1932 Buster Benton*
1940 Little Freddie King*
1948 Jürgen Kerth*
1964 Timo Gross*
2002 Alan Lomax+
Steve Waitt*
Happy Birthday
Buster Benton *19.07.1932
Buster Benton (July 19, 1932 – January 20, 1996)[1] was an American blues guitarist and singer, who played guitar in Willie Dixon's Blues All-Stars, and is best known for his solo rendition of the Dixon-penned song "Spider in My Stew."[2] He was tenacious and in the latter part of his lengthy career, despite the amputation of parts of both his legs, Benton never stopped playing his own version of Chicago blues.
Arley Benton was born in Texarkana, Arkansas.[3]
Whilst residing in Toledo, Ohio, during the mid-1950s, and having been influenced by Sam Cooke and B.B. King, Benton began playing blues music.[1] By 1959, he was leading his own band in Chicago.[3] During the 1960s, local record labels, such as Melloway, Alteen, Sonic, and Twinight Records released several Benton singles, before in 1971 he joined Willie Dixon.[1] Indeed, a lack of opportunity in the early 1960s meant that Benton gave up playing professionally for several years, and he worked as an auto mechanic.[4] Benton's earlier work was an amalgam of blues and soul, which he confusingly dubbed 'disco blues'. However, according to Music journalist, Bill Dahl, "in the late 1970s, when the popularity of blues music was at low ebb, Benton's recordings, particularly for Ronn Records, were a breath of fresh air."[1]
Benton became a fixture in Dixon's Blues All-Stars for some time.[1] A 1973 album by Dixon's Blues All-Stars, featuring Benton, The All Star Blues World Of Maestro Willie Dixon and his Chicago Blues Band, was issued on Spivey.
Dixon was credited as the songwriter of Benton's best known song, "Spider in My Stew."[2] Released on the Shreveport-based Jewel Records label, it gave Benton a modicum of fame, and his 1974 follow-up, "Money Is the Name of the Game", helped to cement his standing.[1] Benton's 1978 effort for Jewel's Ronn Records subsidiary (also titled Spider in My Stew) became recognised as one of the more engaging Chicago blues albums of its time.[1]
Benton recorded three further albums on the Ichiban label, but in comparison to his work on the Ronn label, they were uncommercial.[1] One such LP offering was 1989's, Money's The Name of The Game, produced by Gary B.B. Coleman.[5] Benton also issued a record on the Blue Phoenix label.[3] Benton's fortitude did not go unnoticed. He suffered from the effects of diabetes and received dialysis for the final years of his life. In addition, in 1993, part of his right leg was amputated due to poor circulation, having already lost a portion of the other some ten years previously. He soldiered on, playing his brand of the blues up to his death.[1] However, as journalist, Tony Russell, stated in his book The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray, Benton "never found another money spider".[3]
Benton died in January 1996, in Chicago,[1][6] from the effects of diabetes, at age 63.
His work has appeared on a number of compilation albums, including Chicago Blues Festival: 1969-1986 (2001).
Buster Benton -- Blues & Trouble (1985)
01 -- You're My Lady [00:05:07]
02 -- That's Your Thing [00:04:49]
03 -- Can't Wait To See My Baby's Face [00:04:55]
04 -- Blues And Trouble [00:06:17]
05 -- It's Good In My Neighborhood [00:03:33]
06 -- Lonesome For A Dime [00:07:20]
07 -- I Wish't I Knew [00:04:34]
08 -- From Missouri [00:03:44]
09 -- Dangerous Woman [00:05:04]
10 -- Honey Bee [00:04:36]
11 -- Hard Luck Blues [00:05:45]
12 -- I Must Have A Hole In My Head [00:03:28]
13 -- Cold Man Ain't No Good [00:05:32]
14 -- Money Is The Name Of The Game [00:06:00]
02 -- That's Your Thing [00:04:49]
03 -- Can't Wait To See My Baby's Face [00:04:55]
04 -- Blues And Trouble [00:06:17]
05 -- It's Good In My Neighborhood [00:03:33]
06 -- Lonesome For A Dime [00:07:20]
07 -- I Wish't I Knew [00:04:34]
08 -- From Missouri [00:03:44]
09 -- Dangerous Woman [00:05:04]
10 -- Honey Bee [00:04:36]
11 -- Hard Luck Blues [00:05:45]
12 -- I Must Have A Hole In My Head [00:03:28]
13 -- Cold Man Ain't No Good [00:05:32]
14 -- Money Is The Name Of The Game [00:06:00]
Jürgen Kerth *19.07.1948
Jürgen Kerth (* 19. Juli 1948 in Erfurt) ist ein deutscher Blues-Gitarrist und -sänger.
