John Mayall (1933–2024)
I wanted to find something with Mayall playing piI wanted to find something with Mayall playing piano, solo. I got close: here’s “Bear Wires,” with Bob Hite.
Orange Crate Art: Desert Island Discs : Keith Richards
From BBC Radio 4: the Keith Richards episode of Desert Island Discs.
Mack McCormick’s Monster
The Smithsonian is revealing more materials from Mack McCormick’s archive of recordings and writings, aka “The Monster.”
A Gennett Records documentary
From WTIU, a 2018 documentary, The Music Makers of Gennett Records. Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Uncle Dave Macon, and Charley Patton were among the musicians who recorded for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana.
Robert, Jack and Jill, and others
Details culled from Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson’s stepsister.
A teaching moment
One time after I played Robert Johnson’s recording of “Cross Road Blues,” a student in the front row said “You should’ve played Cream.” I smiled and asked, “Where do you think they got it?”
Icicles, shrimp, and tamales
From Mack McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey.
Peg and Pinkie (and Floyd)
Peg Leg Sam and Pink Anderson, in an old issue of Billboard.
Joe Bussard, streaming
Ninety episodes of Joe Bussard’s radio show/podcast, Country Classics. All 78s: country, blues, jazz, gospel.
Joe Bussard (1936–2022)
Record collector extraordinaire. Dust-to-Digital has an appreciation.
Sheiks
The music that runs behind the opening credits of A Face in the Crowd (credited to Tom Glazer) is more or less a version of the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Sitting on Top of the World.” An apt choice for the story the movie tells.
Blue canard
Sorry, Open Culture, there’s no evidence that Robert Johnson’s recordings were intentionally speeded up.
Bob Koester (1932–2021)
The proprietor of Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart and the founder of Delmark Records
Yazoo Zippy, sort of
In today’s Zippy, Bill Griffith pays tribute to his great-grandfather, the painter and photographer William Henry Jackson. One of Jackson’s photographs appears on the cover of a Yazoo LP.
Knowing of
A character from Proust and Skip James.
Son House and Buddy Guy
I went on a Son House kick yesterday and discovered that an episode of Camera Three with Son House and Buddy Guy is now available at YouTube.
NPR, Son House, and Brünnhilde
I know what Son House meant when he sang that the minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days. So that’s one singer. But with Griffy and Zippy, I am waiting for Brünnhilde.
A third Robert Johnson photograph
It appears on the cover of a book published this week, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Close enough for tarantellas
A wonderful example of musical versatility, with Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines in New York and New Jersey.
A Robert Johnson obituary
In The New York Times. Not great.
An Alabama song
WTF’s chief meteorologist: “Alabama was going to be hit very hard, along with Georgia.” So I thought of a song, Charley Patton’s “Going to Move to Alabama.”
Chris Albertson (1931–2019)
The writer, producer, and Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson has died at the age of eighty-seven.
Playing to lose
Buddy Guy: “Funny thing about the blues — you play ’em cause you got ’em. But, when you play ’em, you lose ’em.”
Otis Rush (1935–2018)
“All the old musicianers and music philosophers are going: their time has come.”
Robert Johnson, mortgagor
“She got a mortgage on my body now, and a lien on my soul.”
Dowd, Waters, and Walker
Attn: Maureen Dowd: T-Bone Walker should be credited, not Muddy Waters.
Paul Oliver (1920–2017)
As a teenager, I borrowed Oliver’s The Story of the Blues (1969) from the library, again and again. The first blues record I ever bought: the Columbia double-album The Story of the Blues (1969), designed to accompany the book. A world opened.
James Cotton (1935–2017)
The harpist and singer James Cotton has died at the age of eighty-one.
Leon Russell (1941–2016)
Furry Lewis and Russell and company perform “Furry’s Blues.”
The color of blue
From William H. Gass.