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The Down Home Boys - Two Little Tommie Blues by Papa Harvey Hull & Long "Cleve" Reed from The Songster Tradition (1927- 35)

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Preserving Country Blues through Education, Performance and Technology

Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends: Party!

November 17, 2011, 06:25:41 PM by Slack
Views: 288 | Comments: 0

Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends: Party!
Written by John Miller

Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends: Party! At Home-Arcola Records, A CD 1001

This wonderful CD was recorded by Arcola Records founder Bob West in 1968, at a couple of home recording sessions/parties, one at the home of Albino Red and two at Furry Lewis's apartment. The relaxed circumstances in which the recordings were made certainly had a beneficial effect on the music; Bukka White and Furry Lewis are both in outstanding form here, and placing the songs in the context of the parties where they were recorded and including the jocularity and banter of the various friends assembled for the event makes you feel as though you were there yourself. It really sounds like all concerned had a darn good time.

The program, which is divided roughly equally between Furry and Bukka, is opened by Bukka, with"Hello Central, Give Me 49", a one-chord slide number in Vastapol. From the opening notes, I found myself staggered by the force of Bukka's playing--it put me in mind of Charlie Patton's aside on "34 Blues": "My God, what solid power!" Bukka follows up with "Gray-Haired Woman", similarly in cross-note tuning and working from the "Aberdeen, Mississippi" model, but with a crucial difference: on "Gray-Haired Woman", Bukka employs a lot of syncopated thumb-popping of the fifth string in ...

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Sunnyland Slim-Long Tall Daddy

November 17, 2011, 06:25:00 PM by Slack
Views: 242 | Comments: 0

Sunnyland Slim-Long Tall Daddy
Written by John Miller

Sunnyland Slim-Long Tall Daddy, Arcola Records A CD 1006

The Blues pianist and singer Albert "Sunnyland Slim" Luandrew was born in 1907 near Vance, Mississippi, 20-30 miles southeast of Clarksdale, and died on March 17, 1995. A listing of performers with whom he played or recorded over the course of his career reads like a "Who's Who" of Blues musicians from the '30s on up to the '80s and '90s, with Little Brother Montgomery, Roosevelt Sykes, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boys I and II, Muddy Waters, and Robert Lockwood, Jr. numbered among them. This CD captures a session recorded by Arcola founder Bob West aboard his houseboat on May 7, 1976, during a trip Slim was paying to Seattle accompanied by the youthful Sarah Streeter, who was later to gain recognition as the Chicago blues singer Big Time Sarah.
Slim opens the program with "I'm Tore Up", a rollicking shuffle that lays its cards right on the table: "I'm tore up, people just as drunk as I can be". Slim's musical strengths similarly are on display from the word go. His time is really strong, his reach quite large, and he likes thick scrunchy chordal voicings. He particularly likes to employ tremolo with the sustain pedal depressed. That sound reminds me a bit of the great South African Jazz pianist Abdullah...

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Babe Stovall-The Old Ace

November 17, 2011, 06:24:03 PM by Slack
Views: 479 | Comments: 7

Babe Stovall-The Old Ace
Written by John Miller

Babe Stovall-The Old Ace Arcola Records A CD 1005

This CD offers 13 songs by, and three brief interviews with, Babe Stovall, a Mississippi-born New Orleans street musician, recorded by Arcola Records founder Bob West in July of 1968. David Evans's informative liner notes tell us that Babe was born on October 4, 1907 near Tylertown, Mississippi, approximately 100 miles North of New Orleans, in a part of the state that the blues had not really reached at that time. Partially as a result of his birthplace, Babe's repertoire tended toward a lot of cut-time pre-Blues material of a type one would not normally associate with a Mississippi player, with a predilection for playing in C and G in standard tuning rather than the Spanish and E standard tunings that you might expect from a delta musician of that era.
Babe was also certainly not averse to picking up songs from recordings or wherever else he might hear them. In the three or four years prior to these recordings being made, Babe had done a bit of touring in the U.S., playing in Boston, New York, Southern California and San Francisco, being taken on his tours by a young musician, Mark Ryan, who had discovered Babe playing in New Orleans and had been impressed by his music. Babe passed away on September 21, 1974.

What of Babe's music, then? ...

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Angola Prisoners' Blues

November 17, 2011, 06:23:05 PM by Slack
Views: 237 | Comments: 0

Angola Prisoners' Blues
Written by John Miller

Angola Prisoners' Blues--Arhoolie CD 419

This CD was recorded by Dr. Harry Oster at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana in the 1950s. Arhoolie has released two other CDs of material recorded by Dr. Oster at Angola in the same period, one focusing on work songs and the other on spirituals.

The program starts with Robert Pete Williams performing his "Prisoner's Talking Blues", a free-associated recitation over riffing in D on Dr. Oster's twelve-string guitar. Robert Pete expressed himself so poetically in the normal course of affairs that it is hard to believe he didn't plan out lines like: "I don't keep well no more. I keeps sickly.I takes a lot of medicine, but it looks like it don't do no good. All I have to do is pray; that's the only thing'll help me here. One foot in the grave, look like, and the other'un out. Sometime looks like my best day gotta be my last day."

Matthew "Hogman" Maxey follows with a version of "Stagolee", likewise played on Dr. Oster's twelve-string. Hogman's monicker derived apparently from his mistaken notion as a child that he was a hog doctor. His version of "Stagolee" is terrific. Played in E standard, it shares much of the same vocal phrasing as Lloyd Price's popular version from the '50s, but Hogman's time is so driving, fierce really, that the song i...

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This Old Hammer - John Miller

November 17, 2011, 06:22:21 PM by Slack
Views: 575 | Comments: 0

This Old Hammer - John Miller
Written by Andrew Mullins

This Old Hammer - John Miller
Orb Discs Orb-1010

This Old Hammer is John Miller's first solo blues outing in over three decades, so one can understand how some people may have been getting a little impatient waiting for this record to appear. His LPs made for Blue Goose in the 1970s are highly regarded -- and nearly impossible to find. Shortly after those albums, John was off exploring different musical directions, with projects over the years ranging from jazz to bluegrass to world music. While those who have had the opportunity to see him perform live in recent years have been able to catch tantalizing snippets of this new blues album at a gig or workshop, finally that music is gathered in one place.

(I should say in the interest of full disclosure that I know John and have studied with him at the Port Townsend Country Blues Workshop for years. Like a lot of people, a great number of them his fellow musicians, I admire his talent and the depth of his knowledge of country blues styles. But given the strength of this album, any possible bias I might have seems irrelevant to me.)

The overall creative approach taken on This Old Hammer is to reinvent country blues originals that have caught John's ear over the years. As he explains in his notes for the CD, "I wanted to ret...

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