Where you been? - Carl Martin's response to Jack Hansen's observation that he had never seen a mandolin with the pairs strung in octave courses as they were on Carl's
Paul Swinton has been working on a book about Lemon for some years. Still no word on that, that I'm aware of.
Paul Oliver produced a manuscript on Texas Blues that was potentially to be a collaboration with Mack McCormick and that has never seen the light of day.
For "some years" read "four decades", most of which was spent Stateside interviewing and researching.
As for the Texas book, Paul Oliver's health isn't what it used to be and I believe he's passed this on for others to pull into shape. I spoke to Paul on the phone last month and said his priority was to finish his autobiography. His interests have been many and varied.
I've wanted to like him, because he is highly regarded and I've thought of reasons why I should(And they have nothing to do with disabilities or any other biographical data) but I've never been able to warm to his recordings in the slightest. Of course, as we know, musical likes and dislikes are the most subjective topic there is, but I've never been able to muster anything stronger than "pretty OK" for anything of his. Granted, he's got a lot of "pretty OK's" to his credit, but he's just not my cup of tea.
The man was a genius, i think it's the rather poor (actually extremely poor) recording equipment that Paramount used to record him that gives you that impression not Lemon himself. Fact is Lemon was hard done by in that Paramount had this fantastic and incredibly unique guitar player and singer and yet they couldn't have used decent equipment to record him on. I myself had trouble hearing Lemon's work through all the scratches but one day I saw and purchased Ari Eisinger's Blind Lemon guitar lessons videos and suddenly after picking up my jaw off the floor at what I was hearing my next reaction was, "oh so that's what he is playing and Jesus how good is this little white guy ?" From that day on I hear lemon's music in a completely new way, before then every note and chord of his was a mystery but since learning songs from Ari's tape I know at least what is going on in at least 6 Lemon tunes. Then later I saw our very own Weenie, Frankie Basile doing "That Crawlin' Baby Blues" and after that the case is closed and the verdict is out. Blind lemon Jefferson has been judged by the jury and the verdict is...... THE MAN WAS A GENIUS.
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I met a woman she was a pigmeat some Big fat mouth, I followed her home She pulled a gun and broke my jaw Didnt leave me hard on, I didnt get sore