TOP 20 influential blues artists – (ETTA JAMES SONG)
1. W.C. Handy2. Son House3. Bessie Smith4. Robert Johnson5. B.B. King6. T-Bone Walker7. Muddy Waters8. Little Walter9. Lonnie Johnson10. John Lee Hooker11. Blind Lemon Jefferson12. Elmore James13. Willie Dixon14. Freddie King15. Billie Holiday16. Stevie Ray Vaughan17. Charlie Patton18. Ma Rainey19. Leadbelly20. Howlin’ Wolf21. Louis Jordan22. Big Bill Broonzy23. Skip James
Duration : 0:5:15
My Blues Roots
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. There have been lots of stressful things going on. This morning, I was in a pretty bad mood as I was making an unnecessary 200 mile road trip. I put a Muddy Waters cd in the player and in about 3 minutes I was starting to feel better. In essence, I was getting back to my blues roots. I played one blues cd after another and as I drove, my mood improved. Now, I’m not saying I am in a wonderful mood this afternoon but the gloom and doom of this morning is gone.
Chris Brown – Turn Up The Music
Music video by Chris Brown performing Turn Up The Music. (C) 2012 RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment
Duration : 0:4:18
Legends of Country Blues Guitar Vol. 2 Part 3 – Big Joe Williams Houston Stackhouse
Legends of Country Blues Guitar Vol.2 Part 3
Big Joe Williams
6. Sloppy Drunk
7. Highway 49
8. Providence Help The Poor People
Houston Stackhouse
9. Cool Drink of Water
Thirty-five years have now come and gone since
the rediscoveries of the blues revival startled
us with their corporeal presence. It seems little
short of miraculous that so many of the greatest
pre-War bluesmen were found ready, willing,
and able to recreate the passion of their
youths music for a moving Last Hurrah.
Now they are, to a man, gone, making the
window which briefly shown into their world
all the more precious. That these men were
filmed in performance is fortuitous for us today;
they need no longer be disembodied
voices. The performance experience was captured
and while the video reflection is no more
the essence of the artist than the scratchy 78, it
is far more than we once could have hoped for.
We enter their world of Delta blues during
the first half of this DVD and experience that
music little removed from its source. Bukka
White and Big Joe Williams were disciples of
Charley Patton, Sam Chatmon claimed he was
his half-brother, and Son House began his blues
recording career at Pattons behest. (House was
also a formative inspiration for Robert Johnson
and Muddy Waters.) The other seminal influence
on early Delta blues, Tommy Johnson, is
reflected in performances here by Houston
Stackhouse and Sam Chatmon, once a member
of the legendary Mississippi Sheiks.
Beyond the powerful blues of the Delta,
ragtime was a still- popular pre-blues music
throughout the Southeast in the 1920s- 30s.
Adapted from piano to guitar, ragtime flourished
in Virginia and the Carolinas and had no greater
exponent than Rev. Gary Davis. The previously
unseen home movie footage of Davis shows
here the ease with which he spanned ragtime,
blues and sacred song.
Though both Texas and Louisiana claim
him, Huddie Ledbetter defies neat regional pigeonholing.
Leadbelly was a vast storehouse of
blues and pre-blues African-American tradition,
a songster whose repertoire ranged from pop
tunes to ancient work songs to original topical
ones. He was the sort of larger-than-life figure
who played his robust myth to the hilt and managed
both to entertain and inspire with enduring
vigor. Given that Leadbelly left us before any
of the other figures on this video (and, in fact,
before any blues revival existed), we are indeed
fortunate to have film footage offering
some semblance of his power as a performer.
Duration : 0:9:55
American Folk-Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 (3ª Parte)
This series originally came out during the Year Of The Blues (2003) and provided us with glimpses of the real originals in this genre. The first three volumes gave us a lot of wonderful clips of Wolf, Sonny Boy, Memphis Slim, Otis Rush, Muddy, T-Bone, Big Mamma, Lonnie Johnson and so on. The German settings were a bit sterile and often staged to look like a Juke or with strange back drops of urban America. This set, from 1963-1966, is more like a concert. And it’s great!.
