1906 Roosevelt Sykes*
1915 Alan Lomax*
1915 Alan Lomax*
1928 Chuck Willis*
1932 Ottilie Patterson*
1932 Ottilie Patterson*
1944 Charlie
Musselwhite*
1952 Paul deLay*
1953 Big Time Sarah*
1966 Ferdl Eichner*
1966 Ferdl Eichner*
1970 Slim Harpo+
1976 Buster Brown+
1976 Buster Brown+
Little
Victor*
I think the 31.01. should be a day of remembrance for blues harmonica player.
Happy Birthday
Chuck Willis *31.01.1928
Harold „Chuck“ Willis (* 31. Januar 1928 in Atlanta, Georgia; † 10. April 1958 ebenda) war ein US-amerikanischer Blues- und Rhythm-and-Blues-Sänger und Songwriter.
Willis sang zunächst bei einigen lokalen Bands, bevor er 1951 einen Vertrag bei Columbia Records unterschrieb. Erste Erfolge in der R&B-Hitparade hatte er mit den Coverversionen von Fats Dominos Goin' to the River. Von ihm stammt das Original von I Feel So Bad, das 1961 ein Hit für Elvis Presley wurde. Er selbst erreichte 1954 Platz 8 der R&B-Charts. Ab 1956 veröffentlichte Willis bei Atlantic Records. 1957 erfolgte seine erfolgreichste Aufnahme, ein Cover von Gertrude „Ma“ Raineys C. C. Rider, das Position eins der R&B- und Platz zwölf der Popcharts erreichte. 1958 starb er an einer Peritonitis im Alter von 30 Jahren.
Seine Version des Songs C. C. Rider wurde von der Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in die Liste der 500 Songs, die den Rock and Roll geprägt haben aufgenommen. Später coverten viele Bands seine Songs, unter anderem The Band, Charlie Rich, Otis Redding, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison und Derek and the Dominos.
Harold "Chuck" Willis (January 31, 1928 – April 10, 1958)[1] was an American blues, rhythm and blues,[2] and rock and roll singer and songwriter. His biggest hits, "C. C. Rider" (1957) and "What Am I Living For" (1958), both reached No.1 on the Billboard R&B chart. He was known as The King of the Stroll for his performance of the 1950s dance the Stroll.[3]
Biography
Willis was born in Atlanta, Georgia.[4] Willis was spotted at a talent contest by Atlanta radio disc jockey Zenas Sears, who became his manager and helped him to sign with Columbia Records in 1951.[3] After one single, Willis began recording on a Columbia subsidiary, Okeh. During his stay at Okeh, he established himself as a popular R&B singer and songwriter. In 1956, he moved to Atlantic Records where he had immediate success with "It's Too Late (She's Gone)", "Juanita" and "Love Me Cherry". His most successful recording was "C.C. Rider", which topped the US Billboard R&B chart in 1957 and also crossed over and sold well in the pop market. "C.C. Rider" was a remake of a twelve-bar blues, performed by Ma Rainey in Atlanta before Willis was born.[3] Its relaxed beat, combined with a mellow vibraphone backing and chorus, inspired the emergence of the popular dance, The Stroll. Willis's follow-up was "Betty and Dupree", another "stroll" song, which also did well. Willis' single "Going to the River", a song by Fats Domino, was a prototype for his "stroll" sound, reaching No.4 on the R&B chart.[3]
Willis, who had suffered from stomach ulcers for many years, died during surgery in Chicago of peritonitis while at the peak of his career, just after the release of his last single, "What Am I Living For?", backed by "Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes". "Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes" was actually the A side of the single but upon his death "What Am I Living For" became the most popular of the two songs.[4] "What Am I Living For?" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.[1] It was also the top R&B disc of 1958.[1]
His hit, the blues ballad "It's Too Late (She's Gone)" was covered by other artists, including Otis Redding, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos and the Jerry Garcia Band. In 2005, it was heavily sampled by Kanye West on Late Registration's "Gone". Elvis Presley covered "I Feel So Bad" and "C. C. Rider" and Ruth Brown and Conway Twitty had hits with "Oh What a Dream".
Willis's cousin is Chick Willis.
Biography
Willis was born in Atlanta, Georgia.[4] Willis was spotted at a talent contest by Atlanta radio disc jockey Zenas Sears, who became his manager and helped him to sign with Columbia Records in 1951.[3] After one single, Willis began recording on a Columbia subsidiary, Okeh. During his stay at Okeh, he established himself as a popular R&B singer and songwriter. In 1956, he moved to Atlantic Records where he had immediate success with "It's Too Late (She's Gone)", "Juanita" and "Love Me Cherry". His most successful recording was "C.C. Rider", which topped the US Billboard R&B chart in 1957 and also crossed over and sold well in the pop market. "C.C. Rider" was a remake of a twelve-bar blues, performed by Ma Rainey in Atlanta before Willis was born.[3] Its relaxed beat, combined with a mellow vibraphone backing and chorus, inspired the emergence of the popular dance, The Stroll. Willis's follow-up was "Betty and Dupree", another "stroll" song, which also did well. Willis' single "Going to the River", a song by Fats Domino, was a prototype for his "stroll" sound, reaching No.4 on the R&B chart.[3]
Willis, who had suffered from stomach ulcers for many years, died during surgery in Chicago of peritonitis while at the peak of his career, just after the release of his last single, "What Am I Living For?", backed by "Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes". "Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes" was actually the A side of the single but upon his death "What Am I Living For" became the most popular of the two songs.[4] "What Am I Living For?" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.[1] It was also the top R&B disc of 1958.[1]
His hit, the blues ballad "It's Too Late (She's Gone)" was covered by other artists, including Otis Redding, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos and the Jerry Garcia Band. In 2005, it was heavily sampled by Kanye West on Late Registration's "Gone". Elvis Presley covered "I Feel So Bad" and "C. C. Rider" and Ruth Brown and Conway Twitty had hits with "Oh What a Dream".
Willis's cousin is Chick Willis.
Charlie Musselwhite *31.01.1944
Charlie Musselwhite (* 31. Januar 1944 in Kosciusko, Mississippi) ist ein US-amerikanischer Blues-Musiker (Mundharmonika, Gitarre). Sein Markenzeichen ist sein ausdrucksstarkes und zugleich technisch hervorragendes Mundharmonikaspiel, das ihn weltweit zu einem der besten Mundharmonikaspieler werden lässt. Er wurde das Vorbild für Dan Aykroyd's „Blues Brother Elwood“.[1]Biografie
Musselwhite erlebte Memphis, als dort der Rock'n'Roll geboren wurde. Unter dem Eindruck von Musikern wie Elvis Presley und Jerry Lee Lewis lernte er Mundharmonika und Gitarre spielen. Will Shade von der Memphis Jug Band wurde sein musikalischer Ziehvater. Sein Geld verdiente Musselwhite mit Whiskeyschmuggel.
Mit 18 zog Musselwhite nach Chicago, wo er Arbeit zu finden hoffte. Hier kam er mit dem "elektrischen" Blues in Berührung. Er spielte mit Legenden wie Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf und John Lee Hooker. Big Walter Horton, selbst ein Schüler von Will Shade, nahm ihn unter seine Fittiche.
1967 nahm Musselwhite mit eigener Band sein Debütalbum Stand Back! auf. Der Erfolg führte ihn nach Kalifornien, wo er blieb und die Hippieszene in und um San Francisco mit seinem Blues bereicherte.
Im Laufe seiner Karriere hat Charlie Musselwhite über 20 eigene Alben aufgenommen und war an zahlreichen Aufnahmen bekannter Kollegen beteiligt, darunter Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits und INXS. Musselwhite spielte häufig mit John Lee Hooker, der auch sein Trauzeuge war.
Charlie Musselwhite erhielt etliche Auszeichnungen, darunter 14 W. C. Handy Awards, einen Grammy (für das Album Get Up! zusammen mit Ben Harper) sowie sechs weitere Grammy-Nominierungen. 2010 wurde er in die Blues Hall of Fame der Blues Foundation aufgenommen.
Charles "Charlie" Douglas Musselwhite (born January 31, 1944) is an American electric blues harmonica player and bandleader,[1] one of the non-black bluesmen who came to prominence in the early 1960s, along with Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield. Though he has often been identified as a "white bluesman",[2][3] he claims Native American heritage. Musselwhite was reportedly the inspiration for Dan Aykroyd's character in the Blues Brothers.[4]
Biography
Childhood
Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, United States. He has said that he is of Choctaw descent, born in a region originally inhabited by the Choctaw. In a 2005 interview, he said his mother had told him he was actually Cherokee.[5]
Musselwhite's family considered it natural to play music, with his father playing guitar and harmonica, his mother playing piano, and a relative who was a one-man band.
At the age of three, Musselwhite moved to Memphis, Tennessee. When he was a teenager, Memphis experienced the period when rockabilly, western swing, and electric blues and other forms of African American music were combining to give birth to rock and roll. That period featured Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, as well as lesser known musicians such as Gus Cannon, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, and Johnny Burnette. Musselwhite supported himself by digging ditches, laying concrete and running moonshine in a 1950 Lincoln automobile. This environment was a school for music as well as life for Musselwhite, who eventually acquired the nickname "Memphis Charlie."[6]
Career
In true bluesman fashion, Musselwhite then took off in search of the rumored "big-paying factory jobs" up the "Hillbilly Highway", the Highway 51 to Chicago, where he continued his education on the South Side, making the acquaintance of even more legends including Lew Soloff, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Big Walter Horton. Musselwhite immersed himself completely in the musical life, living in the basement of, and occasionally working at Jazz Record Mart (the record store operated by Delmark Records founder Bob Koester) with Big Joe Williams and working as a driver for an exterminator, which allowed him to observe what was happening around the city's clubs and bars. He spent his time hanging out at the Jazz Record Mart at the corner of State and Grand and the nearby bar, Mr. Joe's, with the city's blues musicians, and sitting in with Big Joe Williams and others in the clubs, playing for tips. There he forged a lifelong friendship with John Lee Hooker; though Hooker lived in Detroit, Michigan, the two often visited each other, and Hooker served as best man at Musselwhite's third marriage. Gradually Musselwhite became well known around town.
In time, Musselwhite led his own blues band, and, after Elektra Records' success with Paul Butterfield, he released the legendary Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite's Southside Band album in 1966 on Vanguard Records (as "Charley Musselwhite"), to immediate and great success.[3][7] He took advantage of the clout this album gave him to move to San Francisco, where, instead of being one of many competing blues acts, he held court as the king of the blues in the exploding countercultural music scene, an exotic and gritty figure to the flower children. Musselwhite even convinced Hooker to move out to California.
Since then, Musselwhite has released over 20 albums, as well as guesting on albums by many other musicians, such as Bonnie Raitt's Longing in Their Hearts and The Blind Boys of Alabama's Spirit of the Century, both winners of Grammy awards. He also appeared on Tom Waits' Mule Variations and INXS' Suicide Blonde. He himself has won 14 W. C. Handy Awards and six Grammy nominations, as well as Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Monterey Blues Festival and the San Javier Jazz Festival in San Javier, Spain, and the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.