Kerths Laufbahn begann 1964 mit der Schülerband Spotlights (zusammen mit Heinz-Jürgen Gottschalk), die sich auf Druck der Kulturbehörden in „Rampenlichter“ umbenennen musste und 1966 verboten wurde. Er gründete daraufhin 1967 das Rock & Blues Ensemble Kerth. Nach einer musikalischen Ausbildung in der Musikschule Erfurt gründete er 1971 das Jürgen-Kerth-Quintett bzw. die Gruppe Jürgen Kerth, aus welcher 1973 ein Quartett und nach dem Tod des Bassisten Roland Michi im Jahr 1979 ein Trio wurde. Virtuose Gitarren- und Gesangstechnik prägen seine bluesgefärbte Rockmusik, er spielte aber auch hervorragende jazzorientierte Instrumentals. Er spielte mehrere LPs und Singles ein, eine Auswahl ist auf dem Sampler Best of Blues enthalten. 2002 coverte Clueso sein Lied Nachts Unterwegs. 2006 erschien die CD Blues-Anthologie.
Kerth engagiert sich als ehrenamtlicher Botschafter der Stiftung Kinderhospiz Mitteldeutschland Nordhausen e. V. in Tambach-Dietharz.
1999 erhielt Kerth den Kulturpreis der Stadt Erfurt.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Kerth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjEQkNTSns#t=244
Jürgen Kerth, geboren am 19. Juli 1948 in Erfurt, ist einer der besten deutschen Blues-Gitarristen und -Sänger. Der Musiker begann 1964 in der Schülerband "Spotlights", in der er zusammen mit Heinz-Jürgen "Gotte" Gottschalk musizierte. Durch Gottes Hinweis auf ein besonderes Angebot kam Jürgen Kerth zu seinem markanten und bis heute im Einsatz befindlichen Instrument. "Die Eine", wie er seine Gitarre nennt, ist eine Gitarre der Marke MIGMA (Musikinstrumenten Handwerker-Genossenschaft Markneukirchen) aus Klingenthal. Sie kostete damals ca. 600 Mark.
Die erste Station bei der Gruppe "Spotlights" war nur eine sehr kurze, da sich die Band auf Druck der Kulturbehörden in "Rampenlichter" umbenennen musste, und 1966 sogar komplett verboten wurde. Danach folgte eine musikalische Ausbildung an der Musikschule Erfurt. Während dieser Ausbildung, im Jahre 1971, gründete Kerth das "Jürgen Kerth-Quintett", später dann in "Gruppe Jürgen Kerth" umbenannt. Im Jahre 1973 wurde aus dem Quintett ein Quartett, und nach dem Tod des Bassisten Roland Michi im Jahre 1979 ein Trio.
Im Jahre 1973 erschien unter dem Namen "Jürgen Kerth Quartett" bei der AMIGA die erste Single mit dem Titel "Marie". Mit "Martha" (1975) und "...und sie ist glücklich dazu" (1977) erschienen zwei weitere Singles, ehe 1978 das erste komplette Album veröffentlicht wurde. Nach der Veröffentlichung seiner dritten LP ("Gloriosa", 1982) fiel er beim Plattenlabel AMIGA wegen kritischer Texte in Ungnade. Es wurden bis zur Wende 1989 keine weiteren Platten von Jürgen Kerth mehr produziert.
Jürgen Kerth ist für seine virtuose Gitarren- und Gesangstechnik über die Grenzen des Landes hinaus bekannt. Perfekt gespielte, bluesgefärbte Rockmusik, aber auch jazzorientierte Instrumentals ließen ihn auch in den USA erfolgreich sein. Nach der Wende stand er schon oft auch international auf der Bühne, spielte gefeierte Konzerte in den USA und kann inzwischen auf gemeinsame Auftritte z.B. mit dem legendären B.B. King zurück blicken (siehe Foto oben).
