I really like the music of YouTuber Geoff C. He is an excellent guatarist and singer. Here he does a great version of Son House's Baptist Preacher Blues.
According to wikipedia;
Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) refers to all the acoustic, guitar-driven forms of the blues. After blues' birth in the southern United States, it quickly spread throughout the country (and elsewhere), giving birth to a host of regional styles. These include Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Texas, Piedmont, Louisiana, Western, Atlanta, St. Louis, East Coast, Swamp, New Orleans, Delta and Kansas City blues.Notable country blues musicians @ SqueezeMyLemon;Country Blues @ Amazon.com
I have this tradition of trying to lighten it up a little on Fridays. And in keeping with that I'd like to offer this very cool little blues related distraction.
Since an online friend turned me on to this link I have done little else but play with it. And I bet all the guitar players will love this link;
Frank "Son" Seals is another bluesman who was born in the month of August. Of him wikipedia says;
He was born in 1942 in Osceola, Arkansas where his father, Jim "Son" Seals, owned a small club. He began performing professionally by the age of 13, first as a drummer with Robert Nighthawk, and later as a guitarist. In 1959, he formed his own band which performed locally and he also toured with Albert King.He passed away in 2004 due to complications from diabetes. He is missed by fans from around the world.
In 1971, he moved to Chicago. His career took off after he was discovered by Bruce Iglauer of Alligator Records at the Flamingo Club in Chicago's South Side. His debut, The Son Seals Blues Band, was released in 1973. The album included "Your Love Is Like a Cancer" and "Hot Sauce". Seals followed up with 1976's Midnight Son and 1978's Live and Burning. He continued releasing albums throughout the next two decades, all but one on Alligator Records. These included Chicago Fire (1980), Bad Axe (1984), Living In The Danger Zone (1991), Nothing But The Truth and Live-Spontaneous Combustion (1996). He received the W.C. Handy Award, an honor for best blues recording of the year, in 1985, 1987, and 2001.
eBay has some great collectible and vintage harmonicas as well as brand new ones. If you are looking for a great selection and a good price check out what the have to offer below.
You can get racks, mikes, amps and other blues accessories as well.
These videos go along way in showing how gospel music is related to the blues. I hope that it helps the frat boys, the aging boomers and the corporate blues fans to go deeper into the roots of the blues. I know that it helped me to understand the relationship between these two great American music forms that I have been listening to all my life.
And not that it matters how you came to the music, it just helps to understand where the music came from.
The Classic Female Blues music is a part of the blues that I love to high light for many reasons. According to Wikipedia;
The classic female blues spanned from 1920 to 1929 with its peak from 1923 to 1925. The most popular of these singers were Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace, Alberta Hunter, Clara Smith, Edith Wilson, Trixie Smith, Lucille Hegamin and Bertha “Chippie” Hill. Hundreds of others recorded including Lizzie Miles, Sara Martin, Rosa Henderson, Martha Copeland, Bessie Jackson (Lucille Bogan), Edith Johnson, Katherine Baker, Margaret Johnson, Hattie Burleson, Madlyn Davis, Ivy Smith, Alberta Brown, Gladys Bentley, Billie and Ida Goodson, Fannie May Goosby, Bernice Edwards and Florence Mills.Books on Classic Female Blues
They sang often backed behind their bands consisting of piano, several horns and drums. These women were pioneers in the record industry: they were among the first black singers recorded, they were the first blues singers recorded, and they were instrumental in spreading the 12-bar blues form throughout the country. In terms of performing, they often wore elaborate outfits and sang of the injustices of their lives, bonding with their audience’s sorrows. Their schedules were grueling, staying on the road most of the time with tent shows in the summer and theatres during the winter. With the crash of Wall Street in 1929, the popularity of the blues singers declined. Some went back home, took up jobs or moved to Hollywood. In the '60s with the blues revival, Sippie Wallace, Alberta Hunter, Edith Wilson and Victoria Spivey returned to the stage.
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, from Georgia, was the “Mother of the Blues,” and lived from 1886–1939. She was the first woman to incorporate blues into her act of show songs and comedy. In 1902, she heard a woman singing about the man she’d lost, and quickly learned the song. From then on at each performance, she used it as her closing number calling it “the blues.” She recorded over 100 songs and wrote 24 of them herself. “Bessie Smith (and all the others who followed in time), wrote jazz historian Dan Morgenstern “learned their art and craft from Ma, directly or indirectly.” Young women followed Ma Rainey’s path in the tent show circuit, since black performers were not allowed to be in venues. Eventually most singers were booked on the T.O.B.A. (Theatre Owners Booking Association) circuit.
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The genre of the blues was a hallmark of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.So great was its influence, and so much was it recognized as Handy's hallmark, that author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novel The Great Gatsby that;
"All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor."
Nuno Mindelis who was born on August 7, 1957. He is nicknamed "The Beast", and is an Angolan-born Brazilian blues guitarist and singer-songwriter.
According to the bio at Nuno Mindelis.com.
Born in Cabinda (Angola), Eastern Africa on Aug. 7, 1957, Nuno Mindelis became a guitar enthusiast at the very young age of 5. By the age of 9 he began building and playing self-made guitars.
A primary influence at that time was Otis Redding and his great rhythm section, Booker T. & The MG's, made up of Booker T., Steve Cropper, Donald "Duck" Dunn, and Al Jackson. Nuno continues to enjoy the work of these musicians to this day.