In 1979, Musselwhite recorded The Harmonica According to Charlie Musselwhite in London for Kicking Mule Records, intended to go with an instructional book; the album itself became so popular that it has been released on CD. In June 2008, Blind Pig Records reissued the album on 180-gram vinyl with new cover art.[8]
In 1990 Musselwhite signed with Alligator Records, a step that led to a resurgence of his career.
In 1998, Musselwhite appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000. He provided the harmonica position in the super-ensemble The Louisiana Gator Boys, which also featured many other rhythm and blues legends such as B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Eric Clapton, Koko Taylor, Jimmie Vaughan, Dr. John, and Jack DeJohnette.
Over the years, Musselwhite has branched out in style. His 1999 recording, Continental Drifter, is accompanied by Cuarteto Patria, from Cuba's Santiago region, the Cuban music analog of the Mississippi Delta. Because of the political differences between Cuba and the United States, the album was recorded in Bergen, Norway, with Musselwhite's wife ironing out all the details.
Musselwhite believes the key to his musical success was finding a style where he could express himself. He has said, "I only know one tune, and I play it faster or slower, or I change the key, but it’s just the one tune I’ve ever played in my life. It’s all I know."[9]
His past two albums, Sanctuary and Delta Hardware have both been released on Real World Records.
Musselwhite plays on Tom Waits' 1999 album Mule Variations. He can be heard at the beginning of the song "Chocolate Jesus" saying "I love it". Waits has mentioned that he feels this is his favorite part of the song.[10]
In 2002, he featured on the Bo Diddley tribute album Hey Bo Diddley - A Tribute!, performing the song "Hey Bo Diddley".
Musselwhite lost both of his elderly parents in December 2005, in separate incidents. His mother, Ruth Maxine Musselwhite, was murdered.[11]
Musselwhite joined the 10th annual Independent Music Awards judging panel to assist independent musicians' careers.[12][13][14] He was also a judge for the 7th and 9th Independent Music Awards.[15]
Charlie Musselwhite was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2010. The same year, he appeared on the JW-Jones recording "Midnight Memphis Sun" along with Hubert Sumlin.
For the first half of 2011, Musselwhite toured with the acoustic-electric blues band Hot Tuna. In the latter half of 2011, he went on tour with Cyndi Lauper in light of his harmonica recording contributions to her hit album Memphis Blues. While on this tour, he appeared with Lauper on Jools Holland's Hootenanny on New Year's Eve 2011, performing alongside her for a modified arrangement of her signature song, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
In 2012, Musselwhite teamed up with Ben Harper to record the album Get Up!, which was released in January of 2013. In January 2014, the album won a Grammy Award for Best Blues Album.
In 2014, he won a Blues Music Award in the 'Best Instrumentalist – Harmonicist' category.
Biography
Childhood
Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, United States. He has said that he is of Choctaw descent, born in a region originally inhabited by the Choctaw. In a 2005 interview, he said his mother had told him he was actually Cherokee.[5]
Musselwhite's family considered it natural to play music, with his father playing guitar and harmonica, his mother playing piano, and a relative who was a one-man band.
At the age of three, Musselwhite moved to Memphis, Tennessee. When he was a teenager, Memphis experienced the period when rockabilly, western swing, and electric blues and other forms of African American music were combining to give birth to rock and roll. That period featured Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, as well as lesser known musicians such as Gus Cannon, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, and Johnny Burnette. Musselwhite supported himself by digging ditches, laying concrete and running moonshine in a 1950 Lincoln automobile. This environment was a school for music as well as life for Musselwhite, who eventually acquired the nickname "Memphis Charlie."[6]
Career
In true bluesman fashion, Musselwhite then took off in search of the rumored "big-paying factory jobs" up the "Hillbilly Highway", the Highway 51 to Chicago, where he continued his education on the South Side, making the acquaintance of even more legends including Lew Soloff, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Big Walter Horton. Musselwhite immersed himself completely in the musical life, living in the basement of, and occasionally working at Jazz Record Mart (the record store operated by Delmark Records founder Bob Koester) with Big Joe Williams and working as a driver for an exterminator, which allowed him to observe what was happening around the city's clubs and bars. He spent his time hanging out at the Jazz Record Mart at the corner of State and Grand and the nearby bar, Mr. Joe's, with the city's blues musicians, and sitting in with Big Joe Williams and others in the clubs, playing for tips. There he forged a lifelong friendship with John Lee Hooker; though Hooker lived in Detroit, Michigan, the two often visited each other, and Hooker served as best man at Musselwhite's third marriage. Gradually Musselwhite became well known around town.
In time, Musselwhite led his own blues band, and, after Elektra Records' success with Paul Butterfield, he released the legendary Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite's Southside Band album in 1966 on Vanguard Records (as "Charley Musselwhite"), to immediate and great success.[3][7] He took advantage of the clout this album gave him to move to San Francisco, where, instead of being one of many competing blues acts, he held court as the king of the blues in the exploding countercultural music scene, an exotic and gritty figure to the flower children. Musselwhite even convinced Hooker to move out to California.
Since then, Musselwhite has released over 20 albums, as well as guesting on albums by many other musicians, such as Bonnie Raitt's Longing in Their Hearts and The Blind Boys of Alabama's Spirit of the Century, both winners of Grammy awards. He also appeared on Tom Waits' Mule Variations and INXS' Suicide Blonde. He himself has won 14 W. C. Handy Awards and six Grammy nominations, as well as Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Monterey Blues Festival and the San Javier Jazz Festival in San Javier, Spain, and the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.
In 1979, Musselwhite recorded The Harmonica According to Charlie Musselwhite in London for Kicking Mule Records, intended to go with an instructional book; the album itself became so popular that it has been released on CD. In June 2008, Blind Pig Records reissued the album on 180-gram vinyl with new cover art.[8]
In 1990 Musselwhite signed with Alligator Records, a step that led to a resurgence of his career.
In 1998, Musselwhite appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000. He provided the harmonica position in the super-ensemble The Louisiana Gator Boys, which also featured many other rhythm and blues legends such as B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Eric Clapton, Koko Taylor, Jimmie Vaughan, Dr. John, and Jack DeJohnette.
Over the years, Musselwhite has branched out in style. His 1999 recording, Continental Drifter, is accompanied by Cuarteto Patria, from Cuba's Santiago region, the Cuban music analog of the Mississippi Delta. Because of the political differences between Cuba and the United States, the album was recorded in Bergen, Norway, with Musselwhite's wife ironing out all the details.
Musselwhite believes the key to his musical success was finding a style where he could express himself. He has said, "I only know one tune, and I play it faster or slower, or I change the key, but it’s just the one tune I’ve ever played in my life. It’s all I know."[9]
His past two albums, Sanctuary and Delta Hardware have both been released on Real World Records.
Musselwhite plays on Tom Waits' 1999 album Mule Variations. He can be heard at the beginning of the song "Chocolate Jesus" saying "I love it". Waits has mentioned that he feels this is his favorite part of the song.[10]
In 2002, he featured on the Bo Diddley tribute album Hey Bo Diddley - A Tribute!, performing the song "Hey Bo Diddley".
Musselwhite lost both of his elderly parents in December 2005, in separate incidents. His mother, Ruth Maxine Musselwhite, was murdered.[11]
Musselwhite joined the 10th annual Independent Music Awards judging panel to assist independent musicians' careers.[12][13][14] He was also a judge for the 7th and 9th Independent Music Awards.[15]
Charlie Musselwhite was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2010. The same year, he appeared on the JW-Jones recording "Midnight Memphis Sun" along with Hubert Sumlin.
For the first half of 2011, Musselwhite toured with the acoustic-electric blues band Hot Tuna. In the latter half of 2011, he went on tour with Cyndi Lauper in light of his harmonica recording contributions to her hit album Memphis Blues. While on this tour, he appeared with Lauper on Jools Holland's Hootenanny on New Year's Eve 2011, performing alongside her for a modified arrangement of her signature song, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
In 2012, Musselwhite teamed up with Ben Harper to record the album Get Up!, which was released in January of 2013. In January 2014, the album won a Grammy Award for Best Blues Album.
In 2014, he won a Blues Music Award in the 'Best Instrumentalist – Harmonicist' category.
Paul deLay *31.01.1952
Paul Joseph deLay (* 31. Januar 1952 in Portland, Oregon; † 7. März 2007 ) war ein US-amerikanischer Sänger und Mundharmonikaspieler.
Leben
Er wurde in Oregon geboren, wuchs aber in einer der Musik zugeneigten Familie in Milwaukee auf. Im Alter von acht Jahren, nachdem er Paul Butterfield gehört hatte, begann er Mundharmonika zu spielen. Seine Vorbilder waren Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs und später George „Harmonica“ Smith und Charlie Musselwhite. Er nahm Klavierunterricht und wollte sich selbst Gitarre und Schlagzeug beibringen, aber er erkannte bald, dass die Mundharmonika seine Berufung ist. [1]
In den 1970er-Jahren spielte er in einer Band namens The Brown Sugar Band, die hauptsächlich in der Umgebung von Portland auftrat. 1978 gründete er eine Band, die unter seinem Namen auftrat, mit dieser Band begleitete er unter Anderem Sunnyland Slim und Hubert Sumlin. 1980 widmete er sich dem Ausbau seiner Kenntnisse als Songschreiber. Er vermied es seine Karriere hindurch, Bluesklischees in seinen Songs zu verwenden.
Sein größtes Problem war seine Sucht, und als er dem Alkohol entsagte, wendete er sich Kokain zu. Er wurde wegen Drogenhandel verhaftet und kam für drei Jahre ins Gefängnis, wo er eine große Zahl von Songs schrieb, die er nach seiner Entlassung 1995 auf einigen Alben veröffentlichte.
In den 1980er und 1990er Jahren trat er beim San Francisco Blues Festival, dem Pocono Blues Festival, dem Long Beach Blues Festival und dem San Francisco Harmonica Festival auf.
2007 starb Paul deLay an Leukämie und den Spätfolgen seiner Sucht.
Paul Joseph deLay (January 31, 1952 – March 7, 2007) was an American blues vocalist and harmonicist.
Life and career
Paul deLay was born in Portland, Oregon, United States.
His musical career started in the early 1970s with a band called "Brown Sugar", which played numerous West Coast gigs. In 1976, he and guitarist Jim Mesi formed the Paul deLay Blues Band, which performed well into the 1980s. The band also recorded several albums during that time.
By the late 1980s, deLay was suffering from alcohol and cocaine addiction. In 1990, he was arrested for drug trafficking, and served a 41-month prison sentence. He performed in Prison in Walla Walla with Michael Morey of Seattle's Alleged Perpetrators on bass. While he was incarcerated, his band continued without him, performing as the "No deLay Band" and featuring longtime Portland blueswoman Linda Hornbuckle as lead vocalist in lieu of deLay.[1] Upon his release from prison, deLay (now clean and sober) rejoined the band and recorded a series of critically acclaimed albums.
