Saturday Matinee – Cooder, Mahal & Cooder, Duane Eddy & La Mississippi

Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, with Joachim Cooder on drums, from Get On Board, a tribute to Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. Great country blues.

Mancini’s classic by the Titan of Twang himself, Duane Eddy.

The Mississippi Blues Band formed in Buenos Aires in 1989. Renamed La Mississippi, they released their debut recording, Mbugi in 1993.

Have a great Labor Day weekend, and if you’re driving somewhere, don’t complain about the traffic – once you pull out of your driveway, you ARE the traffic. See ya tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – Taj Mahal & Etta James, Little Feat, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real

Taj MahalEtta James covered Inez & Charlie Foxx in 1993 on Letterman.
[h/t Mme. Jujujive]

Little Feat  would hate to lose your lovin’.

Meanwhile, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real (aka PTOR) had just about enough of the drama and decided to walk. Nelson & PTOR got off to a good start in 2008, opening for his dad, Willie, and now they back up Neil Young. They sound a bit like The Band to me, and that’s a good thing.

There’s a big storm coming, and I’m not talking about weather. Get your stuff in order and be back here tomorrow for no reason at all.

Saturday Matinee – Thee Lakesiders, Thee Sinseers, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, & Taj Mahal

Thee Lakesiders have a good East L.A. retro vibe that kinda matches my mood lately. Let’s groove it up a bit.

More East L.A. R&B, this time from Thee Sinseers.

St. Paul & The Broken Bones successfully channels the Stax Records sound, and my mood is improving a bit.

Taj Mahal takes a ride around town, pickin’ the classics, and I feel better.

<vent>Way too much stuff went down in meatworld this week, some very good, some pretty bad, and the latter was starting to get to me. Backing into a BMW SUV in a hospital parking lot didn’t help either – just one more damn thing to accept and deal with. Yeah, the Lord’s testing me…</vent>

Ah well, have a great weekend, folks. Wear masks if you have to, don’t if you don’t. Do what you want and ignore the scolds – they’re not going to eat you (unless you let them). See you tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – Max’s Journey to the Moon, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Ry Cooder & Taj Mahal

Cool animation required 600 pancakes [found here]).

Bassist Keith Ferguson is ‘playing’ one of Jimmy’s 6 string guitars upside down.”

The original Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1980:
Jimmie Vaughan (guitar), Kim Wilson (vocals/harmonica), Keith Ferguson (guitar) and Mike Buck (drums).

If Things Could Talk (1974)
Ry Cooder – guitars, vocals; Russ Titelman – bass; Jim Keltner & Milt Holland – percussion, drums; Bobby King, Gene Mumford & Cliff Givens – backup vocals. (Mumford & Givens sang with The Dominoes.)
40 years later:

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder play Blind Willie McTell‘s 1928 Statesboro Blues in 2014.

Have a great weekend, folks, and we’ll sure do something or other tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – Ismael Sanz-Pena, Ricky Syers, Taj Mahal & ZZ Top


Persistence of Vision III is an awesome vid by Ismael Sanz-Pena  [h/t Mme. Jujujive].

Cool artistry, cool story, and Ricky Syers is interesting.

The legendary Taj Mahal & The Phantom Blues Band covered Bill Doggett‘s 1956 hit Honky Tonk “filmed at Yoshi’s SF grand opening.” (Yoshi’s had grand openings in 1972, 1979, 1985 & 1997, so take your pick.)

ZZ Top is one of the greatest 3-man blues-rock freight trains ever, and here they are in their prime.

Have a great weekend, folks. We’ll be back here tomorrow, rain or shinola.

Saturday Matinee – Blind Willie McTell, Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder, The Allman Brothers & Buddy Guy

Yeah. That’s the great Taj Mahal with the great Ry Cooder covering the great Blind Willie McTell‘s great 1928 recording of Statesboro Blues in Nashville Tennessee, September, 2014.

The Allman Brothers covered the same great song.

Speaking of jamming, the great Buddy Guy still does it better than most.

Have a great weekend, my friends, see you back here tomorrow.

The .Gif Friday Post No. 263 – Rotation

Cat Recycling V1Cat Recycling V2

Taj Mahal Spin

Chicken Wire

[First .gifs found here. I rotated them and paired ’em up. The other two were from a site that’s NSFW/NSFK, but…

Due to almost-unforseen circumstances, I’m posting this from an annoyingly un-tweaked mouse-less laptop, and I don’t have my bookmarks handy to link to it. My ailing desktop is going in for surgery tomorrow.

[Update: Surgery failed, can’t fix a broken motherboard. You read that right. Not malfunctioning. Broken. I broke it. I broke a motherboard.

Adam’s Electronics swapped me a refurbished model, over and above the quality of service expected. They are beyond the valley of awesome.]

Saturday Matinee – Country Blues Edition, With Furry Lewis, Belton Sutherland, and Taj Mahal Hosts A Documentary

“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.

A story about Lomax’ filmAmerican Patchwork” includes one mention:

“…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.”

That’s a great documentary about Country Blues, hosted by the great Henry Saint Clair Fredericks.

For those of you who find the rough roots of The Blues too tough to listen to, here’s a a WTF moment for a cat instead.

Have a great weekend folks, and we’ll be back tomorrow with more odd funnies.

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