more of Archie B.
Five Blind Boys of Mississippi (feat. Archie Brownlee [1925-1960], lead vocals)
“Will My Jesus Be Waiting,” 1952
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“Where There’s a Will,” 1958
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“That Awful Hour,” 1960
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“Take Your Burdens to Jesus,” 1959
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lagniappe
reading table
Life shoots you a lethal dose of time. Time is a drug that wears off.
—Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief
alone
This guy breathes life into whatever he plays. The other day we heard a Beethoven performance from 1993. Here he is in 1964.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue; Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000), piano, live, 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
‘[O]ur days on Earth are numbered, and the numbers are not that big.’
—Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief
There are a handful of pieces I can’t imagine living without—this is one.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat major, excerpt (third movt.); Igor Levit (piano), live, Amsterdam, 2013
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lagniappe
reading table
To say she is dead is senseless, just as senseless as it is to say I myself am alive.
—Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief
mother & daughter
Cissy & Whitney Houston, medley (“(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone,” “Ain’t No Way,” “You Send Me”), live (TV show), 1983
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lagniappe
reading table
He spreads the paper flat and pushes down its dog-eared corners. The paper was once white, and now it is yellow, he thinks. Once flat, now creased. And there is the truth about life: once this, then that.
—Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness
sounds of New Orleans
Henry Butler (piano, vocals), Steven Bernstein (trumpet), Herlin Riley (drums), et al., “Some Iko,” recording session (Viper’s Drag, 2014)
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lagniappe
reading table
One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing.
—Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness
old school
Dixie Hummingbirds, We Love You Like a Rock (excerpts), 1995
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lagniappe
reading table
You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.
—Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief (James Wood, “Fly Away,” New Yorker, 12/8/14)
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taking a break
I’m taking some time off—back in a while.
music clip of the day 