Der Gitarrist steht noch heute auf den Bühnen des Landes und begeistert sein Publikum mit seiner Spielkunst. Schon zu DDR-Zeiten wurde Kerth mehrfach zum Gitarristen Nr. 1 gewählt und war der "inoffizielle" ostdeutsche Blues-König. Im Jahre 1999 erhielt er den Kulturpreis seiner Heimatstadt Erfurt verliehen.
In den letzten Jahren sind bei seiner ehemaligen Plattenfirma (heute SONY Music) diverse CDs erschienen. Neue Songs verlegt er inzwischen ein Eigenregie, so sind z.B. die Alben "Dass Dir einer hilft" und "Made for USA" erschienen.
Jürgen Kerth nutzt seine Popularität aber auch dazu, sich ehrenamtlich als Botschafter der Stiftung Kinderhospiz Mitteldeutschland Nordhausen e.V. in Tambach-Dietharz zu engagieren. Sogar in Sachen "Filmmusik" ist Kerth schon zum Einsatz gekommen: In einem Film über Angelo Dandi, der berühmten Trainerlegende von Mohammed Ali, ist seine Musik zu hören ist.
The guitarist Juergen Kerth has been performing for thirty years. „The East
German Blues King“ is stylistically influenced by Rory Gallagher, Santana, Johnny Winter,
B.B. King, Hendrix, etc. His music contains swing, soul, funk, and reggae
sounds — and much more!
During the Communist reign, he was voted East Germany’s #1 guitarist several times.
Ten years ago, he began appearing in America, where he has performed
countless concerts. To the astounded and impressed Americans he explained:
„If you, as a musician, are bound to one area and cannot venture into the
world, you must imagine your heroes and the legendary concerts such as
Woodstock and shows at the Fillmore East. You’ve got to bring this emotion
into your world.“
The decade of Juergen Kerth’s popularity must point not only to his
motivational concepts, but also to his supportive fans who enjoy Kerth’s
unique style of playing.
Through his many compositions and works, and because of his constant
striving to improve himself, he has become one of the most important and
influential guitarists in Germany — and America.
Juergen is accompanied by his son, Stefan, who has been his bassist since the
age of sixteen, as well as drummer Alexander Batzel — two excellent
musicians!
Die erste Station bei der Gruppe "Spotlights" war nur eine sehr kurze, da sich die Band auf Druck der Kulturbehörden in "Rampenlichter" umbenennen musste, und 1966 sogar komplett verboten wurde. Danach folgte eine musikalische Ausbildung an der Musikschule Erfurt. Während dieser Ausbildung, im Jahre 1971, gründete Kerth das "Jürgen Kerth-Quintett", später dann in "Gruppe Jürgen Kerth" umbenannt. Im Jahre 1973 wurde aus dem Quintett ein Quartett, und nach dem Tod des Bassisten Roland Michi im Jahre 1979 ein Trio.
Im Jahre 1973 erschien unter dem Namen "Jürgen Kerth Quartett" bei der AMIGA die erste Single mit dem Titel "Marie". Mit "Martha" (1975) und "...und sie ist glücklich dazu" (1977) erschienen zwei weitere Singles, ehe 1978 das erste komplette Album veröffentlicht wurde. Nach der Veröffentlichung seiner dritten LP ("Gloriosa", 1982) fiel er beim Plattenlabel AMIGA wegen kritischer Texte in Ungnade. Es wurden bis zur Wende 1989 keine weiteren Platten von Jürgen Kerth mehr produziert.
Jürgen Kerth ist für seine virtuose Gitarren- und Gesangstechnik über die Grenzen des Landes hinaus bekannt. Perfekt gespielte, bluesgefärbte Rockmusik, aber auch jazzorientierte Instrumentals ließen ihn auch in den USA erfolgreich sein. Nach der Wende stand er schon oft auch international auf der Bühne, spielte gefeierte Konzerte in den USA und kann inzwischen auf gemeinsame Auftritte z.B. mit dem legendären B.B. King zurück blicken (siehe Foto oben).
