Lena Horne

I'm guessing most tributes to Lena Horne will include the 1943 version of "Stormy Weather", but it's interesting to compare that young girl's intuitive understanding with a bluesier version sung later in life. Not a false caesura in either version, by the way, which ought to teach pop idols the difference between genuine emotion and sentiment, but probably won't.



The other two songs, "Moon River" and "It's Not Easy Being Green", I posted for myself. I'd like to know what went through her head while rehearsing "Green". With that voice and those impossible cheekbones, this woman could have run the table as Hollywood's Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Sally Hemings or the Queen of Sheba-- but in that benighted time, she couldn't even hang on to the part of Julie in Showboat. The studio cast Ava Gardner in the "controversial" role of a "high yellow gal" passing for white in order to marry the man she loved.

So Lena finally said to hell with Hollywood, went home to New York and became a chanteuse instead. Ironically this was a winning decision: Hollywood discards its leading ladies quickly, whereas jazz and blues singing, like painting, rewards longevity and depth.

Unheard of Music: Yoko Kanno

Yoko Kanno with her big band in a live performance of "Tank", a sound that, without fear or favor, truly kicks ASS and TAKES NAMES. If you aren't moving around to this, I don't think I want to know you:

Yoko Kanno is a Japanese composer and leader of "The Seatbelts", a jazz band/pick up orchestra. She found the usual paths closed to her, so she made a name writing soundtracks for animation, much as Ennio Morricone elevated Westerns.

Kanno must have worked every type of jazz, funk, blues, even shamanic chants and lullabies into my favorite, Cowboy Bebop. What amazes me is how authentic it sounds, even with her goofy habit of mixing Japanese with English and sometimes Russian lyrics. If you'd told me I'd be singing along phonetically-- and feeling-- to a Japanese blues... (the title refers to Howling Wolf's first album, The Real Folk Blues)

"The Real Folk Blues" by Yoko Kanno
Aishiteta to nageku ni wa
Amari ni mo toki wa sugi te shimatta
Mada kokoro no hokorobi o
Iyasenumama kaze ga fuiteru
(It's too late to cry I love you.
The wind still blowing, my heart still aching)
Hitotsu no me de asu o mite
Hitotsu no me de kinou mitsumeteru
Kimi no ai no yurikagode
Mo ichido yasurakani nemuretara
(One side of my eyes see tomorrow,
And the other one see yesterday
I hope I could sleep in the cradle of your love, again)

Kawaita hitomi de dareka na itekure
(Somebody cry for me, with dry eyes)
The real folk blues!
Honto no kanashimi ga shiritaidake
Doro no kawa ni sukatta jinsei mo warukuwanai
Ichido kiri de owarunara
(The real folk blues:
I just want to feel real sorrow
It's not so bad a life, sitting in muddy water
If life is only lived once)
Kibou ni michita zetsuboto
Wanagashikakerareteru kono chansu
Nani ga yoku te warui no ka
Koin no omoi to kuramitaita

(Hopeless hope, every chance becomes a trap
What is right, or wrong
It's like both sides of a coin)
Dore dake ikireba iyasareru no darou
(How long I must live till I'm set free?)
The real folk blues
Honto no yorokobi ga shiritai dake
Hikaru mono no subete ga ougen to wa kagiranai
(The real folk blues
I just want to feel pleasure that's real
All that glitters is not gold)

This is a scene from the penultimate episode of Cowboy Bebop. Faye Valentine draws the outline of her childhood bedroom in the ruins of a devastated Earth. Radical Edward, the child savant known as "Ed" leaves the ship, alone-- and Ein, a genetically enhanced, hyper-intelligent corgi, decides that Ed needs him more than the others do.


Here she tries her hand at ska, "Bad Dog No Biscuit":


Or fooling around with standards on solo piano ("How Long Has This Been Going On" at the beginning and "Rhapsody in Blue" at the end and I don't know what in the middle):

One more favorite: wringing emotion out of techno music on "Inner Universe", with lyrics in Russian, English and Latin for Ghost in the Shell.

I didn't even know techno could contain so much emotion. I love this woman.

Nathan Ndjiharine

Sad to hear that Nathan Ndjiharine, lead guitarist of Zion Lion, my favorite live band in Kalamazoo, drowned last week while tubing with his family in the Muskegon River when he was swept under by the current.

Savage Northerners and Southern Transplants Tell Eldritch Tales of Chilly con Carneval

Monday, January 28
Mardi Gras: A Twilight Tales Tradition!
Easter is earlier than usual, therefore Ash Wednesday is earlier than usual, therefore tonight is Twilight Tales' own special Carnival.

