“I Wanna Go Home To The Armadillo.”
I’ve heard that song so many times without knowing the words, let alone the source. It’s the theme song to Austin City Limits, performed by Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker. (Oh and by the way, unless you’re sporting functional longrider hats, y’all just look silly.)
Red Nightmare is a must watch. Anything featuring Jack Webb is by default automatically awesome and true. [via]
Have a great weekend, folks. More great stuff is coming up, whether you like it or not.
I love rural hand-painted highway signs that are spelled correctly and get right to the point, like this one. (Note that the pavement is blackened from all the cars screeching to a stop upon spotting this effective advertisement).
“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.”
Tacky Raccoons 