Der Gitarrist steht noch heute auf den Bühnen des Landes und begeistert sein Publikum mit seiner Spielkunst. Schon zu DDR-Zeiten wurde Kerth mehrfach zum Gitarristen Nr. 1 gewählt und war der "inoffizielle" ostdeutsche Blues-König. Im Jahre 1999 erhielt er den Kulturpreis seiner Heimatstadt Erfurt verliehen.
In den letzten Jahren sind bei seiner ehemaligen Plattenfirma (heute SONY Music) diverse CDs erschienen. Neue Songs verlegt er inzwischen ein Eigenregie, so sind z.B. die Alben "Dass Dir einer hilft" und "Made for USA" erschienen.
Jürgen Kerth nutzt seine Popularität aber auch dazu, sich ehrenamtlich als Botschafter der Stiftung Kinderhospiz Mitteldeutschland Nordhausen e.V. in Tambach-Dietharz zu engagieren. Sogar in Sachen "Filmmusik" ist Kerth schon zum Einsatz gekommen: In einem Film über Angelo Dandi, der berühmten Trainerlegende von Mohammed Ali, ist seine Musik zu hören ist.
The guitarist Juergen Kerth has been performing for thirty years. „The East
German Blues King“ is stylistically influenced by Rory Gallagher, Santana, Johnny Winter,
B.B. King, Hendrix, etc. His music contains swing, soul, funk, and reggae
sounds — and much more!
During the Communist reign, he was voted East Germany’s #1 guitarist several times.
Ten years ago, he began appearing in America, where he has performed
countless concerts. To the astounded and impressed Americans he explained:
„If you, as a musician, are bound to one area and cannot venture into the
world, you must imagine your heroes and the legendary concerts such as
Woodstock and shows at the Fillmore East. You’ve got to bring this emotion
into your world.“
The decade of Juergen Kerth’s popularity must point not only to his
motivational concepts, but also to his supportive fans who enjoy Kerth’s
unique style of playing.
Through his many compositions and works, and because of his constant
striving to improve himself, he has become one of the most important and
influential guitarists in Germany — and America.
Juergen is accompanied by his son, Stefan, who has been his bassist since the
age of sixteen, as well as drummer Alexander Batzel — two excellent
musicians!
Der Blues von der Grauen Maus, Juergen Kerth & Band, live 1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjEQkNTSns#t=244
Little Freddie King *19.07.1940
Little Freddie King (born Fread Eugene Martin,[2][3] July 19, 1940, McComb, Mississippi) is an American Delta blues guitarist. His style was based on Freddie King, although his own approach to country blues is original.The cousin of Lightnin' Hopkins, King learned guitar from his father, but in 1954 moved to New Orleans at the age of 14.[1][3] He played in many juke joints with his friends Babe Stovall, Slim Harpo, and Champion Jack Dupree, playing both acoustic and electric guitar.[4]
He recorded the first electric blues album in New Orleans with Harmonica Williams in 1969. In 1976, King undertook a European tour alongside Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker.[5] His next recording opportunity came some twenty seven years after his first in 1996, with the release of Swamp Boogie. King's Sing Sang Sung (2000) was recorded live at the Dream Palace in Faubourg Marigny.[1]
King is a charter member and has played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for 42 years.[1] He is a member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. Three times selected Blues Performer of the Year in New Orleans, King was presented with a Mississippi Trail Marker in McComb, Mississippi.[6]
King's most recent album, Chasing tha Blues was released in 2012.[7][3] The album won Best Blues Album at the 12th Annual Independent Music Awards.
Timo Gross *19.07.1964
Timo Gross (* 19. Juli 1964 in Hannover) ist ein deutscher Gitarrist, Sänger, Komponist und Produzent. Seit seiner Schulzeit steht die Musik im Mittelpunkt seines Lebens. Nach drei Jahrzehnten mit unterschiedlichen Projekten und Bands veröffentlichte er 2005 sein erstes Album („Down to the Delta“) und etablierte sich damit in der deutschen Bluesszene. Seitdem veröffentlichte er etliche weitere CDs, tourt durch Europa und befasst sich in verschiedenen Dozententätigkeiten mit der musikalischen Nachwuchsarbeit.Der Weg zum Blues
Zwischen 1979 und 1988 erlernte er während und nach seiner Schulzeit in Bad Bergzabern am dortigen Gymnasium das Gitarrenspiel als Autodidakt. Es folgten monatlich etwa vier Auftritte mit Schüler- und Amateurbands; zudem war Timo Gross Mitglied im Schulorchester Bad Bergzabern.