Authors to include:
Jody Lynn Nye, author of SciFi, Fantasy, fun, and Cats
Michael Fountain, creator of "Blood for Ink"
Tina Jens, author of The Blues Ain't Nothin'


With special musical guest "Rollin' & Tumblin'," starring Chicago's only red-headed blues diva Liz Mandeville
plus King Cake! and Raffle Prizes! yes, even Beads!


Tonight will be at our temporary home Mix: The Lincoln Park Lounge 2843 N. Halsted (don't forget, there's free parking in the adjoining lot!)

Buddy Bolden, Pray for Us Sinners

I'm working on a story about Buddy Bolden for Twilight Tales' annual Mardi Gras show, coming up January 28th in Chicago. Along the way I found an Australian band, The Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra, that meticulously researches and tries its best to reproduce the sound of Bolden's band, never heard by living ears. Bolden is generally considered by everyone (except a proprietory Jelly Roll Morton) to be the "Father of Jazz", but he was hospitalized for schizophrenia in 1907 before he ever recorded, and died there in 1931.

Click on the song titles to play. May I commend to you the most excellent "Funky Butt", kept in memory by the ragtime guitarist Mississippi John Hurt, and developed by the Bolden band from an older dance tune they called "Doing the Ping Pong" .

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Heartbreaker, Nervewrecker, Meansucker—Which of You Stole Wesley Willis’ Money?

My kid-sister-in-law Colleen used to greet Wesley Willis on her way to and from class in Chicago. Wesley was a homeless, 300-pound schizophrenic who then made a few bucks selling ballpoint pen drawings and a CD he’d cut of homemade songs sung (badly— tone-deaf Wesley was a living refutation of the myth that black people are naturally musical) in front of a Casio keyboard that always played the same tune. Colleen usually shared her change, bought a CDs and received her blessing: knocking foreheads together and Wesley’s assurance that “you are my friend in Jesus’ name”. Starting in the 1970s, and then with a vengence in the 1980's, there was a devil's bargain between liberal pity for the institutionalized and conservative disdain for the poor : schizophrenics and severe manic depressives were turned out of the State Hospitals by the thousands and given pittances for rent and medications-- of course, they didn't take their medicine without supervision and wound up living on the street or being exploited in the new, private sector "group homes". Wesley was just one more broken loser, a failed capitalist in self congratulatory America. Great job, Brownie.

Then the beautiful people discovered Wesley. Chicago punks started using him as an opening act, then nationally known “alternative” artists, who shall remain nameless because I don’t feel like getting into a pissing match with Jello Biafra fans, started hailing Wesley Willis as a primitive genius, a celebrity of outsider art, started getting him gigs, recording contracts, having him over until they got tired of him. And I have no problem with that, if it got him out of the cold once in a while, if he had friends who checked on him once in a while.

But as entertainment, I never quite thought the joke was funny. I thought Will Robinson Sheff hit the nail on the head when he said "periodic appearances for crowds of jeering white "fratboys" evoke an uncomfortable combination of minstrel act and traveling freakshow. “It’s funny” my less fastidious friends tell me, “it’s not exploitive, it’s funny the way he screams ‘Suck a Swiss hound’s diiiiick...’ “. It’s still a freak show, I answer, and I have mixed feelings about the morality of freak shows. But then it’s all about the freak show these days, isn’t it? And nothing is immoral in America if it can be marketed somehow.

But Wesley died of leukemia at the age of 40, and no one seems to know where Wesley’s money went from the sold-out shows and the novelty act CD sales and his appearance fees for being laughed at on the Howard Stern show. If stealing a dead crazy man's money is a prerequisite for hipness, then turn my heart to stone. In a more honest age, we called them “geeks” and they bit the heads off live chickens and we paid them in drugs or bottles of hootch, and paraded them for the marks as “The Wild Man of Borneo” or some such-- but we knew it was grotesque and we didn’t kid ourselves that we were being chic. Yeah, rock on, Chicago.

How Mississippi John Hurt Stole Music

Blues With a Butter Knife

My second cousin Elwood, late of Brownwood, Missouri and one of my childhood heroes, used to sound like Doc Watson when he sang and had an odd technique for playing the guitar with a kitchen knife out of the drawer, instead of a "bottleneck" or guitar slide. Through the years, I've mentioned this technique to blues afficianadoes and guitarists, but none of them had ever heard of it. I finally saw the technique again in the 2002 documentary, "You See Me Laughin'", about the last generation of delta blues players that lived through the old south and remember the Depression in their childhood.

