timeless
Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (H. Williams), 1949
Note for note, syllable for syllable, this may be the most perfect song I know.
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art beat
Bruce Davidson (1933-), New York (Coney Island), 1959
Johnny Cash, live (Town Hall Party), 1958-59
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art beat: more from Thursday night at the Art Institute of Chicago
Josef Koudelka (1938-), Czechoslavakia, 1963
Nationality Doubtful, through September 14th
sounds of Chicago
Robbie Fulks, “I’ll Trade You Money For Wine,” live, Norway (Oslo), 2013
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art beat
Danny Lyon (1942-), Uptown, Chicago (1965)
only rock ’n’ roll
Phil Lee & The Sly Dogs, “A Night in the Box”
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random thoughts
Yesterday, a perfect summer day, walking in the woods with my son’s dog Roscoe, I was reminded, repeatedly, that the thing about nature—the thing that makes an experience like this fundamentally different from, say, sitting in my living room reading a book—is this: it’s buggy.
White folks are cool, too.
Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale, live, Washington, D.C., 2013
more
George Jones (1931-2013), “Amazing Grace,” TV show, 2008
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radio
Today, beginning at 10 a.m. (EST), there’ll be a four-hour memorial broadcast on WKCR-FM (Columbia University).
passings
George Jones, September 12, 1931-April 26, 2013
With Johnny Paycheck (vocals & bass), et al., “Things Have Gone To Pieces,” TV show, 1960s
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George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81.
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Mr. Jones was a presence on the country charts from the 1950s into the 21st century, and as early as the 1960s he was praised by listeners and fellow musicians as the greatest living country singer. He was never a crossover act; while country fans revered him, pop and rock radio stations ignored him. But by the 1980s, Mr. Jones had come to stand for country tradition. Country singers through the decades, from Garth Brooks and Randy Travis to Toby Keith and Tim McGraw, learned licks from Mr. Jones, who never bothered to wear a cowboy hat.
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George Glenn Jones was born with a broken arm in Saratoga, Tex., an oil-field town, on Sept. 12, 1931, to Clare and George Washington Jones. His father, a truck driver and pipe fitter, bought George his first guitar when he was 9, and with help from a Sunday school teacher he taught himself to play melodies and chords. As a teenager he sang on the streets, in Pentecostal revival services and in the honky-tonks in the Gulf Coast port of Beaumont. Bus drivers let him ride free if he sang. Soon he was appearing on radio shows, forging a style modeled on Lefty Frizzell, Roy Acuff and Hank Williams.
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In his last years, Mr. Jones found himself upholding a traditional sound that had largely disappeared from commercial country radio. “They just shut us off all together at one time,” he said in a 2012 conversation with the photographer Alan Mercer. “It’s not the right way to do these things. You just don’t take something as big as what we had and throw it away without regrets.”
“They don’t care about you as a person,” he added. “They don’t even know who I am in downtown Nashville.”
—Jon Pareles, New York Times, 4/26/13
When he died, at the age of twenty-nine, folks got the news the same way they heard his music.
WCKY (Cincinnati), 1/1/1953, announcing Hank Williams’ death, followed by his recording of “I Am Bound For The Promised Land” (S. Stennett)
In heaven, I’ve heard, you can listen, any time of day, any time of night, to old radio shows.
Hank Williams, Mother’s Best Flour, WSM (Nashville), 1951
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random thoughts
How many of our shoes will outlive us?
two takes
“If I Could Only Fly” (B. Foley)
Merle Haggard, TV show (music starts at 1:15), 1986
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Blaze Foley (1949-1989)
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What makes this song work? For me two things stand out; both relate to the first line of the hook (“If I could only fly . . .”). One is the sounds of the words: the repeated “f’s,” the long “i” and the “y.” The other is what happens with the melody: the little step up on the second syllable of “only.” To me it suggests, fleetingly, what it might feel like, as imagined by the singer, to take flight—”if only.”
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Here’s one more take—Blaze, boozy, somebody’s backyard, 1985.
music clip of the day 