1988 begann der Südpfälzer sein Gitarrenstudium an der Amsterdamer Hochschule der Künste bei Christian Hassenstein, Henk Sprenger und Victor Kaihatou (Ensemble), verließ das Konservatorium in Hilversum allerdings nach zwei Jahren wegen regelmäßiger Engagements in diversen Bands, hauptsächlich im Raum Rhein-Neckar und Pfalz. Parallel dazu nahm er seine ersten privaten Unterrichtstätigkeiten auf.
Country- und Schlagerphase
Zwischen 1991 und 1994 war Timo Gross auf Tournee durch Deutschland und im angrenzenden Ausland. Er spielte fest in der Profi-Country-Band Hobo. Es folgten ein Plattenvertrag mit Sony/Columbia mit der Band Speakeasy sowie zwei Veröffentlichungen, diverse TV-und Liveauftritte.
Von 1996 bis 1998 kam Timo Gross zur Profiband Americas Most Wanted und spielte unter anderem auch mit Rolf Stahlhofen (Söhne Mannheims) in ganz Deutschland. Während dieser Zeit arbeitete er als Studiogitarrist unter anderem in Ralf Zang Studios und Edo Zanki Studios in Mannheim und komponierte Werbemusik für AOK, Mercedes Benz, Vebacom, BMG/Ariola und Bi. Er spielte im El Topo und in Dierks Studios (Scorpions) in Köln sowie im Winnie Ley in Sandhausen. Es folgten Veröffentlichungen mit Valentin Engel und Detlev Stiegert.
1998 übernahm er gleich zwei musikalische Leitungen: zum einen für den Schlagersänger André Stade (Intercord, Polydor, Koch), für den er unzählige Fernsehauftritte spielte, und für die R’n’B-, Soul- und Hip-Hop-Coverband Cozmic Soul. Bis 2002 bestritt er über 350 Auftritte mit letzterer Formation und etablierte ein wöchentliches Event im Karlsruher Nachtcafé; ab 2003 war er bei einer wöchentlichen Soulnight im Session Kulturwerk Walldorf mit Cozmic Soul zu hören.
Für sein Engagement in der regionalen Musikszene erhielt Timo Gross 1999 den Südpfälzer Musikpreis. Im selben Jahr produzierte er eine CD mit der Boygroup Bed and Breakfast (Polydor).
In die 2000er startete Timo Gross als Gitarrist der Renee Walker Band, mit der er im In- und Ausland tourte. Zudem produzierte er ein Album mit der Trip-Hop-Band Nonex, mit der er ebenfalls auf Tour war. 2001 übernahm er die musikalische Leitung für Kathy Kelly (The Kelly Family).
2002 war Timo Gross bei einem Fernsehauftritt mit Gunter Gabriel (epark) zu sehen, es folgten Auftritte mit Larry Garner (Blues) und die Veröffentlichung der Maxi-CD „Be Yourself“ mit der Renee Walker Band.
Eine Tour mit den Boogaloo Kings durch Österreich, die Schweiz und Deutschland sowie die Veröffentlichung des Albums „Leaving Las Vegas“ schlossen sich an. Im Mannheimer Capitol etablierte Timo Gross die monatliche Blues-Lounge.
Eigene Projekte und vermehrte Dozententätigkeit
Nach rund 25 Jahren im Musikgeschäft begann Timo Gross 2004 mit der Produktion seines Debütalbums „Down to the Delta“. Damit geht er musikalisch nun ganz eigene Wege. Gleichzeitig produzierte er für den Schlagersänger Tim Capri und wurde Dozent an der Jugendmusikschule Bad Schönborn (bis 2007). Seine monatliche Blueslounge in Mannheim konnte derweil mit Stargästen wie Laith al-Deen, Grönemeyer-Gitarrist Stephan Zobeley, Markus Tiedemann (Six was Nine), Jim Kahr, Kosho (Söhne Mannheims) und Andreas Schmid-Martelle (Jule Neigel) aufwarten – Timo Gross spielte mit ihnen allen.