In 2002, deLay assembled the final version of his band, with David Vest sharing lead vocals and playing piano, Peter Dammann on guitar, and Jeff Minnick and Dave Kahl on drums and bass. A live CD[2] featuring this lineup was released in 2007, entering the Top Ten on Billboard's national blues chart.
Paul deLay continued touring and recording until his final illness. In March 2007, after returning to Portland from a gig in Klamath Falls, Oregon, deLay felt ill and sought medical treatment. It was discovered that he was suffering from end-stage leukemia; he soon lapsed into a coma from which he would not recover. He died in Portland on March 7, 2007, aged 55.[3]
An outgrowth of the memorial concerts is an annual event, a benefit for an scholarship at Ethos, a non-profit, Portland-based music education program, in deLay's name.
Awards and achievements
Over his career, deLay received a W.C. Handy Award for best instrumentalist, a recording of the year award from the Portland Music Association, and several awards from the Cascade Blues Association.
Life and career
Paul deLay was born in Portland, Oregon, United States.
His musical career started in the early 1970s with a band called "Brown Sugar", which played numerous West Coast gigs. In 1976, he and guitarist Jim Mesi formed the Paul deLay Blues Band, which performed well into the 1980s. The band also recorded several albums during that time.
By the late 1980s, deLay was suffering from alcohol and cocaine addiction. In 1990, he was arrested for drug trafficking, and served a 41-month prison sentence. He performed in Prison in Walla Walla with Michael Morey of Seattle's Alleged Perpetrators on bass. While he was incarcerated, his band continued without him, performing as the "No deLay Band" and featuring longtime Portland blueswoman Linda Hornbuckle as lead vocalist in lieu of deLay.[1] Upon his release from prison, deLay (now clean and sober) rejoined the band and recorded a series of critically acclaimed albums.
In 2002, deLay assembled the final version of his band, with David Vest sharing lead vocals and playing piano, Peter Dammann on guitar, and Jeff Minnick and Dave Kahl on drums and bass. A live CD[2] featuring this lineup was released in 2007, entering the Top Ten on Billboard's national blues chart.
Paul deLay continued touring and recording until his final illness. In March 2007, after returning to Portland from a gig in Klamath Falls, Oregon, deLay felt ill and sought medical treatment. It was discovered that he was suffering from end-stage leukemia; he soon lapsed into a coma from which he would not recover. He died in Portland on March 7, 2007, aged 55.[3]
An outgrowth of the memorial concerts is an annual event, a benefit for an scholarship at Ethos, a non-profit, Portland-based music education program, in deLay's name.
Awards and achievements
Over his career, deLay received a W.C. Handy Award for best instrumentalist, a recording of the year award from the Portland Music Association, and several awards from the Cascade Blues Association.
Roosevelt Sykes *31.01.1906
Roosevelt Sykes (* 31. Januar 1906 in Elmar, Arkansas; † 17. Juli 1983 in New Orleans, Louisiana) war ein einflussreicher US-amerikanischer Blues-Pianist, auch bekannt als „the Honeydripper“.
Leben
Mit 15 Jahren begann Sykes, Piano zu spielen. Anfang der 1920er zog die Familie nach St. Louis, wo Sykes bald als hervorragender Bluesmusiker bekannt wurde. Wie viele andere Musiker zog er herum und spielte vor einem ausschließlich männlichen Publikum in Sägewerken und Bauarbeitercamps entlang des Mississippi Rivers. Hier erarbeitete er sich ein Repertoire von rohen, sexuell anzüglichen Liedern. 1929 wurde er von einem Talentescout entdeckt und er machte seine erste Plattenaufnahme für Okeh Records. Es handelte sich um den 44 Blues, eine Nummer, die zu einem Bluesstandard und zu seinem Markenzeichen wurde. Er machte viele Aufnahmen für verschiedene Labels, auch unter Pseudonymen wie „Easy Papa Johnson“, „Dobby Bragg“ und „Willie Kelly“. Ferner war er als Begleitmusiker tätig, u. a. für Charlie „Specks“ McFadden.
In den 1940ern ging Sykes nach Chicago; dort nahm er auch einige Singles für United auf. Er war einer der wenigen Musiker, die auch während des Krieges, in Zeiten der Rationierung, Aufnahmen machen durften. Sykes war einer der ersten amerikanischen Bluesmusiker, die in Europa auftraten. Nachdem der elektrifizierte Blues in Chicago das Musikgeschehen beherrschte, ging Sykes nach New Orleans. Dort begann er in den 1960er-Jahren wieder Platten aufzunehmen, so für Delmark, Bluesville, Storyville und Folkways.
Seine letzten Jahre verbrachte Roosevelt Sykes in New Orleans, wo er 1983 starb. 1999 wurde er in die Blues Hall of Fame aufgenommen.
Roosevelt Sykes (January 31, 1906 – July 17, 1983) was an American blues musician, also known as "The Honeydripper". He was a successful and prolific cigar-chomping blues piano player, whose rollicking thundering boogie-woogie was highly influential.[1]
Career
Born in Elmar, Arkansas, Sykes grew up near Helena but at age 15, went on the road playing piano with a barrelhouse style of blues. Like many bluesmen of his time, he travelled around playing to all-male audiences in sawmill, turpentine and levee camps along the Mississippi River, gathering a repertoire of raw, sexually explicit material. His wanderings eventually brought him to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met St. Louis Jimmy Oden.,[2] author of the blues standard "Goin' Down Slow".
In 1929 he was spotted by a talent scout and sent to New York City to record for Okeh Records.[3] His first release was "'44' Blues" which became a blues standard and his trademark.[3] He quickly began recording for multiple labels under various names including Easy Papa Johnson, Dobby Bragg and Willie Kelly. After he and Oden moved to Chicago he found his first period of fame when he signed with Decca Records in 1934.[3] In 1943, he signed with Bluebird Records and recorded with The Honeydrippers.[4] Sykes and Oden continued their musical friendship well into the 60s.
In Chicago, Sykes began to display an increasing urbanity in his lyric-writing, using an eight-bar blues pop gospel structure instead of the traditional twelve-bar blues. However, despite the growing urbanity of his outlook, he gradually became less competitive in the post-World War II music scene. After his RCA Victor contract expired, he continued to record for smaller labels, such as United, until his opportunities ran out in the mid-1950s.[3]
Roosevelt left Chicago in 1954 for New Orleans as electric blues was taking over the Chicago blues clubs. When he returned to recording in the 1960s it was for labels such as Delmark, Bluesville, Storyville and Folkways that were documenting the quickly passing blues history.[5] He lived out his final years in New Orleans, where he died from a heart attack[6] on July 17, 1983.[1]
Legacy
Sykes had a long career spanning the pre-war and postwar eras. His pounding piano boogies and risqué lyrics characterize his contributions to the blues. He was responsible for influential blues songs such as "44 Blues", "Driving Wheel", and "Night Time Is the Right Time".[1]
He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1999[7] and the Gennett Records Walk of Fame in 2011.
Career
Born in Elmar, Arkansas, Sykes grew up near Helena but at age 15, went on the road playing piano with a barrelhouse style of blues. Like many bluesmen of his time, he travelled around playing to all-male audiences in sawmill, turpentine and levee camps along the Mississippi River, gathering a repertoire of raw, sexually explicit material. His wanderings eventually brought him to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met St. Louis Jimmy Oden.,[2] author of the blues standard "Goin' Down Slow".
In 1929 he was spotted by a talent scout and sent to New York City to record for Okeh Records.[3] His first release was "'44' Blues" which became a blues standard and his trademark.[3] He quickly began recording for multiple labels under various names including Easy Papa Johnson, Dobby Bragg and Willie Kelly. After he and Oden moved to Chicago he found his first period of fame when he signed with Decca Records in 1934.[3] In 1943, he signed with Bluebird Records and recorded with The Honeydrippers.[4] Sykes and Oden continued their musical friendship well into the 60s.
In Chicago, Sykes began to display an increasing urbanity in his lyric-writing, using an eight-bar blues pop gospel structure instead of the traditional twelve-bar blues. However, despite the growing urbanity of his outlook, he gradually became less competitive in the post-World War II music scene. After his RCA Victor contract expired, he continued to record for smaller labels, such as United, until his opportunities ran out in the mid-1950s.[3]
Roosevelt left Chicago in 1954 for New Orleans as electric blues was taking over the Chicago blues clubs. When he returned to recording in the 1960s it was for labels such as Delmark, Bluesville, Storyville and Folkways that were documenting the quickly passing blues history.[5] He lived out his final years in New Orleans, where he died from a heart attack[6] on July 17, 1983.[1]
Legacy
Sykes had a long career spanning the pre-war and postwar eras. His pounding piano boogies and risqué lyrics characterize his contributions to the blues. He was responsible for influential blues songs such as "44 Blues", "Driving Wheel", and "Night Time Is the Right Time".[1]
He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1999[7] and the Gennett Records Walk of Fame in 2011.
Sarah Streeter (January 31, 1953 – June 13, 2015), better known by her stage name Big Time Sarah, was an American blues singer.
Biography
She was born in Coldwater, Mississippi, and raised in Chicago, where she sang in gospel choirs in South Chicago churches.[1] At age 14, she began singing blues at the Morgan's Lounge Club, and in the 1970s she played with musicians such as Magic Slim, Buddy Guy, The Aces, Junior Wells, Johnny Bernard, and Erwin Helfer.[1][2]
Her experience playing with Sunnyland Slim led to her first solo release, a single released on his label, Airways Records.[1] Teamed with Zora Young and Bonnie Lee in 'Blues with the Girls', Sarah toured Europe in 1982 and recorded an album in Paris, France.[3] From 1989, she performed with a group called The BTS Express. From 1993 to 2015, she recorded for Delmark Records.[citation needed]
Death
Big Time Sarah died on June 13, 2015, from heart complications in a Chicago-area nursing home. She was 62.
Big Time Sarah & Blue Jeans - Woke up this morning - Natu Nobilis Blues Festival 2002
Little Victor *31.01.
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Little Victor is an exemplary keeper of the flame for the old school, down home blues. His rowdy, joyous showmanship, larger than life personality, and deep understanding of the fine points of the downhome tradition have made him a popular international festival attraction. And his brilliant collaboration with Louisiana Red on "Back To The Black Bayou" had a world wide impact in the blues, earning many awards and nominations.
This albums finds Little Victor in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, utilizing some great musicians to create a beautiful ensemble sound and a great support for Victor's wonderfully "back in the alley" guitar, harmonica, and vocals. I am very proud to call Little Victor my friend, and I am delighted to have a guest slot as a harmonica player on this record, particularly since Victor is an excellent harmonica player and certainly does not need my help. Keep on bopping those blues Little Victor!