The concert format with an appreciative audience is really fantastic and well done for the time. We see Sonny Boy Williamson in three performances with the harp in his mouth sideways and playing with his NOSE! He is cool, no wonder he taught Little Walter (whose only recorded performance is in Vol. 3 of this series!).We also see Hubert Sumlin play with Sonny Boy on his second offering in this show. He turns in one of his most unusual solos in “Getting Out Of Town”- very chromatic and almost jazzy! We see Muddy as a stand up singer (no guitar), on “Mojo” and in two bonus performances. He has Matt “Guitar” Murphy playing behind him on this one (who was playing with Memphis Slim at the time). There is a rare look at the great Lonnie Johnson, who plays by himself and shows us why he is one of the original inventors of the Urban Blues guitar style. Big Joe Williams gives us a close up view of his famous nine string guitar.
Lightnin’ Hopkins plays his distinctive Texas-style acoustic blues, with a few tricks on the fretboard as well. Howlin’ Wolf puts in, to me, his best ever filmed performance-it’s worth the price of the whole thing!!! He does an update of “Smokestack Lightning” (without its famous riff) and “Don’t Laugh At Me” in a “Killing Floor” groove, a song which had just been recorded. And we also see a young Hubert Sumlin playing with Wolf and also with Sugar Pie Desanto’s female input (these shows always had at least one female performer).
Big Joe Turner does his usual big voiced thing and he has Otis Rush on lead guitar, it’s a fantastic performance, one of the best insight’s into Otis’s guitar style we’ve seen. A bonus in this tune is that we see maybe the only existing footage of pianist Little Brother Montgomery who wrote “The First Time I met the Blues” and “I Can’t Keep From Crying”-this is a rarity. Also scarce is film of drummer Fred Below, who gave the beat to Chess Records. Fred plays on this tune and in Junior Well’s section.
Junior Wells is in his James Brown groove (he always did this! In Australia in 1991 when I saw him he led off with “I Feel Good”). He does Ray Charles’”What’D I Say” in a JB style, but we hear no harp! Sister Rosetta Tharpe, one of the first US Blues/Gospel acts to crack the UK, finishes the set with two of the bonus tracks. They are superb as is Muddy Waters’ two bonus tracks staged and filmed at a railway station-very effective. His slide playing (standing up) is another extremely rare view of Muddy.
This is one of the most historic releases for urban blues yet available. The sound has been remixed by Eddie Kramer.
Duration : 0:14:47
Henry James Townsend — Blind Girl Blues
Henry Townsend, the only blues artist to have recorded during every decade from the 1920s to the 2000s, was born in Shelby on October 27, 1909. A longtime resident of St. Louis, where he was hailed as a patriarch of the local blues scene,
Townsend died on September 24, 2006. Other performers from the Shelby area have included singers Erma Franklin, Jo Jo Murray, the Kelly Brothers, and Hattie Littles, jazz legend Gerald Wilson, and bandleader Choker Campbell.
Townsend, a master guitarist and pianist, played an integral role in the vital St. Louis blues scene of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. His earliest years were spent in Shelby and then near Lula; the family was in Cairo, Illinois, when Townsend ran away from home and settled in St. Louis as a preteen. He made his recording debut in 1929, and during the 1930s he recorded in the company of leading blues artists including Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Robert Nighthawk, and Mississippi-born Big Joe Williams and Walter Davis. A prolific and spontaneous composer, Townsend claimed credit for writing the first version of the blues standard “Every Day I Have the Blues,” recorded by Tupelo native Aaron “Pine Top” Sparks in 1935.
Townsend continued to record with Davis after World War II but began working more outside of music as a hotel manager and debt collector. In 1961Townsend recorded his first album for folklorist Sam Charters, and over the next decades he toured, recorded several albums, and mentored younger artists in St. Louis. He received a prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985. In 2008 he was awarded a posthumous Grammy for his participation on the album Last of The Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen – Live in Dallas, which featured fellow nonagenarians Robert Lockwood, Honeyboy Edwards, and Pinetop Perkins.