Direkt nach der Veröffentlichung seines ersten Albums „Down to the Delta“ wählte das Magazin Bluesnews die CD zum Album des Monats März. Es folgten positive Rezensionen in ganz Europa sowie Konzerte in Deutschland, der Schweiz und Frankreich. Unter anderem spielte Timo Gross mit seiner Band (Frowin Ickler am Bass und Michael Siegwart am Schlagzeug) bei Europas größtem Bluesfestival in Gaildorf. Stumble Records veröffentlichte „The Bluesnews Collection Vol. IV” mit Titeln von Timo Gross. In die rund 100 Auftritte bis Jahresende reihten sich unter anderem auch Duokonzerte mit der Chicagoer Blueslegende Jim Kahr.
2006 trat er bei der Musikmesse in Frankfurt auf. Timo Gross tourte in diesem Jahr mit seinem Album durch Europa und spielte einige Duokonzerte unter anderem mit Kosho (Söhne Mannheims). Im selben Jahr veranstaltete er erstmals das „Blues & Roots“-Festival in Pleisweiler, das seitdem jedes Jahr stattfindet.
Auf dem Sampler „Showbiz Blues“ (Dude Records) erschien Timo Gross' Song „Trouble“, die Blues Lounge zog um nach Ludwigshafen am Rhein und fand seitdem im dasHaus statt. Er machte unter anderem Werbung für Blade Guitars in der Fach- und Bluespresse. Die Bluesnews brachte ein großes Interview mit ihm.
Auch sein zweites Album „Travellin'“ (2007) schnitt in der internationalen Presse ebenfalls gut ab. Es folgten Funkeinsätze und Radiointerviews unter anderem mit dem Deutschlandfunk und dem SWR. Als erste deutsche Bluesband tourte die Timo Gross Band 14 Tage durch Schottland und England. Er spielte erneut beim Bluesfestival in Gaildorf.
Mit seinem dritten Album „Desire“ wechselte Timo Gross 2009 zum Label ZYX/Pepper Cake, das noch im gleichen Jahr seine ersten beiden Alben in seinen Katalog aufnahm und veröffentlichte. Mit „Desire“ spielte er eine Deutschlandtour mit über 30 Terminen, zum dritten Mal tourte er anschließend durch Schottland, spielte in Glasgow und Edinburgh. Zudem war er beim Festival „Blues au chateau“ in der Bretagne zu Gast. Außerdem spielte er beim Maryport-Blues-Festival in England und kehrte im Spätjahr für eine Kurztour nach Schottland zurück.
Der Song „Travellin´“ erschien auf dem „Blues highway companion Vol. 1“ bei 272 records in den USA. Timo Gross spielte verschiedene Duokonzerte mit Richie Arndt und Gregor Hilden – dies entpuppte sich als Grundlage für sein nächstes Album „The Vineyard Sessions“, das er mit diesen beiden Kollegen 2009 aufnahm und bei Fuego veröffentlichte. Es folgte eine erfolgreiche Deutschlandtour. Sein Song „Sweet Love“ erschien auf dem Sampler „Blues Ballads“ von ZYX/Pepper Cake. Im Spätjahr wurde er zum Finalisten bei der German Blues Challenge in Eutin gewählt.
2010 erschien sein erstes Livealbum „Road Worn“ (ZYX/Pepper Cake), aufgenommen im Blues-Club Baden-Baden - es wurde für den Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik nominiert. Sein Stück „500 Miles“ erschien auf dem Begleit-Sampler des Magazins Akustik Gitarre, das auch die Tour zu „The Vineyard Sessions“ präsentierte und ein Tourtagebuch von Timo Gross veröffentlichte. 2010 erschien die Fortsetzung - „The Vineyard Sessions Vol. II“ - diesmal mit Richie Arndt und Alex Conti (Lake, Hamburg Blues Band, Atlantis), wiederum bei Fuego. Es wurde als zweites Timo-Gross-Album in einem Jahr für den Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik nominiert.
Im Sommer 2011 spielt Timo Gross mit seiner Band und namhaften Gästen auf dem Bluesfestival in Lahnstein, dem bekanntesten seiner Art in Deutschland.
Lehrtätigkeiten und Jugendarbeit
1996 kam Timo Gross an die Blue Music School in Landau in der Pfalz sowie an die Pfälzische Musikschule in Neustadt/Weinstraße. Dort gab er Einzel- sowie Gruppenunterricht und übernahm erste Bandcoachings, unter anderem für epark in München (bis 2001).