Well not actually, his birthday was a couple of days ago, but I did want to acknowledge as I try to include more of the modern blues musicians. Colin James is a Canadian which works towards my other goal of including bluesmen from other countries.
Born Colin James Munn (born August 17, 1964 in Regina, Saskatchewan) he is singer, guitarist, and songwriter who plays in the blues, rock, and swing genres.
Check out the below video of him with Willie Dixon.
Luther Allison was born on this day in 1939 and he passed away on August 12 in 1997. He was an blues guitarist who was born in Widener, Arkansas and moved with his family, at age twelve, to Chicago, Illinois in 1951. He taught himself guitar while still a kid down in Arkansas where he first heard the blues. Many years later he began hanging outside blues clubs with the hopes of being invited to perform. He played with Howlin' Wolf's band and backed up James Cotton among others. He was also called to the stage to play with Muddy Waters.
Samuel Johnson is credited with having said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." It had been my intentions to write something about the capabilities of the new Apple iPhone.
I think that the blues and high tech can mix well. One thing that will help to keep blues music alive is showing young people how cool it is to use their new shiny gadgets to enjoy good old music like the blues. The blues will continue to be revived for new mediums as they are created.
Consider YouTube and some of the other new video sharing websites that allow blues fans to enjoy content that was unthinkable in years past. The iPhone can be used to view your favorite blues videos on YouTube for example.
Cahl's Juke Joint, a blog that I have been reading forever has written about the Apple iPhone and how you can use it to listen to blues and jazz music. I like his post because it gave me ideas of how to use the iPhone to enjoy many of the music sites that I have been listening to for some while now.
For your reading pleasure please check out;
iPhone Music Applications, and iPhone Music part 2. Both these post give good info on how to use an iPhone to listen to music.
Boogie-Woogie is also one of my favorite forms of the blues. According to Wikipedia;
Boogie-woogie is a style of piano-based blues that became very popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but originated much earlier, and was extended from piano, to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, and country and western music, and even gospel. Whilst the blues traditionally depicts sadness and sorrow, boogie-woogie is associated with dancing. The lyrics of one of the very earliest, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie", consist entirely of instructions to dancers:Now, when I tell you to hold it, I don't want you to move a thing. And when I tell you to get it, I want you to Boogie Woogie!It is characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato and the most familiar example of shifts of level, in the left hand which elaborates on each chord, and trills and decorations from the right hand.
The origin of the term boogie-woogie is unknown, according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the word is a redoubling of boogie, which was used for rent parties as early as 1913. The term is often hyphenated. Blues historian Robert Palmer wrote that the boogie-woogie style bass pattern may have been created in the logging and turpentine camps and oil boomtowns of Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta circa 1900. Palmer also reports that Willie Dixon told Karl Gert zur Heide, author of "Deep South Piano" that in Mississippi before the term boogie was used, the eight to the bar piano patterns were called "Dudlow Joes".
In an interview with NPR blues singer and pianist Marcia Ball stated that "Boogie woogie started out with a bunch of different names, depending on where you were. Apparently there was a song by a guy named Dudlow, Joe Dudlow. He’s the first guy that a lot of them heard that was playing that kind of um… [playing]. And so they called it that for a while, Dudlow Joe." The precise origin of boogie-woogie piano is, however, uncertain; it was no doubt influenced by early rough music played in honky tonks in the Southern United States. W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton both mentioned hearing pianists playing this style before 1910. According to Clarence Williams, the style was started by Texas pianist George W. Thomas. Thomas published one of the earliest pieces of sheet music with the boogie-woogie bassline, "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues" in 1916, although Williams recalled hearing him play the number before 1911. The term "boogie" itself was in use very early, as in Wilbur Sweatman's "Boogie Rag" recorded in April, 1917. link
When great music artist like Isaac Hayes pass away, I often want to note their passing in some small and respectful way here in SML, but often the words fail me.
But I think that Reverend Keith A. Gordon over at About.com's blues page did a good job or honoring the late grate mister Hayes. In his profile on Isaac Hayes he states;
Although known primarily as a soul artist, Hayes' influence on blues music is undeniable, and blues artists such as Freddie King, B.B. King, Rory Gallagher, Earl Hooker, Tommy Castro, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds have all recorded songs written by Hayes.
In a recent post titled No Rest For Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown? About.com blogger Reverend Keith A. Gordon brought to my attention the problem of Gatemouth's grave not having a marker.
The full story was reported in a Beaumont Enterprise article Marking Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown's legacy.
An account for Gatemouth Brown is set up at Sabine Federal Credit Union in Orange, Texas: Gatemouth Brown Memorial Committee Acct # 1892149.
Clarence Gatemouth Brown @ SqueezeMyLemon
Driftin' Slim (February 24, 1919 – September 15, 1977[1]) was an African American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player.
Born Elmon Mickle in Keo, Arkansas, he not only recorded as Driftin' Slim, but also as Model 'T' Slim and under his real name. His recordings were released on the - amongst others - Modern, RPM, Blue Horizon, Styletone, Milestone, Kent, and Flyright record labels.
By the turn of the 1970s, ill health had forced Slim to retire from the music industry and when he died, a chapter of American music — that of the one-man band — had virtually died with him. Slim passed away in Los Angeles, California, in September 1977
I thought after posting the small bit of animation from yesterday, you all might want to hear the real song and see Mr. James play it on guitar.