Whew! Nobody else is cutting an original barrel house groove like this, friends. Like a Steppin' Razor! No doubt about it: this is new blues composed within the traditional genre: lyrical, snakey, lush, inventive, sleek/swamp/slope head-jive, rang-a tang, blue-gum, blue balls, blue blood. This is the loosest, most esoteric, raunchy, blueses yet from Little Victor... an esteemed artist obviously at the height of his powers as a masterful guitarist, harp player & and singer of extraordinary darkness & witt.. those long, hot days wailing on Beale Street have paid off in Spades for Lil' Victor: he's got the tone, he's got the moan, he's got a black cat bone... look out for your happy home
Little Victor-You Don't Know My Mind TV3
Ottilie Patterson *31.01.1932
Anna
Ottilie Patterson (* 31. Januar 1932 in Comber, County Down; † 20. Juni
2011 in Ayr) war eine nordirische Blues- und Jazzsängerin, die durch
ihre Auftritte und Aufnahmen mit Chris Barber in den späten 1950er und
frühen 1960er Jahren bekannt wurde.
Biographie
Sie war das jüngste von vier Kindern. Ihr Vater, Joseph Patterson, kam aus Nordirland, und ihre Mutter, Jūlija Jēgers, kam aus Lettland. Beide Eltern waren sehr musikalisch, und Ottilie wurde ab einem Alter von elf Jahren als klassische Pianistin ausgebildet. Eine Gesangsausbildung hat sie nie erhalten.
1949 ging Ottilie, nach Belfast, um am Belfast College of Technology Kunst zu studieren. Ein Kommilitone brachte sie damals mit der Musik von Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton und Meade Lux Lewis in Kontakt. 1951 begann sie mit der Jimmy Compton's Jazz Band zu singen, und im August 1952 gründete sie die Muskrat Ramblers mit Al Watt and Derek Martin.
Während ihres Sommerurlaubs 1954 traf sie Beryl Bryden, die ihr die Chris Barber Jazz Band vorstellte. Am 1. Januar 1955 wechselte sie komplett zur Chris Barber Band und ihr erster gemeinsamer Auftritt war am 9. Januar 1955 in Londons Royal Festival Hall. Zwischen 1955 und 1962 tourte Ottilie weitgehend mit Chris Barbers Band und man veröffentlichte gemeinsam viele Aufnahmen auf Decca: EPs Blues (1955), That Patterson Girl (1955), That Patterson Girl Volume 2 (1956), Ottilie (1959) und die LP Chris Barber's Blues Book (1960); außerdem erschien sie auf zahlreichen Chris Barber-Aufzeichnungen mit einzelnen Titeln. 1957 trat sie auch mit Rosetta Tharpe auf; bei der USA-Tournee von Barber jammte sie in Chicago mit der Band von Muddy Waters.
Ab etwa 1963 litt sie an Problemen der Kehle und hörte auf, regelmäßig mit Barber, mit dem sie von 1959 bis 1983 verheiratet war, aufzutreten. Offiziell zog sie sich von der Band 1973 zurück. Während dieser Zeit nahm sie einige Songs in anderen Genres auf, 1969 erschien das Soloalbum 3000 Years with Ottilie, nachdem bereits 1959 das der Folklore ihrer Heimat gewidmete Album Irish Night entstanden war.
Im Frühjahr 1983 gaben Ottilie und Chris Barber eine Reihe von Konzerten in South London, die auf Madame Blues and Doctor Jazz (1984) zu hören ist. Dieses sind ihre letzten Aufnahmen.
Nach Ansicht von Rex Harris und Brian Rust war Pattersons Bluesgesang stark von Bessie Smith, Ida Cox und Bertha „Chippie“ Hill beeinflusst, deren Repertoire sie interpretierte. Zu ihren Höhepunkten zählen die Autoren ihre Aufnahmen mit Chis Barber von 1955, wie „Trouble in Mind“, „Poor Man´s Blues“, „Shipwreck Blues“ und den „Weeping Willow Blues“. Nach Ansicht von Chris Barber ist ihre Interpretation des St. Louis Blues von 1962 meisterlich.
Biographie
Sie war das jüngste von vier Kindern. Ihr Vater, Joseph Patterson, kam aus Nordirland, und ihre Mutter, Jūlija Jēgers, kam aus Lettland. Beide Eltern waren sehr musikalisch, und Ottilie wurde ab einem Alter von elf Jahren als klassische Pianistin ausgebildet. Eine Gesangsausbildung hat sie nie erhalten.
1949 ging Ottilie, nach Belfast, um am Belfast College of Technology Kunst zu studieren. Ein Kommilitone brachte sie damals mit der Musik von Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton und Meade Lux Lewis in Kontakt. 1951 begann sie mit der Jimmy Compton's Jazz Band zu singen, und im August 1952 gründete sie die Muskrat Ramblers mit Al Watt and Derek Martin.
Während ihres Sommerurlaubs 1954 traf sie Beryl Bryden, die ihr die Chris Barber Jazz Band vorstellte. Am 1. Januar 1955 wechselte sie komplett zur Chris Barber Band und ihr erster gemeinsamer Auftritt war am 9. Januar 1955 in Londons Royal Festival Hall. Zwischen 1955 und 1962 tourte Ottilie weitgehend mit Chris Barbers Band und man veröffentlichte gemeinsam viele Aufnahmen auf Decca: EPs Blues (1955), That Patterson Girl (1955), That Patterson Girl Volume 2 (1956), Ottilie (1959) und die LP Chris Barber's Blues Book (1960); außerdem erschien sie auf zahlreichen Chris Barber-Aufzeichnungen mit einzelnen Titeln. 1957 trat sie auch mit Rosetta Tharpe auf; bei der USA-Tournee von Barber jammte sie in Chicago mit der Band von Muddy Waters.
Ab etwa 1963 litt sie an Problemen der Kehle und hörte auf, regelmäßig mit Barber, mit dem sie von 1959 bis 1983 verheiratet war, aufzutreten. Offiziell zog sie sich von der Band 1973 zurück. Während dieser Zeit nahm sie einige Songs in anderen Genres auf, 1969 erschien das Soloalbum 3000 Years with Ottilie, nachdem bereits 1959 das der Folklore ihrer Heimat gewidmete Album Irish Night entstanden war.
Im Frühjahr 1983 gaben Ottilie und Chris Barber eine Reihe von Konzerten in South London, die auf Madame Blues and Doctor Jazz (1984) zu hören ist. Dieses sind ihre letzten Aufnahmen.
Nach Ansicht von Rex Harris und Brian Rust war Pattersons Bluesgesang stark von Bessie Smith, Ida Cox und Bertha „Chippie“ Hill beeinflusst, deren Repertoire sie interpretierte. Zu ihren Höhepunkten zählen die Autoren ihre Aufnahmen mit Chis Barber von 1955, wie „Trouble in Mind“, „Poor Man´s Blues“, „Shipwreck Blues“ und den „Weeping Willow Blues“. Nach Ansicht von Chris Barber ist ihre Interpretation des St. Louis Blues von 1962 meisterlich.
Ottilie Patterson (31 January 1932 – 20 June 2011) was a Northern Irish blues singer best known for her performances and recordings with the Chris Barber Jazz Band in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Biography
Anna Ottilie Patterson was born in Comber, County Down, Northern Ireland, on 31 January 1932. She was the youngest child of four. Her father, Joseph Patterson, was from Northern Ireland, and her mother, Jūlija Jēgers, was from Latvia. They had met in southern Russia.[1] Ottilie's name is an Anglicised form of the Latvian name "Ottilja".[1] Both sides of the family were musical, and Ottilie trained as a classical pianist from the age of eleven, but never received any formal training as a singer.[2]
In 1949 Ottilie went to study art at Belfast College of Technology where a fellow student introduced her to the music of Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton and Meade Lux Lewis.[3] In 1951 she began singing with Jimmy Compton's Jazz Band, and in August 1952 she formed the Muskrat Ramblers with Al Watt and Derek Martin.
In the summer of 1954, while holidaying in London, Ottilie met Beryl Bryden, who introduced her to the Chris Barber Jazz Band.[4]
She joined the Barber band full-time on 28 December 1954,[1] and her first public appearance was at the Royal Festival Hall on January 9, 1955.[5] Between 1955 and 1962 Ottilie toured extensively with the Chris Barber Jazz Band and issued many recordings: those featuring her on every track include the EPs Blues (1955), That Patterson Girl (1955), That Patterson Girl Volume 2 (1956), Ottilie (1959), and the LP Chris Barber's Blues Book (1961); she also appeared on numerous Chris Barber records.
She and Barber were married in 1959.[1] They divorced in 1983.[1]
From approximately 1963 she began to suffer throat problems and ceased to appear and record regularly with Chris Barber, officially retiring from the band in 1973. During this period she recorded some non-jazz/blues material such as settings of Shakespeare (with Chris Barber) and in 1969 issued a solo LP 3000 years with Ottilie which is now much sought by collectors.
In early 1983 she and Chris Barber gave a series of concerts around London, which were recorded for the LP Madame Blues and Doctor Jazz (1984). This is her most recently issued recording.
Ottilie is buried in Movilla Abbey Cemetery, Newtownards, Northern Ireland in the Patterson family grave. Her gravestone, marked Ottilia Anna Barber, is by the wall adjacent to the car park.
In February 2012 a plaque marking her birthplace in a terraced house in Comber was unveiled, and the same evening a sell-out musical Tribute was performed at the La Mon Hotel in Comber.
Alan Lomax *31.01.1915
Alan
Lomax (* 31. Januar 1915; † 19. Juli 2002) war ein US-amerikanischer
Folklore- und Musikforscher, der sich auf die frühe Musik der
Vereinigten Staaten und ihre Wurzeln spezialisiert hatte. Alan Lomax war
der Sohn des Musikforschers John Lomax, bei dem er seine Karriere
begann.Biographie
Lomax hatte einen Abschluss in Philosophie an der University of Texas in Austin. Der Musikethnologe arbeitete für ein Projekt der Library of Congress über die mündlich überlieferte Geschichte.
Seine Tonaufnahmen gelten als Schätze der amerikanischen und internationalen Kultur. Seine Karriere widmete Lomax vollständig dem Sammeln volkstümlicher Musik überall auf der Welt, insbesondere aber im Süden der Vereinigten Staaten.
Lomax nahm auch während seiner „recording trips“ Interviews von grundlegender Bedeutung auf, vor allem mit bedeutenden Musikern wie Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton und Jeannie Robertson. 2003 erhielt er posthum einen Grammy Trustees Award für sein Lebenswerk.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lomax
Alan
Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American
field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a
folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political
activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced
recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which
played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals
of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During the New Deal, with his
father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and
with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the
Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and
acetate discs.
After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. In March 2004 the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which 'brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.' [4]With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore,[5] even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.
Biography
Early life
Lomax, born in Austin in 1915, was the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The elder Lomax, a former professor of English at Texas A&M and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the University of Texas.