In 2004 erhielt er ein Engagement am Landesmuseum für Arbeit und Technik in Mannheim. Dort fand die Ausstellung „Stromgitarren“ statt, zu der er etwa 30 Termine mit von ihm selbst konzipierten Workshops sowie Konzerten absolvierte. In einem Gutachten bescheinigte Professor Udo Dahmen von der Popakademie Mannheim Timo Gross 2006 die künstlerische Reife – er gründete daraufhin sein eigenes Gitarreninstitut in Landau und Bad Bergzabern; zudem wurde er Dozent für Bandcoaching am Alfred Grosser Schulzentrum in Bad Bergzabern. 2007 begann seine Arbeit als musikalischer Leiter beim Wormser Verein Nibelungenhorde.
Parallel zu seinen eigenen Projekten nahm sich Timo Gross in dieser Zeit verstärkt der Nachwuchsarbeit mit aufstrebenden Bluesmusikern an. Als Produzent, Arrangeur und Gitarrist wirkte er beim Debütalbum „Come on“ von Johnny Rieger mit.
Mit der Nibelungenhorde vertiefte sich Timo Gross in die Theatermusik und arrangierte erneut in einem Sommerworkshop mit jungen Musikern verschiedene Stücke für die aktuelle Produktion – so auch 2010 für das Stück „Die Winterreise“, für das er auch erstmals Filmarbeiten vertonte. Zudem war Timo Gross Dozent beim EU-Projekt „Eurockulture“ in Saverne, Frankreich.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timo_Gross
http://www.timogross.com/
http://www.timogross.com/
The previous album "Landmarks" was something of a musical autobiography with edits foreign hits. On his new album "It's All About Love" tells songwriter / guitarist Timo Gross again very own stories. And if it goes on the songs to dirty blues rock gripping or restrained Americana: Love is the theme of what holds everything together.
Ultimately, it's all about love, Gross says in the booklet to his new album. All problems have to do with the absence of close Nährer or less the same. A blue-eyed attitude? The spirit of hippies mixed into the 21st century? No, not sure. It's not about holding hands or flower meadows. The songs are great and rough-edged. it comes to hard times as well as the fun to wounds that suggests love and healing. Add to this the often rough guitar of Gross and a tight band (Dominik Rivinus - dr, Manuel Bastian - g, org and Maritz Grenzmann - b).
The result is an album that does not really care about genres: time it's blues-rock, sometimes it is reminiscent of the relaxed style of JJ Cale, at times contemporary country rock. Although Timo Gross may come from the Blues. But here he has recorded songs that often go far beyond the pure doctrine of the Holy Twelve clocks out. And that's just as well. "It's All About Love" is an album that Gross presented as catchy guitar as well as one of the best songwriters between blues and rock. (In-akustik)
Ultimately, it's all about love, Gross says in the booklet to his new album. All problems have to do with the absence of close Nährer or less the same. A blue-eyed attitude? The spirit of hippies mixed into the 21st century? No, not sure. It's not about holding hands or flower meadows. The songs are great and rough-edged. it comes to hard times as well as the fun to wounds that suggests love and healing. Add to this the often rough guitar of Gross and a tight band (Dominik Rivinus - dr, Manuel Bastian - g, org and Maritz Grenzmann - b).
The result is an album that does not really care about genres: time it's blues-rock, sometimes it is reminiscent of the relaxed style of JJ Cale, at times contemporary country rock. Although Timo Gross may come from the Blues. But here he has recorded songs that often go far beyond the pure doctrine of the Holy Twelve clocks out. And that's just as well. "It's All About Love" is an album that Gross presented as catchy guitar as well as one of the best songwriters between blues and rock. (In-akustik)
Timo Gross - Red House - Leipzig 2013
Steve Waitt *19.07.
Er ließ Einflüsse von Jazz, Blues, Folk und Rock zu einer atemberaubenden Symbiose verschmelzen und begeisterte die Musikszene der City. Sein Album „Blue Parade“ wurde zu einem Meilenstein der New Yorker Songwriter-Szene und die ersten Tourneen in den USA und in Europa folgten. In den folgenden Jahren veröffentlichte er zwei bemerkenswerte EP`s und tourte weiter ausgiebig. Steve gönnte sich ab 2012 eine kreative Pause und spielte nur wenige Konzerte. Jetzt aber ist er mit neuen Songs wieder am Start. „Stranger In a Strange Land“ ist der Titel des im Februar 2016 erschienen Albums.
