Roland Stone, Waitin’ at the Station.
Ida Reed, Othar Turner’s Rising Star Fife & Drum band.
If you haven’t read this New York Times Magazine piece yet, you should really get on it.
The drums beat slowly, but this time the sound is fermenting into something stronger. Thomas is walking backward, rocking her body back and forth, blowing into the fife and waving it like a conductor’s baton. She’s a snake charmer, and the drummers are under her spell. With a phrase on the fife, Thomas calls the tune — one of Otha Turner’s old standards, mashed up with hip-hop-inflected improvisations. The players keep time not with their feet but rather with their bodies, and the rhythm syncopates and changes with the dance.
The slow burn turns hot. Andre is beating his drum so hard it jumps high into the air with every hit. Mr. Ssippi is bathed in sweat. Much of the audience joins in and is transported, too.
The rhythm of the drums, already impossibly loud and complex, jumps yet another notch. There is a crashing wave of crescendos followed by more whoops from the crowd.
Taken from the great New York Times Magazine piece by Adam Fischer, titled “Blues Travelers”.
The composition looks at fife and drum blues composition, some of the earliest and original blues tradition in Mississippi. One family’s legendary cookout may be the last place to hear this type of music.
Mike Bloomfield onstage at Muddy Water’s Fathers and Sons concert in Chicago, 1969
(Source: oyyeahmikebloomfield)
Now looky here
I did not say I was a millionaire
But I said I have spent more money than a millionaire
‘Cause if I had kept all of the money I had already spent,
I’d would have been a millionaire a long time ago
And women? Well, Googly Moogly
Howlin’ Wolf, Goin’ Down Slow. (Composed by Aretha Franklin and James Oden)
Big Mama Thornton and Muddy Waters Blues Band, I feel the way I feel.
Guitar quality kept improving while the price kept going down. Soon sharecroppers throughout the Delta were ordering guitars from Sears in hopes of supplementing their income on weekends. The catalog is frequently mentioned in the biographies of Delta bluesmen. In 1930 Muddy Waters purchased a used Stella, most likely originally purchased from the catalog, and began playing gigs. He quickly earned enough money to order a brand new guitar from Sears. B.B. King learned the rudiments of the instrument through an instructional book he ordered from the catalog. And of course, blues musicians weren’t the only ones to profit from the availability of cheap guitars: White country artists such as Roy Clark would get their first instrument from the same catalog that black bluesmen like Son Thomas would.
Delta Dawn, by Chris Kojrness in Reason Magazine
“How Sears, Roebuck & Co. midwifed the birth of the blues”
Muddy Waters with Otis Spann, Nobody Knows My Trouble. (1968)
At this point in Muddy’s career, it was still very much Otis Spann WITH Muddy Waters. His comeback had not yet started and as you can see, he’s still sporting that great early 60’s doo-wop hair.
Joe Hill Louis