CeDell Davis, born in 1927 and crippled by polio when he was nine, was crippled up further when he was trampled by a panicked crowd in St. Louis in 1957. Since the 1960s, he's played a regular gig at the Jungle Hut (formerly the Jack Rabbit) in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where according to his song, "If You Like Fat Women, more fat women there than any place I ever saw." Unable to work the frets with his fingers, Davis worked out a way to play the chords with the edge of a butter knife.

Elwood is sadly gone from this life, as is his son and grandson, and I will never know whether the technique had been passed around, seen secondhand, or there was no connection at all, but at least I can vouch that it is not unique.

When I was a teenager, I was brought to the Jungle Hut by my Uncle Jerry (who lives in Pine Bluff), my Uncle Murle, and my father, and when the afternoon bartender saw us, she sounded off, "Four of you Fountains? I ain't stayin' round here," and walked right out the door. In truth, the woman was taking a break on a dead afternoon and trusting us to get our own beers and quietly shoot pool. I like the story better that it was due to my father's antique reputation for fights at dances with the social elite of the local cracker aristocracy, just so I can say I was kicked out of the Jack Rabbit Inn in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and in the event of some future altercation with a hotelier, I will always be able to say with some dignity: "I been kicked out of better places than this!"

AND WHO SHALL WE BLAME, THE CYNICAL RECRUITER OR THE NAIVE RECRUIT?

I make a date for golf, and you can bet your life it rains.
I try to give a party, and the guy upstairs complains.
I guess I'll go through life, just catching colds and missing trains.
Everything happens to me.

I never miss a thing. I've had the measles and the mumps.
And every time I play an ace, my partner always trumps.
I guess I'm just a fool, who never looks before he jumps.
Everything happens to me.

At first, my heart thought you could break this jinx for me.
That love would turn the trick to end despair.
But now I just can't fool this head that thinks for me.
I've mortgaged all my castles in the air.

I've telegraphed and phoned and sent an air mail special too.
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due.
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you.
Everything happens to me.

I've telegraphed and phoned. I sent an air mail special too.
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due.
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you.
Everything happens to me.

'Everything Happens To Me' lyrics by CHET BAKER

Forget About Bringing Sexy Back, I Want You to Stop Calling Me a Traitor

I can't believe I'm posting the lyrics to a pop/country song, either, at least one more recent than Hank Williams, Sr. But I turned in to watch the Police on the Grammies and was profoundly moved by the Dixie Chicks performing this song, and I hope the audience realized the context of what they were seeing and hearing. This is as good a "Fuck, Yeah!" moment as you get outside of fiction or the stage, and the best one we've had since Stephen Colbert praised Our Peerless Leader at the Washington Correspondants dinner last year. Besides, it gives me an excuse to post a picture of (sigh) Natalie Maines. (It's those broad cheekbones, I know it is.)

Dixie Chicks: "Not Ready To Make Nice"

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting

I'm through with doubt,
There's nothing left for me to figure out,
I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying


I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

I know you said
Why can't you just get over it,
It turned my whole world around
and i kind of like it

I made my bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don't mind saying,
It's a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting

***
UPDATE: They won every award they were nominated for.

The Happy Death of Children

I'm reading Mozart's Women by Jane Glover, and came across this letter by his father Leopold, describing his daughter's fight with intestinal typhoid: "Whover could have listened to the conversations which we three, my wife, myself and my daughter, had on several evenings, during which we convinced her of the vanity of this world and the happy death of children, would not have heard it without tears." Maria Anna survived, living to be 79-- but at least five other Mozart children died in infancy. Has anyone done any research on the theology taught to chldren during an era of high mortality? In our age, a child's first experience with death is often that of an elderly relative, but in the 18th century it seems more of them would be exposed to the loss of playmates and their younger brothers and sisters. How much of what the parents told them, about littlest angels and tender souls too good to live, was passed on for the parent's comfort and how much to comfort a frightened child? "If I should die before I wake..."

Happy Mozart's Birthday-- and Elmore James, Too!

Violin Concerto 5 with Janine Jansen on a violin made by Stradivarius.

The Sky Is Crying
by Elmore James, Morgan Robinson and Clarence Lewis

The sky is crying,
Look at the tears rolling down the streets.
The sky is crying,
Look at the tears rolling down the streets.
I looked out my window,
The rain was falling down in sheets.