In seinen Songs weiss er genau, wie er Spannungen aufbaut und den Songs neben tiefsinnigen und feinen Lyrics eine klare Linie gibt. Diese feste Entschlossenheit, gepaart mit seiner unnachahmlichen klaren Stimme, machen jedes Konzert zu einem echten Highlight. Im März wird er, wie das amerikanische Stomper Magazine schrieb, mit seiner „dangerously good band“ wieder das machen was er besonders liebt, zu touren und auf den Bühnen dieser Welt zu stehen.
Steve Waitt is a celebrated New York City musician. An expert piano player with striking song writing ability, Waitt manages to walk the fine and exhilarating line between dynamic rock and ethereal storytelling, each song complete with tension, climax and resolution. Waitt’s gorgeous and gritty vocals swell along with the tempo to create in each song a clear and resonating audio aesthetic that leaves the listener completely satisfied. His background in jazz, blues and folk provides a warm and grounding experience to the overall transcendence of Waitt’s composition. The sounds of New Orleans, and the Southwest from which Steve originates weave their magic throughout each album like a backdrop to be imagined along with each lyric.
Steve and his band have toured all over the US and Europe. Waitt has occupied several esteemed musician residencies at such places as The Kelsto Club in New Orleans, and the Red Room in Manhattan, as well as having been a regular performer at the famous Rockwood Music Hall and The Living Room. He’s played many of New York's most beloved music venues, including, Bowrey Ballroom, Highline Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Mercury Lounge, Brooklyn Bowl, and Joe’s Pub. Steve Waitt and his band will be returning to play festivals in Germany this August 2016, supporting Waitt’s newest and most stunning album to date, Stranger In A Stranger Land. This album draws from Alt-Rock, Indie, Pop, and Country all while maintaing the classic Steve Waitt style.
Steve and his band have toured all over the US and Europe. Waitt has occupied several esteemed musician residencies at such places as The Kelsto Club in New Orleans, and the Red Room in Manhattan, as well as having been a regular performer at the famous Rockwood Music Hall and The Living Room. He’s played many of New York's most beloved music venues, including, Bowrey Ballroom, Highline Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Mercury Lounge, Brooklyn Bowl, and Joe’s Pub. Steve Waitt and his band will be returning to play festivals in Germany this August 2016, supporting Waitt’s newest and most stunning album to date, Stranger In A Stranger Land. This album draws from Alt-Rock, Indie, Pop, and Country all while maintaing the classic Steve Waitt style.
Rockpalast: Steve Waitt - Crossroads 2016
Steve Waitt - Crossroads Festival 2016
Track list:
01. July
02. Fiend
03. A Ghost You Let In
04. The Only Way Out Is Through
05. Song For The Hurricane
06. Stranger
07. Lay It Down
08. Made My Heart A Hammock
09. Jump The Gun
10. Tell Him It's Alright
11. 1800 Miles
12. Like Water
Steve Waitt - vocals, keyboards, guitar
Greg Tuohey - guitar
Mark Beumer - bass
Gordon Piggott - drums
01. July
02. Fiend
03. A Ghost You Let In
04. The Only Way Out Is Through
05. Song For The Hurricane
06. Stranger
07. Lay It Down
08. Made My Heart A Hammock
09. Jump The Gun
10. Tell Him It's Alright
11. 1800 Miles
12. Like Water
Steve Waitt - vocals, keyboards, guitar
Greg Tuohey - guitar
Mark Beumer - bass
Gordon Piggott - drums
Steve Waitt Band
Steve Waitt Band am 17. März 2016 im Sound Yard Hamburg.
Besetzung:
Steve Waitt : vocals & keyboard
Greg Tuohey : guitars & effects
Crash Gordon : drums
Mark Beumer : bass
Besetzung:
Steve Waitt : vocals & keyboard
Greg Tuohey : guitars & effects
Crash Gordon : drums
Mark Beumer : bass
R.I.P.
Alan Lomax +19.07.2002
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
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