewheel
lounge on a riverboat, sit him over in the corner, behind not
much more than a toy drum set, with one working cymbal and no
bass player, and ask him to play songs he's never heard with
people he's never really met. Bramhall is the heart and soul
of that good old Texas shuffle, but who knew he could second-line
so fine!
His "Change It" is
the most memorable song to come out of that whole Texas movement
fronted by Stevie Ray and his brother Jimmy with the Fabulous
Thunderbirds. Might as well hear it by the guy who wrote it,
if you haven't done so already. And Bramhall's covers of John
Lee Hooker songs (how come no one ever calls John Lee a "singer-songwriter"?)
come as close as anyone to absolutely nailing what the Hook was
all about. Add a "Forty-Four" that actually gets the
shambling groove right, unlike almost any other version since
Roosevelt Sykes laid down his guns, and you're feeling mighty
fine.
"Feeling Mighty Fine"
was one of the house-wrecking numbers associated with arguably
the best of the early 50s white Southern gospel groups. This
performance was recorded the night before a plane crash killed
half the quartet in Clanton, Alabama. As far as I know, this
isn't for sale anywhere. I found a well-worn cassette copy on
eBay a while back. The sound is dreadful by almost anyone's standards,
at times like trying to hear a ball game on a Cub Scout project
radio. But for me, the opportunity to relive the experience of
seeing these guys many times in concert was worth the primitive
audio.
The highlight of the concert
is R. W. Blackwood's four encores on "I Want To Be More
Like Jesus Every Day," sung -- and evidently received --
with what can only be called abandon.
Why even listen to this music,
other than for reasons of personal nostalgia? Because the failure
of nerve (and heart, and conscience) exhibited by white Southern
gospel singers just a few years later, during the Civil Rights
movement, was as tragic as it was despicable. Faced with the
necessity of practicing what they preached, or turning their
backs on the source of their best material, most of them proved
white gospel music a fraud, by running off to Nashville and associating
themselves with modern "country" music. Thus they became
the true vanguard of Nixon's "Southern strategy."
In 1954 it was still possible,
just barely, to hope for better from them. Who knows what the
Blackwoods would have done, had that plane landed safely. Would
they have embraced their many black fans, who couldn't even get
into their shows, and locked arms with them in their struggle
for justice, or would they have searched like all the rest of
their peer group for a still-segregated corner of the hideous
treacle now known as "contemporary Christian" music?
Their contemporaries, the Statesmen,
once a great group themselves, sank all the way from an RCA Victor
contract to the level of recording an album called "God
Loves American People" -- and singing backup for Lester
Maddox, the Georgia ax handle peddler. Whereas the Blackwood
Brothers, by the time this concert took place in segregated Mississippi,
had performed and recorded more songs by black composers than
any other white gospel group of their day, enough to allow a
tantalizing glimpse of a road not taken. However imperfectly,
The Final Curtain documents one last wild show by these doomed
legends.
On July 2, in Memphis, according
to Charles Wolfe's essay in the Bear Family box set, Rock-A My
Soul, the 5,000 mourners who filled Ellis Auditorium at a
memorial service for the two dead members of the group included
"a young, heartbroken Elvis Presley" and, "strictly
segregated from the white mourners ... a number of black fans
of the group."
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.