Chicago Blues Festival, part 2
Howlin’ Wolf (with Hubert Sumlin, guitar), live, Chicago, 1966
“How Many More Years”
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“Meet Me In The Bottom”
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lagniappe
When I first heard him [Howlin’ Wolf], I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’—Sam Phillips
Chicago Blues Festival, part 1
Muddy Waters (with James Cotton, harmonica; Otis Spann, piano; Pat Hare, guitar; Andrew Stevenson, bass; Francis Clay, drums), “Got My Mojo Working,” live, Newport Jazz Festival, 1960
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Soon after he got to Chicago, Muddy [Waters] began playing the blues for his friends in relaxed moments, and that led to work playing at rent parties, for small tips and all the whiskey he could drink. ‘You know,’ he said, refilling his glass with champagne, ‘I wanted to go to Chicago in the late thirties, ’cause Robert Nighthawk came to see me and said he was goin’ and get a record. He says, you go along and you might get on with me. I thought, oh, man, this cat is just jivin’, he ain’t goin’ to Chicago. I thought goin’ to Chicago was like goin’ out of the world. Finally he split, and the next time I heard he had a record out. So I started asking some of my friends that had went to Chicago, Can I make it with my guitar? ‘Naww, they don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doin’ now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago. So when I finally come to Chicago, the same person that told me that . . . Dan’s wife, my sister, that’s the same person I started playin’ every Saturday night for, at the rent party in her apartment. Peoples is awful funny.’ He chuckled, savoring the irony. ‘So I started playing for these rent parties, and then I run into Blue Smitty and Jimmy Rogers and we got somethin’ goin’ on. We started playing little neighborhood bars on the West Side, five nights a week, five dollars a night. It wasn’t no big money, but we’s doin’ it.’ They were doing it, all right; they were creating modern blues and laying the groundwork for rock and roll.—Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981)
John Lee Hooker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dinu Lipatti: where else would you find these three artists together, performing back to back, besides a cyberstage?
John Lee Hooker, “Blues For Christmas” (1949)
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Rahsaan Roland Kirk (tenor saxophone, manzello, flute, stritch), “We Free Kings” (1961)
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Dinu Lipatti, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Johann Sebastian Bach/Hess transcription (1947)
. . . I want to be your Santa Claus even if my whiskers ain’t white.—Blind Lemon Jefferson
Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Christmas Eve Blues” (1928)
Yesterday’s clip roamed all over the world. Today we travel to one city, Chicago. This is the Chicago of another era, where, on Sunday morning, on the near west side, on Maxwell Street, you could hear—right on the street—some of the greatest musicians in the world, including this man, one of the finest slide guitar players of all time.
Robert Nighthawk (AKA Robert Lee McCollum; 1909-1967), “Eli’s Place,” live, Chicago’s Maxwell Street, circa 1964
Moment for moment, this record, made in 1931 (up north in Wisconsin), remains one of the most astonishing performances in all of blues.
Skip James (1902-1969), “I’m So Glad” (1931, Grafton, Wisconsin [famously covered by Cream on both their first and last albums: Fresh Cream, 1966; Goodbye, 1969])
Here’s another record, featuring another of blues’ greatest voices, that was made in Memphis in the 1920s.
Sleepy John Estes (1899[or 1904]-1977), “The Girl I Love She Got Long Curly Hair” (1929, Memphis)
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lagniappe
i’m standing there watching the parade/feeling combination of sleepy john estes. jayne mansfield. humphry [sic] bogart/mortimer snerd. murph the surf and so forth . . .—Bob Dylan (liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home [1965])
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. . . Bob Dylan stalked [Ry] Cooder for months asking him for advice on how to play one particular Sleepy John Estes lick.—Paul Duane
Old records, where everyone involved is long dead, don’t just appeal to the senses—they’re springboards for the imagination. Here’s a record that was made, in Memphis, over 80 years ago. It features one of the greatest voices in blues.
Close your eyes.
Open your imagination.
They’re just about ready to record.
What’s the room look like?
What’s the last thing they say before they start?
Tommy Johnson (1896-1956), “Cool Drink of Water Blues” (1928, Memphis)
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lagniappe
On the deepest level, a recording . . . is an invitation to time travel, a chance to resurrect the voices of the dead, a way to indulge a deep instinctual yearning to slow the passage of time. With a recording, we can preserve that fleeting moment, and play it again and again, according to our will. In his penetrating book “The Recording Angel,’’ Evan Eisenberg calls record listening “a séance where we get to choose our ghosts.’’—Jeremy Eichler, 12/13/09
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For about twenty years Tommy Johnson was perhaps the most important and influential blues singer in the state of Mississippi. He was one of the few black musicians to whom that much abused epithet ‘legendary’ rightfully applies.—David Evans
This take?
Or that?
Move the voice forward?
Back?
Make the guitar brighter?
Darker?
Enough bass?
Too much?
Enough room sound?
Mixing a record, as I learned when I worked at Alligator Records (back in the 1970s), involves a seemingly countless number of decisions. After a few hours, everyone starts to get a little punch-drunk. By the end of the night, for instance, this track had morphed—in the warped warble of engineer Freddie Breitberg (AKA, in his personal mythology, Eddie B. Flick)—into “Serve Me Rice For Supper.”
Jimmy Johnson, “Serves Me Right To Suffer” (Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 1, Alligator Records, 1977 [Grammy Nominee])
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reading table
The ’net’s filled with enough dreck for a thousand lifetimes; but then, as happened the other day (after hearing about it on the radio), you come across something that’s simply stunning—like the new, complete collection of the letters of Vincent van Gogh.
. . . Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist . . . Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.—Andrew Motion, The Guardian (11/21/09)
Here’s another musician who, like Dinu Lipatti (Tuesday’s post), died way too young: the great Chicago blues artist Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett). He suffered a fatal heart attack just months after this performance. He was 32.
Magic Sam, live (TV broadcast), Germany, 1969
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lagniappe
Facebook seems to have expanded into new markets. “Sign up,” they say, “to connect with [t]he late, great Magic Sam.”
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