Because of childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, Lomax had mostly been home schooled in elementary school. In Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys (a tiny prep school), where he excelled. He attended the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut for a year, graduating eighth in his class at age 15 in 1930.[6] Because of his mother's declining health, however, rather than going to Harvard as his father had wished, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. A roommate, future anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, recalled Lomax as "frighteningly smart, probably classifiable as a genius", though Goldschmidt remembers Lomax exploding one night while studying: "Damn it! The hardest thing I've had to learn is that I'm not a genius."[7] At the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper, The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control.[7] At this time he also he began collecting "race" records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs, at the risk of expulsion. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess, age 10, was sent to live with an aunt. Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his sophomore year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and the Pre-Socratics with University of Texas professor Albert P. Brogan.[8] He also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects.[9] Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for the Library of Congress, co-authoring American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). He did his first field collecting without his father with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935. He returned to the University of Texas that fall and was awarded a BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa in May 1936.[10] Lack of money prevented him from immediately attending graduate school at the University of Chicago, as he desired, but he would later correspond with and pursue graduate studies with Melville J. Herskovits at Columbia University and with Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Pennsylvania.
Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Harold Goodman, then a student at the University of Texas, in February 1937.[11] They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anne (later known as Anna). Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over the BBC Home Service as part of the war effort. During the fifties, after she and Lomax divorced, she conducted lengthy interviews for Lomax with folk music personalities, including Vera Ward Hall and the Reverend Gary Davis. Lomax also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1935); with John Wesley Work III and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts[12] and Jean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean (1961); with Shirley Collins in Great Britain and the Southeastern US (1959); with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter. All those who assisted and worked with him were accurately credited on the resultant Library of Congress and other recordings, as well as in his many books, films, and publications.
Assistant in Charge and Commercial Records and Radio Broadcasts
From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings.
A pioneering oral historian, he also recorded substantial interviews with many legendary folk and jazz musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz pioneers, and Big Bill Broonzy. He also initiated some of the first (if not the very first) "man-on-the street" radio interviews of ordinary citizens. On December 8, 1941, as "Assistant in Charge at the Library of Congress, he sent telegrams to fieldworkers in ten different localities across the United States, asking them to collect reactions of ordinary Americans to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by the United States. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President," was recorded in January and February 1942.[13]
In late 1939, Lomax hosted two series on CBS's nationally broadcast American School of the Air, called American Folk Song and Wellsprings of Music, both music appreciation courses that aired daily in the schools and were supposed to highlight links between American folk and classical orchestral music. As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet. The individual programs reached ten million students in 200,000 U.S. classrooms and were also broadcast in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, but both Lomax and his father felt that the concept of the shows, which portrayed folk music as mere raw material for orchestral music, was deeply flawed and failed to do justice to vernacular culture.
In 1940 under Lomax's supervision, RCA made two groundbreaking suites of commercial folk music recordings: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly's Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs.[14] Though they did not sell especially well when released, Lomax's biographer, John Szwed calls these "some of the first concept albums."[15]
In 1940, Lomax and his close friend Nicholas Ray went on to write and produce a fifteen-minute program, Back Where I Came From, which aired three nights a week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically. Its racially integrated cast included Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Josh White, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. In February 1941, Lomax spoke and gave a demonstration of his program along with talks by Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Pan American Union, and the president of the American Museum of Natural History, at a global conference in Mexico of a thousand broadcasters CBS had sponsored to launch its worldwide programming initiative. Mrs. Roosevelt invited Lomax to Hyde Park.[16] But despite its success and high visibility, Back Where I Come From never picked up a commercial sponsor. The show ran for only twenty-one weeks before it was suddenly canceled in February, 1941.[17] On hearing the news Woody Guthrie wrote Lomax from California, "Too honest again, I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it can't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."[18] Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development.[19]
While serving in the Army in World War II Lomax produced and hosted numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera", The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.
In the late 1940s, Lomax produced a highly regarded series of commercial folk music albums for Decca Records and organized a series of concerts at New York's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, featuring blues, calypso, and flamenco music. He also hosted a radio show, Your Ballad Man, in 1949 that was broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Radio Network and featured a highly eclectic program, from gamelan music, to Django Reinhardt, to Klezmer music, to Sidney Bechet and Wild Bill Davison, to jazzy pop songs by Maxine Sullivan and Jo Stafford, to readings of the poetry of Carl Sandburg, to hillbilly music with electric guitars, to Finnish brass bands – to name a few.[20]
Move to Europe and later life
In December 1949 a newspaper printed a story "Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers'", that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. The article mentioned Alan Lomax as one of the sponsors of the dinner, along with C. B. Baldwin, campaign manager for Henry A. Wallace; New York Times music critic Olin Downes; and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom it accused of being members of Communist front groups.[21] The following June Red Channels, a pamphlet edited by former F.B.I agents which became the basis for entertainment industry blacklist of the 1950s, listed Lomax as an artist or broadcast journalist sympathetic to Communism (others listed included Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Yip Harburg, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Burl Ives, Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, and Josh White). That summer, congress was debating the McCarran Act, which would require the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies",[22] while the House Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings. Feeling sure that the Act would pass and realizing that his career in broadcasting was in jeopardy, Lomax, who was newly divorced and already had an agreement with Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records to record in Europe,[23] hastened to renew his passport, cancel his speaking engagements, and plan for his departure, telling his agent he hoped to return in January "if things cleared up". He set sail on September 24, 1950, on board the steamer RMS Mauretania. Sure enough, in October, FBI agents were interviewing Lomax's friends and acquaintances. Lomax never told his family exactly why he went to Europe, only that he was developing a library of world folk music for Columbia. Nor would he ever allow anyone to say he was forced to leave. In a letter to the editor of a British newspaper, Lomax took a writer to task for describing him as a "victim of witch-hunting", insisting that he was in the UK only to work on his Columbia Project.[24]
Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly invented LP records. He spent seven months in Spain, where, in addition to recording three thousand items from most of the regions of Spain, he made copious notes and took hundreds of photos of "not only singers and musicians but anything that interested him – empty streets, old buildings, and country roads", bringing to these photos, "a concern for form and composition that went beyond the ethnographic to the artistic".[25] He drew a parallel between photography and field recording:
Recording folk songs works like a candid cameraman. I hold the mike, use my hand for shading volume. It's a big problem in Spain because there is so much emotional excitement, noise all around. Empathy is most important in field work. It's necessary to put your hand on the artist while he sings. They have to react to you. Even if they're mad at you, it's better than nothing.[25]
When Columbia Records producer George Avakian gave jazz arranger Gil Evans a copy of the Spanish World Library LP, Miles Davis and Evans were "struck by the beauty of pieces such as the 'Saeta', recorded in Seville, and a panpiper's tune ('Alborada de Vigo') from Galicia, and worked them into the 1960 album, Sketches of Spain."[26]
For the Scottish, English, and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy, Scots poet Hamish Henderson, and with the Irish folklorist Séamus Ennis,[27] recording among others, Margaret Barry and the songs in Irish of Elizabeth Cronin; Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson; and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, and interviewing some of these performers at length about their lives. Lomax also hosted a folk music show on BBC's home service and organized a skiffle group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who included Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Shirley Collins, among others), which appeared on British television. His ballad opera, Big Rock Candy Mountain, premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot. In Scotland, Lomax is credited with being an inspiration for the School of Scottish Studies, founded in 1951, the year of his first visit there.[28][29]
Lomax and Diego Carpitella's survey of Italian folk music for the Columbia World Library, conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, helped capture a snapshot of a multitude of important traditional folk styles shortly before they disappeared. The pair amassed one of the most representative folk song collections of any culture. From Lomax's Spanish and Italian recordings emerged one of the first theories explaining the types of folk singing that predominate in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.
Return to the United States
Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, Folksong '59, in Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood; the Selah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs (a rock and roll group). The occasion marked the first time rock and roll and bluegrass were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs", Lomax told the audience. According to Izzy Young, the audience booed when he told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll. In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music . . . . At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing."[30]
Alan Lomax had met 20-year-old English folk singer Shirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained a contract from Atlantic Records to re-record some of the American musicians first recorded in the 1940s, using improved equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Wade Ward, Charlie Higgins and Bessie Jones and culminated in the discovery of Fred McDowell. Recordings from this trip were issued under the title Sounds of the South and some were also featured in the Coen brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Lomax wished to marry Collins but when the recording trip was over, she returned to England and married Austin John Marshall. In an interview in The Guardian newspaper, Collins expressed irritation that Alan Lomax's 1993 account of the journey, The Land Where The Blues Began, barely mentioned her. "All it said was, 'Shirley Collins was along for the trip'. It made me hopping mad. I wasn't just 'along for the trip'. I was part of the recording process, I made notes, I drafted contracts, I was involved in every part".[31] Collins addressed the perceived omission in her memoir, America Over the Water, published in 2004.[32][33]
Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961. They separated the following year and were divorced in 1967.[34]
In 1962, Lomax and singer and Civil Rights Activist Guy Carawan, music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album, Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961-62, on Vanguard Records for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth. Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; Azerbaijani mugham performed by two balaban players,[35] a Sicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska;[36] in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more. Sagan later wrote that it was Lomax "who was a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music. He brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections, because Azerbaijanis play bagpipe-sounding instruments [balaban] and Peruvians play panpipes and such exquisite pieces had been recorded by ethnomusicologists known to Lomax."
After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. In March 2004 the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which 'brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.' [4]With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore,[5] even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.
Biography
Early life
Lomax, born in Austin in 1915, was the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The elder Lomax, a former professor of English at Texas A&M and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the University of Texas.
Because of childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, Lomax had mostly been home schooled in elementary school. In Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys (a tiny prep school), where he excelled. He attended the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut for a year, graduating eighth in his class at age 15 in 1930.[6] Because of his mother's declining health, however, rather than going to Harvard as his father had wished, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. A roommate, future anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, recalled Lomax as "frighteningly smart, probably classifiable as a genius", though Goldschmidt remembers Lomax exploding one night while studying: "Damn it! The hardest thing I've had to learn is that I'm not a genius."[7] At the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper, The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control.[7] At this time he also he began collecting "race" records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs, at the risk of expulsion. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess, age 10, was sent to live with an aunt. Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his sophomore year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and the Pre-Socratics with University of Texas professor Albert P. Brogan.[8] He also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects.[9] Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for the Library of Congress, co-authoring American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). He did his first field collecting without his father with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935. He returned to the University of Texas that fall and was awarded a BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa in May 1936.[10] Lack of money prevented him from immediately attending graduate school at the University of Chicago, as he desired, but he would later correspond with and pursue graduate studies with Melville J. Herskovits at Columbia University and with Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Pennsylvania.
Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Harold Goodman, then a student at the University of Texas, in February 1937.[11] They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anne (later known as Anna). Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over the BBC Home Service as part of the war effort. During the fifties, after she and Lomax divorced, she conducted lengthy interviews for Lomax with folk music personalities, including Vera Ward Hall and the Reverend Gary Davis. Lomax also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1935); with John Wesley Work III and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts[12] and Jean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean (1961); with Shirley Collins in Great Britain and the Southeastern US (1959); with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter. All those who assisted and worked with him were accurately credited on the resultant Library of Congress and other recordings, as well as in his many books, films, and publications.
Assistant in Charge and Commercial Records and Radio Broadcasts
From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings.