Shelby was also the birthplace or childhood home of a number of performers who achieved later fame in Detroit, Chicago, and California. Erma Franklin (1938-2002), older sister of Aretha Franklin, recorded the first version of “Piece of My Heart,” later popularized by Janis Joplin. Singer Hattie Littles (1937-2000), once billed as the “New Queen of the Blues,” and saxophonist-bandleader Walter “Choker” Campbell (1916-1993) both recorded for the Motown label group in Detroit.
Trumpeter-bandleader Gerald Wilson (b. 1918) became an elder statesman of West Coast jazz after decades in the Los Angeles area. The Chicago area was the destination of the Kelly Brothers and their cousins, the Johns Brothers, as well as singer-guitarist Gus “Jo Jo” Murray and blues singer-bassist Willie Kent. Andrew (1935-2005), Curtis (b. 1937), and Robert Kelly (b. 1939) recorded gospel music and rhythm & blues and were billed both as the Kelly Brothers and the King Pins. Tenry “T. J.” Johns (b. 1946) led the band T. J. and the Hurricanes in Shelby and later recorded in Chicago under the name “The King Kong Rocker.” Kent (1936-2006), a favorite figure on the Chicago blues scene, recorded several albums and won numerous Blues Music Awards. Jo Jo Murray (b. 1947) remained a familiar figure in Shelby with frequent homecoming appearances at local clubs.
http://www.msbluestrail.org/_webapp_2724828/Henry_Townsend
Duration : 0:4:23
President Obama sings Sweet Home Chicago!
Blues night at the White House, February 21, 2012. See the full concert on PBS on February 27.
Duration : 0:2:14
Loma Prieta- I.V. ALBUM REVIEW
Listen: http://theneedledrop.com/2012/02/loma-prieta-fly-by-night/
On its latest album, California band Loma Prieta mixes its screamo roots with some pretty extreme sounds.
What do you think of this album? Love it? Hate it? Why? What should I review next, eh?
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FAV TRACKS: FLY BY NIGHT, FORGETTING, UNIFORM, ASIDE FROM THIS DISTANT SHADOW, THERE IS NOTHING LEFT
LEAST FAV TRACK: TORN PORTRAIT
LOMA PRIETA- I.V. / 2012 / DEATHWISH / SCREAMO, HARDCORE PUNK, POWERVIOLENCE
8/10 http://theneedledrop.com/loved-list-2012/
Y’all know this is just my opinion, right?
Duration : 0:8:26
What kind of a music scene does Downtown Detroit have at nighttime?
The next time I visit Downtown Detroit, I would like to check out the music scene. What kind of a music scene does Downtown Detroit have and where are the best places to see good music. I am interested in seeing contemporary new age music, classical music, and jazz music. Also, are the places to see good music safe to travel to at nighttime?
There are good hip-hop shows & I’ve been to a rave or 2. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarilly super safe but I do fine there everytime I go. There is a huge free event that lasts for an entire weekend. It’s called D.E.M.F. (Detroit Electronic Music Festival). It’s has a variety of artists (not only electronica) & is fun & safe. You should Google it. It has to be coming up soon.
John Jackson Teaches Louis Collins (w/host Roy Book Binder)
This DVD is a must-have for all guitarists who want a lesson with a traditional blues artist. The Piedmont style comes alive as John Jackson teaches songs from his wide repertoire, detailing the finer points of his fingerstyle technique and reminiscing about Mississippi John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, Son House and other classic blues guitarists who influenced his music. As a child, John Jackson picked up his father’s guitar and taught himself to play by listening to 78 rpm records and watching the legendary blues artists who passed through his home town in Rappahannock County, VA.
Roy Book Binder observes that there appear to be “four or five distinct John Jackson styles,” and you’ll get a taste of each one on this video, from “Little Brown Jug” (the very first piece John learned on guitar) to Mississippi John Hurt’s classic “Candy Man.” “West Coast Blues” and John Hurt’s “Louis Collins” will benefit those just getting into the fingerpicking style, while Blind Blake’s “Police Dog Blues” makes use of more advanced blues technique.
For more information on this video go to http://www.homespuntapes.com/shop/product.aspx?ID=1172
Duration : 0:3:45
