This video is too cool. The bass playing prowess of one Mr. Willie Dixon are on full display here, and I believe that Otis Span is helping out a little bit on the piano. I'm getting nervous just typing this, I tremble in my bones. I believe that this video is from the "The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966, Vol. 2 (2003)" DVD.
As in this video on that DVD Willie Dixon "nervously" stutters his way through this comical song where he is introduced by a very dignified Memphis Slim: "He is such a big man", says Slim, "he weighs four or five hundred pounds, something like that. Imagine a guy that big being nervous!"
Willie Dixon, is one of my favorite bluesmen, who I believe was pound for pound one of the best all around bluesmen ever, and I say that because of his abilities as a producer, songwriter and session musician who helped so
many other Chess Records artist and who also was instrumental in creating the Chicago blues sound.
In the original liner notes to Dixon's classic album "I Am The Blues: Willie Dixon", Pete Welding describes Dixon this way:
He may well be the single most influential artist in the modern blues. Certainly, in light of his prodigious activities in and on behalf of the magnificent, impassioned, urgent and powerful music to which he has contributed so significantly over the years, he must be considered on of the major figures of the postwar blues.
Willie Dixon: Seventh Son video @ YouTube.
file under;
music, blues, video
4 comments:
No doubt Willie Dixon had a real flair for putting together a blues song. I think he had a strong understanding that the music was about the songs and not about monster guitar riffers or jams. He seemed to have a huge influence on the Chess sound, played on a ton of those records, and I would say influenced a lot of careers. I saw and heard him play just once, in Toronto many years ago at the old Ontario Place Forum. The show was very good, and it seems to me that he wore an groovy little hat on stage.
mister anchovy, you know I think you have a point about Willie Dixon not focusing on the "monster guitar riffers" and that being one of the secrets to his success. I never got to see him live, but I love the CD "I Am The Blues" where he does many of the songs that he wrote, but that were made popular by other musicians. I really like his version of "Back Door Man" and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man."
he used both lyrical and melodic hooks, and his songs were always well resolved - beginning, middle and end. That way, I would compare him to Sonny Boy II.....you don't need lots and lots of notes, just the right ones in the right places.
"... you don't need lots and lots of notes, just the right ones in the right places."
Well said.
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