A pioneering oral historian, he also recorded substantial interviews with many legendary folk and jazz musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz pioneers, and Big Bill Broonzy. He also initiated some of the first (if not the very first) "man-on-the street" radio interviews of ordinary citizens. On December 8, 1941, as "Assistant in Charge at the Library of Congress, he sent telegrams to fieldworkers in ten different localities across the United States, asking them to collect reactions of ordinary Americans to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by the United States. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President," was recorded in January and February 1942.[13]
In late 1939, Lomax hosted two series on CBS's nationally broadcast American School of the Air, called American Folk Song and Wellsprings of Music, both music appreciation courses that aired daily in the schools and were supposed to highlight links between American folk and classical orchestral music. As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet. The individual programs reached ten million students in 200,000 U.S. classrooms and were also broadcast in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, but both Lomax and his father felt that the concept of the shows, which portrayed folk music as mere raw material for orchestral music, was deeply flawed and failed to do justice to vernacular culture.
In 1940 under Lomax's supervision, RCA made two groundbreaking suites of commercial folk music recordings: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly's Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs.[14] Though they did not sell especially well when released, Lomax's biographer, John Szwed calls these "some of the first concept albums."[15]
In 1940, Lomax and his close friend Nicholas Ray went on to write and produce a fifteen-minute program, Back Where I Came From, which aired three nights a week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically. Its racially integrated cast included Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Josh White, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. In February 1941, Lomax spoke and gave a demonstration of his program along with talks by Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Pan American Union, and the president of the American Museum of Natural History, at a global conference in Mexico of a thousand broadcasters CBS had sponsored to launch its worldwide programming initiative. Mrs. Roosevelt invited Lomax to Hyde Park.[16] But despite its success and high visibility, Back Where I Come From never picked up a commercial sponsor. The show ran for only twenty-one weeks before it was suddenly canceled in February, 1941.[17] On hearing the news Woody Guthrie wrote Lomax from California, "Too honest again, I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it can't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."[18] Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development.[19]
While serving in the Army in World War II Lomax produced and hosted numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera", The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.
In the late 1940s, Lomax produced a highly regarded series of commercial folk music albums for Decca Records and organized a series of concerts at New York's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, featuring blues, calypso, and flamenco music. He also hosted a radio show, Your Ballad Man, in 1949 that was broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Radio Network and featured a highly eclectic program, from gamelan music, to Django Reinhardt, to Klezmer music, to Sidney Bechet and Wild Bill Davison, to jazzy pop songs by Maxine Sullivan and Jo Stafford, to readings of the poetry of Carl Sandburg, to hillbilly music with electric guitars, to Finnish brass bands – to name a few.[20]
Move to Europe and later life
In December 1949 a newspaper printed a story "Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers'", that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. The article mentioned Alan Lomax as one of the sponsors of the dinner, along with C. B. Baldwin, campaign manager for Henry A. Wallace; New York Times music critic Olin Downes; and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom it accused of being members of Communist front groups.[21] The following June Red Channels, a pamphlet edited by former F.B.I agents which became the basis for entertainment industry blacklist of the 1950s, listed Lomax as an artist or broadcast journalist sympathetic to Communism (others listed included Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Yip Harburg, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Burl Ives, Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, and Josh White). That summer, congress was debating the McCarran Act, which would require the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies",[22] while the House Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings. Feeling sure that the Act would pass and realizing that his career in broadcasting was in jeopardy, Lomax, who was newly divorced and already had an agreement with Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records to record in Europe,[23] hastened to renew his passport, cancel his speaking engagements, and plan for his departure, telling his agent he hoped to return in January "if things cleared up". He set sail on September 24, 1950, on board the steamer RMS Mauretania. Sure enough, in October, FBI agents were interviewing Lomax's friends and acquaintances. Lomax never told his family exactly why he went to Europe, only that he was developing a library of world folk music for Columbia. Nor would he ever allow anyone to say he was forced to leave. In a letter to the editor of a British newspaper, Lomax took a writer to task for describing him as a "victim of witch-hunting", insisting that he was in the UK only to work on his Columbia Project.[24]
Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly invented LP records. He spent seven months in Spain, where, in addition to recording three thousand items from most of the regions of Spain, he made copious notes and took hundreds of photos of "not only singers and musicians but anything that interested him – empty streets, old buildings, and country roads", bringing to these photos, "a concern for form and composition that went beyond the ethnographic to the artistic".[25] He drew a parallel between photography and field recording:
Recording folk songs works like a candid cameraman. I hold the mike, use my hand for shading volume. It's a big problem in Spain because there is so much emotional excitement, noise all around. Empathy is most important in field work. It's necessary to put your hand on the artist while he sings. They have to react to you. Even if they're mad at you, it's better than nothing.[25]
When Columbia Records producer George Avakian gave jazz arranger Gil Evans a copy of the Spanish World Library LP, Miles Davis and Evans were "struck by the beauty of pieces such as the 'Saeta', recorded in Seville, and a panpiper's tune ('Alborada de Vigo') from Galicia, and worked them into the 1960 album, Sketches of Spain."[26]
For the Scottish, English, and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy, Scots poet Hamish Henderson, and with the Irish folklorist Séamus Ennis,[27] recording among others, Margaret Barry and the songs in Irish of Elizabeth Cronin; Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson; and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, and interviewing some of these performers at length about their lives. Lomax also hosted a folk music show on BBC's home service and organized a skiffle group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who included Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Shirley Collins, among others), which appeared on British television. His ballad opera, Big Rock Candy Mountain, premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot. In Scotland, Lomax is credited with being an inspiration for the School of Scottish Studies, founded in 1951, the year of his first visit there.[28][29]
Lomax and Diego Carpitella's survey of Italian folk music for the Columbia World Library, conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, helped capture a snapshot of a multitude of important traditional folk styles shortly before they disappeared. The pair amassed one of the most representative folk song collections of any culture. From Lomax's Spanish and Italian recordings emerged one of the first theories explaining the types of folk singing that predominate in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.
Return to the United States
Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, Folksong '59, in Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood; the Selah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs (a rock and roll group). The occasion marked the first time rock and roll and bluegrass were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs", Lomax told the audience. According to Izzy Young, the audience booed when he told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll. In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music . . . . At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing."[30]
Alan Lomax had met 20-year-old English folk singer Shirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained a contract from Atlantic Records to re-record some of the American musicians first recorded in the 1940s, using improved equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Wade Ward, Charlie Higgins and Bessie Jones and culminated in the discovery of Fred McDowell. Recordings from this trip were issued under the title Sounds of the South and some were also featured in the Coen brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Lomax wished to marry Collins but when the recording trip was over, she returned to England and married Austin John Marshall. In an interview in The Guardian newspaper, Collins expressed irritation that Alan Lomax's 1993 account of the journey, The Land Where The Blues Began, barely mentioned her. "All it said was, 'Shirley Collins was along for the trip'. It made me hopping mad. I wasn't just 'along for the trip'. I was part of the recording process, I made notes, I drafted contracts, I was involved in every part".[31] Collins addressed the perceived omission in her memoir, America Over the Water, published in 2004.[32][33]
Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961. They separated the following year and were divorced in 1967.[34]
In 1962, Lomax and singer and Civil Rights Activist Guy Carawan, music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album, Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961-62, on Vanguard Records for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth. Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; Azerbaijani mugham performed by two balaban players,[35] a Sicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska;[36] in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more. Sagan later wrote that it was Lomax "who was a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music. He brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections, because Azerbaijanis play bagpipe-sounding instruments [balaban] and Peruvians play panpipes and such exquisite pieces had been recorded by ethnomusicologists known to Lomax."
Alan Lomax - Southern prison music and Lead Belly
Ferdl Eichner *31.01.1966
Wenn einer wie Ferdl Eichner in vielen Formationen auf unzähligen Bühnen gespielt hat und sich dabei einen Namen als Bluesharp-Virtuose gemacht hat und nun solo mit Mundharmonika, Gitarre und Ukulele unterwegs ist, dann hat er was zu erzählen.
Erst recht, wenn er noch eine ganz andere Welt wie seine Westentasche kennt: als ehemaliger Skiprofi war er Teil der europäischen Freestyle Buckelpistenszene und als leidenschaftlicher Windsurfer ist er sowohl in den Bergen als auch in Wasser, Wind und Wellen zuhause.
Und genau dort kann man ihn finden, wenn er nicht gerade live on tour ist und das macht ihn als Musiker authentisch, weil er das lebt wovon er singt. Gesungen wird auf bayrisch, so wie ihm der Schnabel gewachsen ist. Manchmal nachdenk-lich und kritisch, manchmal voller Schelm und Witz, denn auch wenn einem das Leben Knüppel zwischen die Beine wirft, gibt es immer wieder Grund zum Lachen. Es sind Geschichten, die voller Lebensfreude stecken, von Höhen und Tiefen handeln - Erfahrungen aus dem echten Leben halt.
Im weiten Feld zwischen Singer/Songwriter, Folk, Rock und Blues kommt seine Musik pur und unverfälscht daher, seine Melodien aus Gitarre oder Ukulele verschmelzen mit seiner Mundharmonika zu einer Einheit, die zusammen mit der Stompbox vor Energie sprüht, aber auch einfach zum Geniessen einlädt - Jack Johnson trifft auf John Lee Hooker und beide jammen auf bayrisch....
Zwischendurch lässt er seine Virtuosität an der Bluesharp bei den Solostücken aufblitzen, wenn er scheinbar die Grenzen sprengt und vor einem staunendem Publikum im Kopfstand oder mit zwei Harps gleichzeitig spielt. So schreibt die Presse: "Nicht nur diese eher äußerlichen Showelemente machten sein Spiel virtuos. Die wahre Magie von Ferdl Eichner lag darin, wie er mit seinem Instrument in allen Farben zum Publikum sprach und mit Leidenschaft er ihm verblüffende Töne entlockte."
Zither-Manä - Coole Zeid
Zither und Rock-Musik? Unvorstellbar, dass so etwas zusammen gehen kann! Und doch: Manfred Zick, geboren am 6. März 1947 in München, ist zwar selbst erstaunt darüber, was er an „heavy Klängen“ seinem Instrument entlocken kann. Aber seit einem Schlüsseler-lebnis am 6. Januar 1980 wurde er in der Praxis eindrucksvoll darin bestätigt, dass diese zwei so unterschiedlichen Welten gar prächtig miteinander harmonieren. Am Abend jenes Tages, in Wörnsmühl im Leitzachtal in der Nähe von Miesbach: Manfred Zick hat einen Liveauftritt mit Volksmusikprogramm in einer Dorfwirtschaft, wie schon öfter. Unmittelbar darauf kommt es zu einer Session mit Rockmusikern. Zick steigt ein ins Geschehen, „ich habe in jener Nacht meine Zither missbraucht”, wie er rückblickend mit breitem Grin-sen gesteht, seitdem ist er angefixt von der Idee des Zither-Rock. Der „Zither-Manä” ist geboren.
