Imelda May is way cool. That’s her version of Buddy Holly’s “Looking For Love” which was also covered by The Stray Cats. It was never covered by Andy Tielman as far as I know, but here on The Saturday Matinee, one vid and three links just don’t make the nut.
Yep. That’s Jimmy & The Rackets as if I had to tell you, but now I’m torn between two more vids to post. I’ll resolve the dilemma by posting them both, back-to-back, because each of them made me smile for different reasons. Have a great weekend folks, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.
Serge Gainsbourg singing “Chez Les Ye-Ye.” Serge is Pee Wee Herman on sopors. He rocked, but not as much as Pierre Cassel whose shoes became glued to the floor during the video. Cassel’s son is a rapper named “Rockin’ Squat.” Go figger.
Personally, I think Robert Johnson was/is overrated, and his fame is due to his recordings covered by British rockers of the early 60s.
Yeah I know, Blasphemy. Johnson got picked, while others, like Papa Charlie Jackson were overlooked. I’m not an authority on musical anthropology, so take it for what it’s worth.
Jackson’s “Airy Man” showed up on a Yazoo Records album that the Missus gave me years ago. The chords were unusual, and the liner notes said this:
“Airy Man Blues,” a work in the key of D, illustrates Jackson’s most complex blues picking in the uptempo idiom at which he and very few other bluesmen excelled. Two fingers play melody and harmonies with support from a thumb which is quite steady within several different patterns. Often he executes complex or seemingly impromptu runs on three or more strings. The basic chord changes are:
D, D, G7, D; G, D, E, A/A7; D, D, G7, D; G7, D, E/A7, D. In the break he changes to B, B7, E, E7, A, A7 D/D minor, D.
Despite the length of these phrases and the comedy of his lyrics, the song is well within the basic blues idiom, lacking in all essential ragtime qualities except speed.
So I looked for a live vid of Papa Charlie Jackson, but instead found a cool tribute by “Gnarlemagne.” It works.
With that we’re out. Have a great weekend, folks and be back here tomorrow for more inane entertainment.
“If you want to go to heaven when you D.I.E.,
Put on your collar and a T.I.E.
If you wanna scare a rabbit out an L.O.G.,
Just make a little sound like a D.O.G.”
That’s Furry Lewis playing slide on “Kassie Jones,” a song he recorded in 1927. The video is from 1968. A few years later Joni Mitchell met with him and recorded “Furry Sings The Blues” in tribute.
Lewis despised Mitchell’s song and demanded she pay him royalties. “She shouldn’t have used my name in no way, shape, form or faction without consultin’ me ’bout it first. The woman came over here and I treated her right, just like I does everybody that comes over. She wanted to hear ’bout the old days, said it was for her own personal self, and I told it to her like it was, gave her straight oil from the can.”
Belton Sutherland was a Mississipi Delta bluesman. There is no Wiki article for him and little other information about him on the internest. There’s no entry for him in Lawrence Cohn’s “Nothing But The Blues” either. Sutherland was filmed in 1978 by Alan Lomax at Maxwell’s Farm, near Canton Mississippi.
“…Lomax rounded up folks even he hadn’t heard of, like Mississippi bluesman Belton Sutherland–a master musician who appeared during Lomax’s session with another singer and asked to ‘try’ the guitar.”
“I’m just an entertainer, and I use music as a medium for entertaining. But I’m not really an entertainer either, because to be an entertainer it implies you have a great desire to want to entertain.”
Leon Redbone
Leon Redbone‘s take on Lonnie Johnson’s “Mr. Jelly Roll Baker” in 2009. (BTW, “jelly roll” was slang for something other than a pastry.)
On growing up in New Orleans Parish: “There was music all around us, and in my family you’d better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can.”
Lonnie Johnson
Lonnie Johnson created the single-note guitar solo in the 1920s, and decades passed before the guitar was regarded as more than a background rhythm instrument. I don’t know who’s on drums or piano, but that’s Willie Dixon on bass, and the vid is likely from the mid to late 1960s.
My first impression of “ethnomusicologist” Bob Brozman was that he’s a pretentious jerk. On the other hand, he’s crammed some great country/Delta blues licks into his American Steel.
Let’s wrap this baboso up with two of the greatest modern day slide guitar players, on stage together in Austin: Bonnie Raitt & Roy Rogers jamming “Gnawin’ On It.”
I don’t usually post two in a row from the same musician, but here’s Mean Mary and husband brother Frank James with “Joy,” an original song she wrote (with snippets from “Ode To Joy”).
The great Sam Chatmon plays Big Road Blues, That’s All Right & Sam’s Rag.
Boyd Rivers at the Mississippi Blues Festival 1980, introduced by Willie Dixon.
Ah, bullpoop. They’re not the greatest guitar players ever, but this is pretty good. Larry Carlton & Robben Ford jam the blues 2007.
That should do you folks for a while. Have a great weekend, see you tomorrow.
[Correction: Frank James is Mean Mary’s brother, not her husband. h/t Steven Brooke.]
Very cold water is very dense. Fishing in a frozen lake in Finland. Here’s an explanation [via]:
They have inflated their BCDs (vests) with air. This will make them float up to the ‘top’. This allows them to stand on the ice upside down. If there was no ice, they would surface. You can see when they breathe, the CO2 will float to the top (bottom) of the ice and it trapped. The wheel barrow is filled with CO2 expelled (poured in from the bucket). This makes it want to float too and hence will stick to the bottom of the ice until they dump it out, which will make it loose its buoyancy and sink to the bottom…
Happy birthday to Kim Wilson, one of the greatest blues harp blowers. Saw him with his original lineup in the early 80’s, pre- Kid Ramos. Pure awesome then, pure awesome now. And just for the helluvit, here’ my favorite Zappa song to wrap it all up, “Black Napkins.”
Yeah, I may have posted that before, but so what – I like it. Have a great weekend, folks, be back here tomorrow for more fun and games.
Tacky Raccoons 