My baby left me this morning,
Lord knows I don't know the reason why.
My baby left me this morning,
I don't know the reason why.
And everytime I think about it,
I hang my head and cry.

The sun is shining,
Although it's raining in my heart.
The sun is shining,
Although it's raining in my heart.
I love my baby,
I hate to see us part.

Some wonderful nut with bottles and roller blades.

NEW ORLEANS UPDATE

Tim (Taocat) says (in response to something in yesterday's Commonplace Book): "Interesting note: I was speaking with a guy last night who is in the Montana Air National Guard. He has served in both Iraq (behind the lines) and in Louisiana. He told me that Iraq wasn't bad - he would be ok going back, but New Orleans was awful. What surprised me was his reasons: In Iraq, he said, there were fewer bullets whizzing past your head. In New Orleans, he said, everyone was demanding, like 'my house was destroyed and now you owe me. You need to clean that garbage out of my yard.'"

My response ran so long, I decided to post it as a blog entry (and it gives me a chance to post cool pictures of Fate Marable, Kid Ory, Buddy Bolden, and the infant Louis Armstrong):

Here's how I would have responded (assuming I had my wits about me) :

1) Take the tax dollars paid by Louisianans to the federal government and multiply by the number of years since the Army Corps of Engineers started maintaining levees. Don't forget the price of US imports and exports that travel through Gulf Coast ports and the Mississippi River. (Don't ask him to think about the priceless contributions of New Orleans to American culture; let's stick to dollars, and not confuse the philistines.)

2) Subtract Louisiana's percentage of federal taxes from the money being pissed away in Iraq ($237,964,700,000 at the moment, but who's counting?)

3) Now the administration is wondering if we can save New Orleans at all? You bet I'm pissed.

Simple humanity tells us that the job of clearing away the garbage is overwhelming. After a flood, it's not just your wreckage in the front yard. Where do you start? Where do you put it all? Who hauls it away? If the National Guard of Montana is going to be used to build schools in Iraq, they can damn well clean mold in New Orleans. Oh, wait, that's not their job, is it? Gosh, we don't want the president changing the mission of the National guard arbitrarily...

You can also tell him that the Louisianans you know (by one handshake removed) are not the indigent po' folks not worth saving (I'm being ironic) shown in television clips. Lewis' father is a research scientist, the Beautiful (sigh) Monica's an educator, her husband's a banker, etc., etc.... (Also note that I said 'by one handshake removed', if anybody gets to hug Monica in this thought experiment, it's going to be me.)

I'm curious to know why we haven't taken the Netherlands approach to our battle with the sea. I hear they've brought in some Dutch engineers recently, and I'll be curious to hear what they say.

***
See Also:
Supreme Court re. Eminent Domain,
Flaming Assholes Speak to the Citizens of New Orleans,
If a Social Darwinst Dies, Should Any of Us Care?,
Louisiana's National Guard in Iraq,
Spasm bands, Louis, and New Orleans History,
Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil (yeah, like any of these guys have an ounce of shame left in their bodies)

B.B., LUCILLE, ISSA, BUTTON, JOHN, SCOUT and JUDY

Riley "Blues Boy" King was away from home when his 2-year-old Maltese, Lucille, vanished from the back yard. He has posted 500 flyers, checked with all the local shelters, and offered one of his autographed guitars as a reward. I was blessed with the friendship of a Maltese for 16 years, and will testify that the comic-book cuteness hides the heart of a lion. They are one of the oldest breeds in the world, with dogs like "Issa" memorialized by Roman generals and poets:
“Issa is as sweet as a maiden’s kiss,
As frolicksome as Catullus’ sparrow.
Before she went down into the dark forever,
Her master ordered that her likeness be painted...”

They are known for their remarkable empathy towards changes in mood. Mine could shift in an instant from the perfect writer's dog, a patient silky presence stretched tight against one leg for hours at a time, then a clown in moments of despair, then bossing the bigger dogs by climbing onto something until her chin was taller than their neck, then running alongside me for an hour on the beach, five times a week, traveling twice as far because of her doggy side excursions on very short legs. She kept this up until her very last year, when she would sit down on the way home and be carried the rest of the way on my shoulders.

On such a week as this there can be no doubt that any one animal is more “humane” than any five humans, and an 80 year old man who has done nothing but bring pleasure at midnight and solace in sorrow to millions of people certainly deserves to have his dog back. Please keep your eyes and hearts open and remember to include a prayer to bring Lucille back home to B.B. King.

