One of the enduring and endearing features of the weenie site is the quotes box that appears below the heading on each page. Currently there are 432 quotes in the database, just enough so that when the server picks one at random they don't come around too often.
But... we need new blood! We'd like to encourage everyone who visits the site to be on the lookout for new quotes and post them to this thread. Periodically we'll add the new ones to the quotes database.
So when you're reading books and liner notes, or transcribing lyrics, and spot something that should be in the quotes database please post the exact text right here, followed by some attribution. Attribution is important for 'fair use', people might want to buy the book or CD and we like to support that kind of thing.
The standard format we have adopted is as follows:
This is the body text of the quote - this is who said it, in what context
« Last Edit: May 12, 2007, 11:24:02 AM by Rivers »
So to kick things off, here's one I spotted recently:
"...probably the low point of my music-listening career": Mississippi bluesmen Skip James and John Hurt trying to perform a version of "Waiting for a Train" with one playing waltz time and the other 4/4 - David Evans quoted in Nolan Porterfield's biography of Jimmie Rodgers
« Last Edit: May 11, 2007, 03:39:40 PM by Rivers »
When I asked Son House to listen to a particular line from a song by Charley Patton that I could not make out, House laughed. He said "You could sit at Charley's feet and not understand a word he sang." - Jeff Todd Titon, "Early Downhome Blues"
I would think there must be a few "gems" contained in some of the ancient pieces I've posted over the past year or so. If time permits I might trawl them and copy/paste here.
"This world is not made to suit no one man's order." - Roosevelt Sykes (Blues Collection 46, Orbis Publishing Ltd. pg 550)
"G'WAY an' quit dat noise, Miss Lucy-- Put dat music book away; What's de use to keep on tryin'? Ef you practise twell you're gray." - Paul Lawrence Dunbar
From Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem When Malindy Sings, and recorded by Rev. James A. Myers of The Fisk University Jubilee Quartet. Available from Document Records on The Fisk Jubilee Singers Vol.1 1909-11 DOCD-5533. The Fisk's might fall well outside the scope and tastes of Weenie Campbell, and have only been present in B&GR since the 4th edition, however I think this is such a wonderful quote that applies equally to anyone learning an instrument today as it did to Miss Lucy.
"[We played in] restaurants, taverns, and gangster hangouts. Played... Italian music, German music, we played polka music... we'd play blues, too... we played wherever the dancers was." - Roosevelt Scott, on the life of a "bluesman" in Chicago in the 1940s. From an interview with Jim O'Neal, quoted in the notes to Document CD 5413.
"The words was the hardest thing to get and make 'em stick. Sometimes you'd sit down at night and write two or three songs, but they had the same tune to mostly all. All the blues pretty near sound alike unless you got a rare voice and put turns and trills in it." - Thomas A. "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, interviewed by Jim O'Neal and Amy van Singel, from The Voice Of The Blues
Hammy Nixon: Well I know you can see better than I can Sleepy John Estes: I'll ask Rachell, how do you feel Rachell? Yank Rachell: You don't need to see to play music Sleepy John Estes: Well, now that's what I'm talking about...when I'm coughin' I create it out of my soul...Delmark records say, "We don't want any of that..good, right?...spoil it."
Yank Rachell's Tennessee Jug Busters conversation before the track "Shout Baby Shout"
"[We played in] restaurants, taverns, and gangster hangouts. Played... Italian music, German music, we played polka music... we'd play blues, too... we played wherever the dancers was." - Roosevelt Scott, on the life of a "bluesman" in Chicago in the 1940s. From an interview with Jim O'Neal, quoted in the notes to Document CD 5413.
That's awfully familiar. It's Jim O'Neal in his superb sleevenotes to the double LP Okeh Chicago Blues, Epic EG37318, 1982, from an unpublished interview. Bob Eagle also interviewed Scott and that was published in Blues World 43, (Summer 1972 p.9 & 12) as "Roosvelt [sic] Scott Remembers ?.". If it's interesting enough I might scan and post as new topic.
« Last Edit: May 13, 2007, 03:03:41 AM by Bunker Hill »
"If you don't give me my hat I will blow your brains out" - Stack Lee Shelton told Billy Lyons, eyewitness George McFaro's account in Stagolee Shot Billy, Cecil Brown
"Bedbug's big as a jackass, he will bite you and stand and grin. Drink up all the bedbug poison, come back and bite you again." - Furry Lewis, 'Mean Old Bedbug Blues'
On page 72 of "Oh, Didn't He Ramble The Life Story of Lee Collins as told to Mary Collins" (Illinois UP, 1977) there's a few pages where he recalls 30s & 40s blues singers he worked with, and on page 73:
"During those years [Chicago late 30s] there was also a blues singer by the name of Dr Clayton out of Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was very popular and made a lot of records. 'Danny Boy' was his favourite and he could really sing it, but he was more of a blues singer."
He then goes on to say Clayton was a heavy drinker and thought he died in 1946,
B-u-t, Dr Clayton, singing 'Danny Boy'? The mind boggles.