„Ich liebe die Volksmusik, das steht außer Frage - und ich spiele sie weiterhin gerne”, stellt der Manä unmissverständlich fest. „Und genauso sehr liebe ich Rock-Musik, gerne die heftigere Variante davon. Das mag schizophren wirken, dürfte es auch sein, aber das macht nichts.”
Nach dem denkwürdigen Erlebnis des 6. Januar 1980 wird der „Zither-Rock” kultiviert und verfeinert. Inzwischen, viele hundert Konzerte und einige Alben-veröffentlichungen später, wartet Zither-Manä mit einer unvergleichlichen Mixtur aus Rock und Gstanzl, Tango und Landler, Blues und Heimat-Folk auf - eine einmalige Mischung aus Deep Purple und Kiem Pauli, aus Pink Floyd und Kraudn Sepp. Eine eigenwillige wie umwerfende Stil-Melange, die das Publikum regelmäßig begeistert zurücklässt, gerade wegen ihrer Leidenschaft und Unverwechselbarkeit.
So entstand von März bis Juli 2013 - zusammen mit dem Mundharmonika-As Ferdl Eichner, dem Gitarristen Frank Schimann und dem Drummer Thomas Bittner, „Coole Zeid”, bestehend aus 16 Studioarbeiten, zwei Texten und zwei Live-Mitschnitten. Tatsächlich ist eine so entspannte wie anregende und wagemutige Kombination heraus gekommen. Nicht nur musikalisch, sondern auch textlich.
Doch etwas anderes ist man vom Zither-Manä ja nicht gewohnt. „So manche Verse sind recht ironisch ausgefallen, da ich mit unserer oberflächlichen Zeit , die manch Jüngere als ‘coole Zeid’ - daher auch der Albumtitel - verherrlichen, ganz schwer zu recht kommen. Doch während ich früher extrem politische Inhalte zum Besten gegeben habe, was mir mancherorts den Ruf des Alt-68ers einbrachte, dichte ich inzwischen unverkrampft fürs Hier und Jetzt.” Was partout nicht zu bedeuten hat, dass sich der Manä den Biss hätte austreiben lassen. Manch bösartige Attacke auf machthungrige Politiker oder neue Nazis sind von geradezu schmerzhafter Offenheit und unmissverständlicher Geschliffenheit.
Trotzdem ist sich Manfred Zick sicher: „Ich füge niemandem Schmerzen zu mit meinen Versen. Um es mit Kurt Tucholsky zu unter-mauern: ‘Humor darf alles - aber nie verletzen.’ Mir geht es um Konsequenz in meinen Zeilen. Und darum, dass man immer mal wieder herzhaft lachen kann. Ich bin ja keine Kunstfigur, zivil wie auf der Bühne immer nur ich. Ich würde mich nie verbiegen, weil ich gar nicht wüsste, wie das gehen soll.”
„Ich liebe die Volksmusik, das steht außer Frage - und ich spiele sie weiterhin gerne”, stellt der Manä unmissverständlich fest. „Und genauso sehr liebe ich Rock-Musik, gerne die heftigere Variante davon. Das mag schizophren wirken, dürfte es auch sein, aber das macht nichts.”
Nach dem denkwürdigen Erlebnis des 6. Januar 1980 wird der „Zither-Rock” kultiviert und verfeinert. Inzwischen, viele hundert Konzerte und einige Alben-veröffentlichungen später, wartet Zither-Manä mit einer unvergleichlichen Mixtur aus Rock und Gstanzl, Tango und Landler, Blues und Heimat-Folk auf - eine einmalige Mischung aus Deep Purple und Kiem Pauli, aus Pink Floyd und Kraudn Sepp. Eine eigenwillige wie umwerfende Stil-Melange, die das Publikum regelmäßig begeistert zurücklässt, gerade wegen ihrer Leidenschaft und Unverwechselbarkeit.
So entstand von März bis Juli 2013 - zusammen mit dem Mundharmonika-As Ferdl Eichner, dem Gitarristen Frank Schimann und dem Drummer Thomas Bittner, „Coole Zeid”, bestehend aus 16 Studioarbeiten, zwei Texten und zwei Live-Mitschnitten. Tatsächlich ist eine so entspannte wie anregende und wagemutige Kombination heraus gekommen. Nicht nur musikalisch, sondern auch textlich.
Doch etwas anderes ist man vom Zither-Manä ja nicht gewohnt. „So manche Verse sind recht ironisch ausgefallen, da ich mit unserer oberflächlichen Zeit , die manch Jüngere als ‘coole Zeid’ - daher auch der Albumtitel - verherrlichen, ganz schwer zu recht kommen. Doch während ich früher extrem politische Inhalte zum Besten gegeben habe, was mir mancherorts den Ruf des Alt-68ers einbrachte, dichte ich inzwischen unverkrampft fürs Hier und Jetzt.” Was partout nicht zu bedeuten hat, dass sich der Manä den Biss hätte austreiben lassen. Manch bösartige Attacke auf machthungrige Politiker oder neue Nazis sind von geradezu schmerzhafter Offenheit und unmissverständlicher Geschliffenheit.
Trotzdem ist sich Manfred Zick sicher: „Ich füge niemandem Schmerzen zu mit meinen Versen. Um es mit Kurt Tucholsky zu unter-mauern: ‘Humor darf alles - aber nie verletzen.’ Mir geht es um Konsequenz in meinen Zeilen. Und darum, dass man immer mal wieder herzhaft lachen kann. Ich bin ja keine Kunstfigur, zivil wie auf der Bühne immer nur ich. Ich würde mich nie verbiegen, weil ich gar nicht wüsste, wie das gehen soll.”
R.I.P.
Slim Harpo +31.01.1970
Slim Harpo (eigentlich James Moore; * 11. Januar 1924 in Lobdel, Louisiana; † 31. Januar 1970 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) war ein US-amerikanischer Blues-Musiker, ein Virtuose auf der Mundharmonika. Als Waise musste Slim Harpo bereits früh hart arbeiten. Nach dem Krieg begann er, in den Clubs von Baton Rouge als „Harmonica Slim“ aufzutreten. Später begleitete er seinen Schwager Lightnin’ Slim sowohl im Studio als auch bei Auftritten.
1957 machte er erste eigene Aufnahmen. Seine Debüt-Single war ein Mix aus I’m A King Bee und I Got Love If You Want It. Beeinflusst von Jimmy Reed brachte Slim Harpo eine Reihe von Hits heraus, darunter Rainin’ In My Heart (1961), I Love The Life I Live, Buzzin’ (instrumental), Little Queen Bee (1964) und Baby Scratch My Back (1966). Slim Harpos Hits I’m A King Bee und Shake Your Hips (1966) wurden später auch von den Rolling Stones aufgenommen. Weitere Gruppen, die Titel von Slim Harpo aufnahmen, waren die Pretty Things, die Yardbirds und Them.
Slim Harpo war nie ein Vollzeit-Musiker. In den 1960ern hatte er sein eigenes Transportunternehmen. Er starb 1970 an einem Herzinfarkt. 1985 wurde er in die Blues Hall of Fame aufgenommen, im Jahr 2004 folgte das Album Raining in my Heart.
James Isaac Moore (January 11, 1924 – January 31, 1970),[1][nb 1] known as Slim Harpo, was an American blues musician, a leading exponent of the swamp blues style, and "one of the most commercially successful blues artists of his day".[2] His most successful and influential recordings included "I'm a King Bee" (1957), "Rainin' In My Heart" (1961), and "Baby Scratch My Back" (1966) which reached no.1 on the R&B chart and no.16 on the US pop chart. A master of the blues harmonica, his stage name was derived from the popular nickname for that instrument, the "harp".[3]
Life and career
James Moore was born in Lobdell, Louisiana, United States,[4] the eldest child in his family. After his parents died he worked as a longshoreman and construction worker in New Orleans during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Influenced in style by Jimmy Reed, he began performing in Baton Rouge bars under the name Harmonica Slim, and also accompanied his brother-in-law Lightnin' Slim in live performances.[1][2][5][6][7]
He started his own recording career in March 1957, working with A&R man and record producer J. D. "Jay" Miller in Crowley, Louisiana.[8] At his wife's suggestion, he took the name Slim Harpo in order to differentiate himself from another performer called Harmonica Slim.[9] His first solo release, for Excello Records based in Nashville, Tennessee, was "I'm a King Bee", backed with "I Got Love If You Want It." The other musicians on the recording were Gabriel "Guitar Gable" Perrodin (guitar); John "Fats" Perrodin (bass); and Clarence "Jockey" Etienne (drums).[8] Although Harpo played guitar in his live shows, he usually used other guitarists when recording.[10] The record was a regional hit, but failed to make the national charts.[5] He followed up with several more singles for Excello before having his first chart hit, "Rainin' In My Heart", in early 1961. The record reached no.17 on the Billboard R&B chart and no.34 on the US pop chart,[11] and it was followed soon after with an LP of the same name and further singles. Many of his songs were co-written with his wife, Lovelle Moore, although she never received credit.[7][9]
Never a full-time musician, Harpo had his own trucking business during the 1960s.[7] According to writer Ryan Whirty, "Harpo and his band needed to tour constantly and play as much as possible; times were frequently lean financially, and the men had to scrape up whatever they could get."[2] But, by 1964, several of his tracks had been released on albums and singles in the UK,[8] and British rock bands like the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Pink Floyd and Them began to feature versions of his songs in their early repertoires. The Moody Blues reportedly took their name from an instrumental track of Slim's called "Moody Blues".[7]
Writer Cub Koda noted that: "Harpo was more adaptable than [Jimmy] Reed or most other bluesmen. His material not only made the national charts, but also proved to be quite adaptable for white artists on both sides of the Atlantic... A people-pleasing club entertainer, he certainly wasn't above working rock & roll rhythms into his music, along with hard-stressed, country & western vocal inflections...By the time his first single became a Southern jukebox favorite, his songs were being adapted and played by white musicians left and right. Here was good-time Saturday-night blues that could be sung by elements of the Caucasian persuasion with a straight face."[1]
He had his biggest commercial success in 1966, when the instrumental "Baby Scratch My Back" reached no.1 on the R&B chart and no.16 on the US pop chart. Harpo described it as "an attempt at rock & roll for me." Like his previous records, it was recorded with producer J. D. Miller and the regular Excello musicians, including guitarist Rudy Richard, bassist James Johnson and drummer Jesse Kinchen, in Crowley, Louisiana.[2][8] However, disagreements with Miller and a change in the record company's ownership led to two follow-ups, "Tip On In" and "Tee-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu," being recorded in Nashville with new producer Robert Holmes.[5] Both made the R&B charts.[11] He recorded his 1968 album Tip On In in Nashville, using musicians Charles Hodges (organ), Mabon "Teenie" Hodges (guitar); Leroy Hodges (bass) and Howard Grimes (drums), who later became more widely known as the Hi Rhythm Section. He also recorded versions of Charlie Rich's "Mohair Sam" and Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues".[8]
He recruited Lightnin' Slim to his touring band in 1968,[5] and toured widely in the late 1960s, mainly reaching rock audiences. In January 1970, with his first scheduled tour of Europe and recording sessions planned, he died suddenly in Baton Rouge, of a heart attack at the age of 46, despite being "one of the cleanest living bluesmen of his era".[1][9] He was buried in Mulatto Bend Cemetery in Port Allen, Louisiana.[12]
Influence
The riff from Harpo's 1966 hit "Shake Your Hips", which itself was derivative of Bo Diddley's "Bring It to Jerome", was used in the ZZ Top 1973 hit "La Grange", and the Rolling Stones covered the song on their 1972 album Exile On Main Street. "Shake Your Hips" was also covered by Joan Osborne on her 2012 album Bring It On Home. Other notable covers of Slim Harpo songs include "I Got Love If You Want It" by the Kinks, "I'm the Face" by the Who (when they were still called the High Numbers), "I'm A King Bee" by the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd and the Doors, and "Don't Start Crying Now" by Them with Van Morrison. Harpo's recordings were also widely covered in modern African-American circles, including by Gil Scott-Heron on his final album. Scott-Heron covered "I'll Take Care of You" on his record I'm New Here. The song is also featured on the remix album featuring Jamie XX called We're New Here. In 2012 a Jack Daniel's Tennessee Honey Whiskey commercial featured Harpo's song "I'm a King Bee" covered by San Francisco blues band the Stone Foxes.