These thoughts take on new urgency with this news of Army Captain John Smathers, an attorney from Maryland, who adopted an Iraqui dog he named "Scout", and then struggled for a year to bring him home to the states:
"He was very vulnerable but he put on a front like he was a tough guy, which is probably how a lot of soldiers feel. I was about to go out on a mission and I was saying goodbye to him there." When Smathers was badly injured and flown home for medical care, Scout was left behind. "He was probably very confused and I knew I had to get him back. There's a bond with he and I, and as long as he was alive and it was within my power to get him here, I was gonna try. I owe him that. It was frustrating. Every door I tried was getting slammed in my face. I just kept knocking. As long as Scout was alive, I’d keep trying. And when I saw him laying at my feet, I was just smiling. I lay down with him and I felt like … John, you're done."

This week Captain Smathers was out walking with Scout and Judy, a new dog he rescued as a buddy for Scout, when the captain's heart suddenly gave out, and he died.

This from the Judge Advocate General's website, February 7, 2006:
"The Smathers family will receive friends Wednesday, 1600-2000 at Harry H. Witzke’s Family Funeral Home, Inc., 4112 Old Columbia Pike., Ellicott City, MD. A Mass of Christian Burial will be said Thursday, 1100 at St. Louis Catholic Church, Clarksville, MD. Interment will be at a later date at Arlington National Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in Captain Smathers’ name to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, 1 Intrepid Square, New York, NY 10036 or call 1-800-340-HERO.
"Captain Smathers is survived by his mother, Carmella Smathers; his sisters Theresa Hoffmann, Frances Hudson, Mary Olson, Patricia Reeves, Luanne Tano and Christine Laubach, and many nieces and nephews.
"Further information, including details of the interment, will follow as soon as they become available. I ask that you remember the Smathers family in your prayers at this most difficult of times."

LONG, LONG, LONG

The night John Lennon died it was snowing in Michigan, big, heavy, wet flakes in a black sky. All that day, the chorus of George Harrison's "Long, Long, Long" from the White Album had been going through my head for no particular reason.

It's been a long long long time,
How could I ever have lost you
When I loved you.

It took a long long long time
Now I'm so happy I found you
How I love you

So many tears I was searching,
So many tears I was wasting, oh. Oh--

Long, Long, Long mp3

I was out running errands when the news came over the radio. Fountain Street Church (this was months before I became a regular there) announced they were opening their doors to whoever wanted to sit in the sanctuary and pray or just talk. The woman I was dating was covering a local news story; I was watching her children and didn't feel up to disrupting their evening because of my own confused feelings. This was a step towards maturity, for a member of the generation that inflicted all their personal drama on their children and thought nothing of it. Or maybe the roads were bad.

Later the psychiatric unit where I worked was having its family Christmas party at the home of Stan and Nancy Rock, a much kinder boss than my fierce heart deserved. The Rocks were as baffled by the news as anyone else. That was the night Stan put me on the right track with a troubling dream I was having that included lines from a Blake poem that I'd dreamed verbatim but had never seen:
"And if the child is born a boy
He's given to a woman old
Who nails him down upon a rock
Catches his shrieks in a cup of gold."

I was still in high school when the Beatles broke up, and very sincere about the dawning that was prophesied by the Older Kids who wrote for Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog”. The kids a year older than me were all “political”; everyone a year younger was happily consuming street drugs. Thank you, CIA, for effectively dissipating the counter-culture.

That’s not quite fair—the assassinations of 1968 and Charlie Manson’s vampire hippie-chicks should have told us we weren’t playing with amateurs when we tried to shout at the devil, to sow peace where there was hate. What killed the dream was the unwillingness of the ‘60’s counter-culture to come to terms with what Jungians call the shadow side of the forces that had been unleashed.

The counter culture took a sucking chest wound at Altamont, when a Hell’s Angel “security guard” stabbed a black guy to death in front of the stage while Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil”. (Even Robert Johnson had sense enough to try and stay away from the crossroads, after he’d cut his deal; caught up with him anyway, but at least he didn’t pull anybody down with him.)

John’s Lennon’s death by a squirmy fat fan-boy was the pillow on the face for the dream that Love Was All You Need. We met the enemy, and it wasn’t the hopelessly straight, it was you and me. Let me please introduce you to yourself.

Then came the ghastly 70’s and 80’s when first narcissism and then acquisition of wealth became the vogue. Cocaine was a perfect drug for the time— it was expensive, status at parties, could get you girls for a while, and no one, certainly not the American consumer, cared how much blood was on it by the time it got here.

