B. B. King (1925–2015)
“It really feels like the end of something.”
Samuel Charters (1929–2015)
He may have done more than anyone else to popularize the inchoate but deeply appealing idea of “the country blues.”
Words of wisdom from Albert King
“Most important thing: the better you get, the harder you work.”
Johnny Winter (1944–2014)
A great guitarist.
Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig!
Howlin’ Wolf performs “How Many More Years,” May 26, 1965.
Book review: John Milward, Crossroads
“As the title metaphor suggests, Crossroads is indeed a ‘a history of connections’ — delightful, improbable, and rewarding, as rock musicians drew deep inspiration from blues, and blues musicians gained new (young, white) audiences for their work.”
Albert Murray (1916–2013)
An excerpt from The Omni-Americans.
Alan Wilson, The Blind Owl
“Me, a writer of liner notes: something I never imagined when I began listening to Canned Heat more than forty years ago.”
John Hurt and Skip James, 1964
Live on the radio.
Mississippi John Hurt: Sing Out!
A 1967 magazine cover.
Mississippi John Hurt, Discovery
“To listen to these recordings is to hear Hurt in two worlds at once: the one a world of private jokes and laughter and the occasional rooster, the other a world in which he was hardly at ease but, it seems, game.”
DFW blues howler
David Foster Wallace writing about a subject he must have known little about.
An afterthought
If I were Boing Boing, the title of the previous post might’ve read like so: Hardee’s commercial likens young women, virgins to breakfast meat.
Hardee’s pigmeat commercial
The song is not about bacon.
Higgs boson explained (?)
Now you ain’t so big, you just small, that’s all.
The Oxford typo
“Carelessness runs through this biography of Son House; this footnote is just an especially glaring example. Ought a reader to expect more from a university press? From Oxford University Press? I would think so.”
David “Honeyboy” Edwards (1915–2011)
The last of the Delta blues musicians.
Blues idiom of the day: dust one’s broom
From Stephen Calt’s Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary
“Ice and Snow Blues No. 3”
It is really, really snowing.
“Ice and Snow Blues No. 2”
Ice getting thicker.
“Ice and Snow Blues”
A good day for Clifford Gibson’s 1929 recording “Ice and Snow Blues.”
Hooker ’n Heat
To my ears, it’s the best record John Lee Hooker made. It might be Canned Heat’s best too.
Mississippi John Hurt
From Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest
Michael P. Smith, photographer
Photographer of New Orleans culture and music
Forty years apart
Henry Thomas, "Bull Doze Blues." Canned Heat, "Going Up the Country."
Listening to Robert Johnson
"The impossibility of reverse-engineering the circumstances of recording puts me in mind of the title of David Shapiro’s poem 'After a Lost Original': we have no reference point for knowing what Johnson sounded like when recording other than his recordings."
Bill Withers and John Hammond
Bill Withers on "blaxperts"
Illinois Central Railroad Pencil
A railroad pencil, and the role of the Illinois Central in blues
Koko Taylor (1928-2009)
"She was, an one of her album titles declares, a force of nature."
Leadbelly at the MLA
An improbable encounter