Topic: "Rack It Back And Tell It Right" - Quote Drive 2018

[Gumbo]

"It was music which had been brought up from the Mississippi delta by migrating post World War II Negroes and hardened and toughened and electrified and amplified to suit the dance halls and mean streets of Chicago, and it thrilled me to the very depths of my soul.  To a dissolute white kid from the mean streets of a concrete housing estate, this music seemed tailored to echo the way that I felt."
Fred McCormick on discovering 'The Best of Muddy Waters' (on Pye International), in a world of Cliff Richard and Helen Shapiro.

[Gumbo]

"I swore to myself I wasn?t writing another goddamned broken-hearted love song, but then my lover took flight and I found myself alone, worn out, disillusioned, and heartbroken in a way I hadn?t known before. The future was looking like an exhaustingly long walk through a knee-deep tunnel of shit ending in death, so, it seemed like it wasn?t going to be an overly joyous next record after all."
Gill Landry on making 'Love Rides A Dark Horse'.

[Gumbo]

"Tell Me, Honey, tell me please. Is my lover hard to please? I'm getting groggy in my knees. Honey, it must be love!"
Blind Willie McTell.

[Stuart]

"I swore to myself I wasn?t writing another goddamned broken-hearted love song, but then my lover took flight and I found myself alone, worn out, disillusioned, and heartbroken in a way I hadn?t known before. The future was looking like an exhaustingly long walk through a knee-deep tunnel of shit ending in death, so, it seemed like it wasn?t going to be an overly joyous next record after all."
Gill Landry on making 'Love Rides A Dark Horse'.

And then there was the negative side...

Here's one for you:

"Q: 'What's the biggest problem with most troubled relationships?' A: 'The other person.'"

[Johnm]

Hi Gumbo,
What is a "world of Cliff Richards and Helen Shapiro"?
All best,
Johnm

[Gumbo]

Pye International is the UK label that began releasing Chess records in the UK in or around 1961. Richards and Shapiro would have been standard radio fare at that point. I was attempting to condense Fred's pre-amble to the quote. Brevity, it seems, is also the soul of ambiguity!

[Johnm]

Thanks, Gumbo.  I think I'd heard of Cliff Richards, but drew a total blank on Helen Shapiro.

[Gumbo]

Fred mentioned other names as well, but we don't need to go there 

[Rivers]

Thanks for getting this year's quotes rolling Gumbo.

I guess you really had to be there. I liked Helen. And Dusty Springfield. They were an integral part of the Brit scene as it exploded on TV and record at the time (mid- to late Sixties), along with many other names that have faded into obscurity worldwide. Helen Shapiro was the female Brit equivalent, & contemporary, of, say, Gene Pitney in the US, in my mind.

[lindy]

?The blues? Ain?t no first blues. The blues always been.?
           

--Nelson ?Big Eye? Delisle, early New Orleans jazz clarinetist, in response to an Alan Lomax question in 1940

[Rivers]

I added these 2018 entries to the quotes database today, as well as the 2017 ones. That was 30 additions, for a total of 1,045 quotes. So all is up to date to here.

And please do bring on more quotes. I'm sure everyone here enjoys seeing what turns up. It's slowed down in the last couple of years as we gathered much of the low hanging fruit. Think of it as a challenge.

Thanks to all - Rivers, de facto curator, weenie magic 8 ball project

[Stuart]

?Somebody put it on the internet and it went bacterial.?

--Donald Hall, U.S. Poet Laureate

[harriet]

"If you try to play like someone else, who will play like you?"
Johnny Gimble

[Rivers]

Brownie McGhee ... says that after the gig all the important folk people came over and told him that he had to move to New York because "they didn't have any blues singers up there; that Josh White was the only one, and he'd gone white." McGhee laughingly adds that when he got to New York and met Josh, "when i saw how much money he was making, I said, 'Hey, show me how to go white too!''" - from Society Blues, Elijah Wald