It would be nice if John Lennon had lived, been less of a legend and more a nice old fellow in a cottage on the Irish coast, as he told Dick Cavett he wanted to end his life. The Stones are promoting a credit card company. MTV packages rebellion in five-year cycles.

I heard an old fellow interviewed once who had fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and he was building houses with Habitat for Humanity down in Central America. He’d certainly seen the betrayal of more than a few generations, from Stalin’s pact with Hitler to Ollie North’s pardon.

Fuck ‘em, he’d say, fetch me some nails, there’s better things to build than crucifixes and coffins. Everybody knows somebody like John when they’re a kid; spirits made of equal parts anger and sweetness are sacrificed young and come back as ghosts to keep our middle aged complacency on its toes. I suppose he’d tell me that the revolutionaries of the sixties were poseurs, yours is not theirs, that the deck has always been stacked, that the true warrior opens his heart up to be broken by the world. And God Bless the Beatles.

("Whales sing, did you know that? And they eat them! We make lipstick out of them! Does anyone eat you for singing?" misquoted from
"Jonah, Who will be 25 in the Year 2000" by John Berger)

Top Ten Blues Songs

The host of

Honey, Where You Been So Long?

, a blues blog that shares my taste for old school stuff, has been asking readers to list their favorites, pre-war or not. There are several other topics of public interest today, but as Thoreau, says, "Read not the times, but the eternities", so here is my list in no particular order:

1. Saint James Infirmary, Jack Teagarden vocal/ Louis Armstrong
2. Cypress Grove Blues, Skip James
3. Back O’ Town Blues, Louis Armstrong vocal/Jack Teagaden



4. Stormy Monday Blues, Junior Wells
5. How Long, How Long Blues, Jimmy Rushing
6. Baby Please Don’t Go, Big Bill Broonzy


7. Ain’t Nobody’s Business, James Cotton
8. Wang Dang Doodle, Koko Taylor


9. Love in Vain, Robert Johnson
10. Go Down Old Hannah, Leadbelly, Sparky Rucker, others unknown



... Anything by Mississippi John Hurt (no particular favorite)
Honorable Mention:
Good Morning Heartache, Billie Holliday
‘Round Midnight, Miles Davis
Black and Blue, Fats Waller

This is a wake-me-at-three-in-the-morning list. The editors are happy to be reminded of any forgotten songs, or to be introduced to new greats. Lists are handy for filling up blog space when you're off on another mission. And photos of blues faces are always good for the soul. That photo of my favorites, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James together, is an instant treasure for my wall.

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

"Spasm" band of street kids playing whatever came to hand around 1900. Before "jass" had a name, there were established groups like Stalebread Lacombe's "Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band". When a rival advertised himself with a similar name, Lacombe and compeers showed up with razors and bricks to threaten harm to the establishment. The impasse was solved by the rivals changing their name to "Razzy Dazzy JAZZY Band" -- "jass" being Old French argot for "to fuck" as in jazzere, jism, and the request heard in sporting houses, "Play something a little jassy, Professor", meaning to fuck around with the music, to syncopate the stately rhythms of popular tunes into something quite unheard. At least that's the story I heard. See also Stephen Longstreets's wonderful "Sporting House: New Orleans and the Jazz Story".

As reporters flip back through their notebooks, It becomes more and more evident that people knw this was coming, and that the loss of life in New Orleans, was caused in part by the inaction of the federal government. Links here, and here, and here. The Army Corps of Engineers has been trying to raise the levees, and had its budget for the projects slashed in half by the Bush administration. The 17th Street levee, where the first big break came, was 4 feet lower than the rest. A blue ribbon commission got a program called SELA going years ago, and that had its funding sent to the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts. How much evidence do you need? Only a village idiot would say something like "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Oh, wait...


One New Year's Eve in New Orleans, little Louis Armstrong wanted to shoot off fireworks too, so he got the gun from under his mama's bed and fired it into the air. Sadly, that got him sent to the Jones Colored Waif's Home, but blessedly, it was this band that gave him his first trumpet. I heard that Armstrong is buried in New York because New Orleans let him down one last time, making him a celebrity at Mardi Gras but refusing to let him perform in public with his friend Jack Teagarden, a white trombonist. Regarding his final home in Queens, New York, he said, “I’m here with the Black people, the Puerto Rican people, the Italian people and Hebrew cats and there’s food in the Frigidaire. What else could I want?”

Ibrahim Ferrar 1927-2005

"¡Oígame compay!
No deje el camino por coger la vereda.
Usted por enamorado ..."