These Memphis cops call me a vagrant, but I?m a musician. I?m a recording artist for the Vict?ry [Victor] company. Known all over the world. But these southern laws don?t recognize a man by his talents.
Willie Blackwell to Alan Lomax
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Robert was loading his gear into the van when he dropped an amplifier onto his left hand and broke his forefinger. The second night he just reinvented all his chords for three fingers. Most amazing thing I ever did see - Robert Junior Lockwood, by Chris Smith on prewarblues list
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These Memphis cops call me a vagrant, but I?m a musician. I?m a recording artist for the Vict?ry [Victor] company. Known all over the world. But these southern laws don?t recognize a man by his talents. Willie Blackwell to Alan Lomax "Can you play B.B. King?" "Yeah, if you put some strings on him, I'll play him." - Yank Rachell, Blues Mandolin Man
"You say a white boy can't know the blues. During the Depression I'd sleep in ditches and know if I died that night no one would know what I was or where I come from."
--Harmonica Frank Floyd, quoted in Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins' Good Rocking Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock & Roll. Here's "Ninety-Nine Years and One Dark Day." The ninety-nine years is when you got a lifetime, the dark day is when you're dead. That's too bad for you. - Jesse Fuller
"The sweet, passionate melody captivated his heart from the first note; it was full of radiance, full of the tender throbbing of inspiration and happiness and beauty, continually growing and melting away; it rumoured of everything on earth that is dear and secret and sacred to mankind; it breathed of immortal sadness and it departed from the earth to die in the heavens."
Ivan Turgenev i asked him how 'bout it, & he said, "all right!" i asked him how long, & he said, "all night!"
? Mattie Delaney, 'The Big Road Blues' (1930) "You can't play no blues unless you have some hard times. Young people today, I don'y care whether they're black or white, they didn't come up like Muddy and me, they come up too easy."
Howlin' Wolf to Peter Guralnick, from Feel Like Going Home. I posted this in my thread What Is It About the Blues, but I felt it belonged here on its own merit as well. "I had no idea jug band music was so important" - overheard in the lobby at a Chasin' Gus's Ghost performance
And that was my 2,900th post, excellent. I made my first banjo out of a guitar neck and a tin can mama used to make biscuits in. And the first thing I learnt on that was Old John Booker - You Call That Gone. - Gus Cannon, interview on Broadcasting the Blues, Document Records.
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Don't know if we had it before, but the Jesse Fuller reference above reminds me of his:
"'Scuse my cough, I slept in a chicken house last night!" "Its like somebody making your lip speak, making it say things he thinks....The Blues is a slow story. The feeling of the beautiful things that happen to you is in the Blues; its a home language like two friends talking.
its the language everybody understands. You can inject into people with the instrument i think. Trumpeter Henry Red Allen on the Blues "Ma, well then it looks like I found me some religion" Brings to mind Broonzy's 'Hey Bub Blues' : I seed a man standin' at the window pullin' off his clothes.... So I said, "Hey, Bub, -- what goes?" So he said, "Look, Bub, -- if you knowed what I paid for this room and what's in it, them clothes will be out of style when I come down." "Is your name Rabbit or is that just a nickname?" "No, my name is Lewis Anderson Muse. That's my real name." "How'd they give you that name?" "What, Rabbit? Well, I got that name playing baseball." - Interview with Lewis "Rabbit" Muse, Digital Library of Appalachia
Upstroke is the way I learned it though. That's the way you're supposed to go with a mandolin. After I got my hands stiff I have to play it down. I can't play that quiver like I used to. You can play that quiver better with an upstroke. Upstroke is a better sound to me. Sure is. - Yank Rachell, Blues Mandolin Man
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