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Had all that cork on our face... made us look even blacker... shit, painted our mouths white... made 'em look big... I had to have a shot of liquor before the show. If I didn't it seemed like I couldn't be funny in front of all them people. When I had one it seemed like them people was one and I would throw up the banjo in the air and really put on a show. - Gus Cannon, on performing with Dr. Stokey's Medicine Show in Clarksdale, Mississippi

Author Topic: Son House Bio at Elderly  (Read 4592 times)

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Offline rjtwangs

  • Member
  • Posts: 181
Re: Son House Bio at Elderly
« Reply #30 on: July 07, 2011, 08:11:54 PM »
I've just ordered this book, can't wait to get it. It's also been a really good time for books about these great men. In the past few weeks I've read the recent biographies on John Hurt and Big Bill Broonzy, both great reads and highly recommended. I hope they keep on coming...

  RJ

Offline RB

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  • Posts: 63
Re: Son House Bio at Elderly
« Reply #31 on: March 14, 2014, 04:45:26 PM »
I was just looking over some old, saved email and I found this, from a friend, written November, 2011:

Quote
I subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement, it?s a bit of an indulgence, higher priced than other magazines that do the same thing.  But it?s a weekly and its reviews are compact, most contained within a page, a few going on for several pages.  A few weeks ago I saw a review for Preaching The Blues, a biography of Son House by Daniel Beaumont, published by the Oxford University Press.  There is a phrase in the review speaking of how he brought a touch of the ?numinous? to juke joints.  A nice turn of phrase, the sort of thing you read in the TLS.  Don?t know if it is exactly true, but it was sharp enough to have me remember it.  The review mentions him being a drunkard and not quite at ease with his later career in the folk music world of the 1960?s.  Remembered a time sitting in the basement of the Main Point when I must have been sixteen years old, with some other young white guys and him. Yes, he was uneasy, I think, although at the time I would not have interpreted his behavior that way. Seemed friendly, quiet, but probably wanted to get away and have a drink or two with some grown ups more like him. 

 Have not yet ordered the book, and don?t really know if I will, though there is probably a lot in it I would like to know.  But something gives me a bad feeling about it.  The author is a college professor at Rochester.


Offline RobBob

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  • Posts: 288
  • Blues is truth.
Re: Son House Bio at Elderly
« Reply #32 on: April 10, 2014, 10:08:31 AM »
It is not a bad book, but an academic can't get to the core of a bluesman.

Offline Gilgamesh

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  • Posts: 75
  • Howdy!
Re: Son House Bio at Elderly
« Reply #33 on: April 30, 2014, 06:02:29 PM »
I just read the book and totally recommend it. What I loved about it was how much it was simply a straightforward biography. I recall little, if any, romanticism, or the purple prose you typically find with Delta Blues, or the exaggerated importance of the subject, which you typically find in music bios, and bios generally.

I did not know that Son first heard the slide guitar c. 1927. That really makes you wonder how prevalent slide guitarists were in the region prior to the mid-late 1920s.

Offline oddenda

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  • Posts: 596
Re: Son House Bio at Elderly
« Reply #34 on: May 01, 2014, 02:20:19 AM »
RobBob -

          Neither can any White guys... not really. "W.E." are marginal.

Peter B.

 


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