The Slim Harpo Music Awards, awarded annually in Baton Rouge, are named in his honour. Proceeds from the awards benefit the "Music in the Schools" outreach program.
Life and career
James Moore was born in Lobdell, Louisiana, United States,[4] the eldest child in his family. After his parents died he worked as a longshoreman and construction worker in New Orleans during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Influenced in style by Jimmy Reed, he began performing in Baton Rouge bars under the name Harmonica Slim, and also accompanied his brother-in-law Lightnin' Slim in live performances.[1][2][5][6][7]
He started his own recording career in March 1957, working with A&R man and record producer J. D. "Jay" Miller in Crowley, Louisiana.[8] At his wife's suggestion, he took the name Slim Harpo in order to differentiate himself from another performer called Harmonica Slim.[9] His first solo release, for Excello Records based in Nashville, Tennessee, was "I'm a King Bee", backed with "I Got Love If You Want It." The other musicians on the recording were Gabriel "Guitar Gable" Perrodin (guitar); John "Fats" Perrodin (bass); and Clarence "Jockey" Etienne (drums).[8] Although Harpo played guitar in his live shows, he usually used other guitarists when recording.[10] The record was a regional hit, but failed to make the national charts.[5] He followed up with several more singles for Excello before having his first chart hit, "Rainin' In My Heart", in early 1961. The record reached no.17 on the Billboard R&B chart and no.34 on the US pop chart,[11] and it was followed soon after with an LP of the same name and further singles. Many of his songs were co-written with his wife, Lovelle Moore, although she never received credit.[7][9]
Never a full-time musician, Harpo had his own trucking business during the 1960s.[7] According to writer Ryan Whirty, "Harpo and his band needed to tour constantly and play as much as possible; times were frequently lean financially, and the men had to scrape up whatever they could get."[2] But, by 1964, several of his tracks had been released on albums and singles in the UK,[8] and British rock bands like the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Pink Floyd and Them began to feature versions of his songs in their early repertoires. The Moody Blues reportedly took their name from an instrumental track of Slim's called "Moody Blues".[7]
Writer Cub Koda noted that: "Harpo was more adaptable than [Jimmy] Reed or most other bluesmen. His material not only made the national charts, but also proved to be quite adaptable for white artists on both sides of the Atlantic... A people-pleasing club entertainer, he certainly wasn't above working rock & roll rhythms into his music, along with hard-stressed, country & western vocal inflections...By the time his first single became a Southern jukebox favorite, his songs were being adapted and played by white musicians left and right. Here was good-time Saturday-night blues that could be sung by elements of the Caucasian persuasion with a straight face."[1]
He had his biggest commercial success in 1966, when the instrumental "Baby Scratch My Back" reached no.1 on the R&B chart and no.16 on the US pop chart. Harpo described it as "an attempt at rock & roll for me." Like his previous records, it was recorded with producer J. D. Miller and the regular Excello musicians, including guitarist Rudy Richard, bassist James Johnson and drummer Jesse Kinchen, in Crowley, Louisiana.[2][8] However, disagreements with Miller and a change in the record company's ownership led to two follow-ups, "Tip On In" and "Tee-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu," being recorded in Nashville with new producer Robert Holmes.[5] Both made the R&B charts.[11] He recorded his 1968 album Tip On In in Nashville, using musicians Charles Hodges (organ), Mabon "Teenie" Hodges (guitar); Leroy Hodges (bass) and Howard Grimes (drums), who later became more widely known as the Hi Rhythm Section. He also recorded versions of Charlie Rich's "Mohair Sam" and Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues".[8]
He recruited Lightnin' Slim to his touring band in 1968,[5] and toured widely in the late 1960s, mainly reaching rock audiences. In January 1970, with his first scheduled tour of Europe and recording sessions planned, he died suddenly in Baton Rouge, of a heart attack at the age of 46, despite being "one of the cleanest living bluesmen of his era".[1][9] He was buried in Mulatto Bend Cemetery in Port Allen, Louisiana.[12]
Influence
The riff from Harpo's 1966 hit "Shake Your Hips", which itself was derivative of Bo Diddley's "Bring It to Jerome", was used in the ZZ Top 1973 hit "La Grange", and the Rolling Stones covered the song on their 1972 album Exile On Main Street. "Shake Your Hips" was also covered by Joan Osborne on her 2012 album Bring It On Home. Other notable covers of Slim Harpo songs include "I Got Love If You Want It" by the Kinks, "I'm the Face" by the Who (when they were still called the High Numbers), "I'm A King Bee" by the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd and the Doors, and "Don't Start Crying Now" by Them with Van Morrison. Harpo's recordings were also widely covered in modern African-American circles, including by Gil Scott-Heron on his final album. Scott-Heron covered "I'll Take Care of You" on his record I'm New Here. The song is also featured on the remix album featuring Jamie XX called We're New Here. In 2012 a Jack Daniel's Tennessee Honey Whiskey commercial featured Harpo's song "I'm a King Bee" covered by San Francisco blues band the Stone Foxes.
The Slim Harpo Music Awards, awarded annually in Baton Rouge, are named in his honour. Proceeds from the awards benefit the "Music in the Schools" outreach program.
Buster Brown +31.01.1976
Buster Brown (* 15. August 1911 in Cordele, Georgia; † 31. Januar 1976 in New York) war ein US-amerikanischer Blues- und R&B-Sänger und Mundharmonikaspieler, dessen Mundharmonikaspiel sich an den Stil von Sonny Terry anlehnt. Am bekanntesten ist sein Hit „Fannie Mae“.
In den 1930er und 1940er Jahren spielte er in lokalen Klubs und machte einige nichtkommerzielle Aufnahmen; so wurde sein Auftritt beim Folkfestival im Fort Valley State Teachers College für das Folkmusic Archiv der Library of Congress aufgenommen. 1956 übersiedelte er nach New York, wo er von Bobby Robinson, dem Chef von Fire Records entdeckt wurde. [1]
1959, mit beinahe 50 Jahren, nahm er „Fannie Mae“ auf, eine Nummer, die ihn auf # 38 der US Top 40 und # 1 der R&B-Charts[2] brachte. Die Nachfolgesingle, ein Cover von Louis Jordans „Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby“[3] kam nicht in die R&B-Charts, das gelang ihm erst wieder mit „Sugar Babe“ (# 19).[4] Eine darauffolgende Aufnahme von „Crawlin' Kingsnake“ für Checker Records in Chicago erreichte aber nicht mehr die Charts.
Buster Brown ist auch der Co-Autor von „Doctor Brown“, eines Songs, der 1968 von Fleetwood Mac auf ihrem Album Mr.Wonderful gecovert wurde.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Brown_%28Bluesmusiker%29
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVNcqb2a3KA#t=18
Buster
Brown (August 15, 1911 – January 31, 1976)[1] was an American blues and
R&B singer best known for his hit, "Fannie Mae".[1]
Biography
Brown was born in Cordele, Georgia.[1] In the 1930s and 1940s he played harmonica at local clubs and made a few non-commercial recordings. These included "War Song" and "I'm Gonna Make You Happy" (1943), which were recorded when he played at the folk festival at Fort Valley (GA) State Teachers College, for the Library of Congress' Folk Music Archive.[2]
Brown moved to New York in 1956, where he was discovered by Fire Records owner Bobby Robinson. In 1959, at almost fifty years of age, Brown recorded the rustic blues, "Fannie Mae", which featured Brown's harmonica playing and whoops, which went to # 38 in the U.S. Top 40, and to #1 on the R&B chart in April 1960. His remake of Louis Jordan's "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" reached # 81 on the pop charts later in 1960, but did not make the R&B chart.[3][4] "Sugar Babe" was his only other hit, in 1962, reaching # 19 on the R&B chart and # 99 on the pop chart.
In later years he recorded for Checker Records and for numerous small record labels.[5] He also co-wrote the song "Doctor Brown" with J. T. Brown, which was later covered by Fleetwood Mac on their 1968 album, Mr. Wonderful.
Death
Brown died in New York in 1976, at the age of 64.[1]
It is often erroneously cited that Brown's real name was "Wayman Glasco" - however, that was Brown's manager who, after his death, bought all of Brown's publishing - thus unintentionally creating the confusion. Though likely a nickname, or alias, Buster Brown may have been his birth name.
Biography
Brown was born in Cordele, Georgia.[1] In the 1930s and 1940s he played harmonica at local clubs and made a few non-commercial recordings. These included "War Song" and "I'm Gonna Make You Happy" (1943), which were recorded when he played at the folk festival at Fort Valley (GA) State Teachers College, for the Library of Congress' Folk Music Archive.[2]
Brown moved to New York in 1956, where he was discovered by Fire Records owner Bobby Robinson. In 1959, at almost fifty years of age, Brown recorded the rustic blues, "Fannie Mae", which featured Brown's harmonica playing and whoops, which went to # 38 in the U.S. Top 40, and to #1 on the R&B chart in April 1960. His remake of Louis Jordan's "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" reached # 81 on the pop charts later in 1960, but did not make the R&B chart.[3][4] "Sugar Babe" was his only other hit, in 1962, reaching # 19 on the R&B chart and # 99 on the pop chart.
In later years he recorded for Checker Records and for numerous small record labels.[5] He also co-wrote the song "Doctor Brown" with J. T. Brown, which was later covered by Fleetwood Mac on their 1968 album, Mr. Wonderful.
Death
Brown died in New York in 1976, at the age of 64.[1]
It is often erroneously cited that Brown's real name was "Wayman Glasco" - however, that was Brown's manager who, after his death, bought all of Brown's publishing - thus unintentionally creating the confusion. Though likely a nickname, or alias, Buster Brown may have been his birth name.
Fannie Mae-Buster Brown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVNcqb2a3KA#t=18
