B-Squared Blues playlist - May 1st, 2012

Here's what we played on the night:

Top Cat theme
Emergency Exit - Dr Frankenstein
Les Fleur del Lys - So Come On
Andre Williams and the Diplomats of Sound - Uptown Hustle
Work Dogs - Little Joe
The Eastern - The James Girl
Catl - Talk Too Much Blues
Heart Attack Alley - Too Hot Blues
Doug Jerebine - Ashes and Matches(?)
Feral Vessel - Caffeine Pukeko Blues
James Brown - Doing It to Death
James Brown - Superbad
Rolling Stones - You Can't Catch Me
Rolling Stones - What A Shame
Whalebones - I Don’t Wanna Live In the City No More
T Model Ford - Somebody Knockin
William Burroughs - reading prologue of Junky.
Los Ovnis - Pequena Ayuda De Mama ( Mothers Little Helper)
Eagles of death metal - Midnight Creeper
JawBone - John Said
Jack White - Sixteen Saltines
Roys and the Devils Motorcycle Club - Six Pink Callidac
Will Stratton - New Vanguard Blues
Blind Willie Johnson - Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed
Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last night

You can usually listen back to the show here: www.waihekeradio.org.nz/bsquared

B-Squared Blues Playlist - April 24th 2012

Here's about what we played on the night. Ben still getting lots of stuff from the Free Music Archive and I'm still spinning mostly vinyl. Did a few tracks for Willie Nelson's birthday April 30th, he'll be 79 this year.

Dr Frankenstein - Emergency Exit
Doug Jerebine - Ashes and Matches
Howlin' Wolf - smokestack lightnin'
Robert Pretway - boogie woogie woman
The Beatles - Why Don't We Do It In the Road
The Beatles - Yer Blues
paul wine jones - if you love me like you say
t model ford -- somebody knocking
Waylon & Willie - The year 2003 minus 25
waylon & willie - pick up the tempo
workdogs - little joe
Workdogs - Talking italian in NJ
Hank Williams - Lovesick Blues
6 string drag - loreen (7")
the spoilers - make a deposit (7")
Love Moods - teach me tiger (7")
holy coast - grizzlybearsharktapus
jj gray and mofro - war
alabama shakes - you ain't alone
creedence clearwater revival - fortunate son
tank & pump - sight for the blind
feral vessel - sink the boat little walter - it ain't right

B-Squared Blues Playlist - April 10th 2012

Workdogs

Here's what we played on the night. The station has just purchased two turntables, replacing our rather old and somewhat disfunctional turntable, so we spun a lot of vinyl on the night!

Dr Frankenstein - Emergency Exit

muddy waters - too young to know

blind willy mctell - bell st lightning

blind willy mctell - love makin' momma #1

Doug Jerebine - Hole in my Hand

Doug Jerebine - Fall Down

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Spread your love

buddy guy - when my left eye jumps

buddy guy - interview PBS

buddy guy - stone crazy

Alabama Shakes - on your way

Holy Coast - grizzlybearsharktopus

the krontjong devils - Arab

Ida Cox - One Hour mama

Workdogs - gunshot blues

Holy Coast - grizzlybearsharktopus

Joe Ely - Musta Notta Gotta Lotta

Joe Ely - Dallas

The flaming lips - thank you jack white

the black keys - hell of a season

ashe grunwald - the devil called me a liar

lil ed and the blues imperials - mean ol frisco

juniour kimbrough - slow lightning

Think that one of the highlights of the show was a repeat playing of Gunshot Blues by the Workdogs, recorded live at WFMU. Lengthy lo-fi narrative talking-blues thing about having the window of your car shot out on the way to a gig.

Play Gunshot Blues:
 

"Blues musicians don't die, they drop!" interview with Buddy Guy

Buddy Guy is 74 and he still shreds! He's just published a memoir and was recently interviewed by PBS.

Watch Buddy Guy: 'Blues Musicians Don't Retire, They Drop' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

B-Squared Blues playlist - March 03, 2012

Andre Williams: The Black Godfather

Here's a pretty reasonable approximation of what we played on the B-Squared Blues Show on Tuesday, April 3rd 2012.

Andre Williams w/ The Diplomats of Sound - Thunder Thighs
Joe Chopper and the swinging 7 soul band - soul pusher
little walter - it aint' right
bo diddley - Elephant Man
Wess & the Airdales - Hey Joe
Andre Williams - Jail Bait
Andre Williams - bonin'
Andre Williams - Only Black Man in South Dakota
Andre Williams - I don't need mary (juana)
Cream - sleepy time time
koko taylor - i'm a woman
gunshot blues -
whalebone - i don't wanna live i the city no more
velcro lewis -
paul butterfield blues band - getta outta my life woman
agrarians -
earl scruggs - foggy mountain breakdown
alex chilton - jumpin' jack flash
ivan julian - you is dead
jack white - sixteen salteens
leonard cohen - darkness
short hand - all is right
sherbert underground - satan
Yaphet Kotto - Have You Ever Seen The Blues

I pulled a bit out on Andre Williams from the Mojo Bag. We also played a bunch of tracks from a fantastic resource, The Free Music Archive (Whalebone, Velcro Lewis, Agrarians, Short Hand, Sherbert Underground). There's a few blues tracks that I've culled from the FMA available here: http://freemusicarchive.org/member/Countrymike

The first blues recording?

"The first" is an incident of interest to any historian. The most oft quoted incident of the first blues recording is Mamie Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues” in 1920. I remember after pursuing my curiosity to seek out what was considered to be the first recorded blues record, feeling somewhat disappointed after my first listen to "Crazy Blues":

"Crazy Blues" - Mamie Smith, 1920.
 

Mamie Smith

"Crazy Blues" was recorded on August 10, 1920, in New York City. Smith recorded two songs written by the African American songwriter, Perry Bradford, "Crazy Blues" and "It's Right Here For You (If You Don't Get It, 'Tain't No Fault of Mine)", on Okeh Records. Within a month of the release of “Crazy Blues” it had sold 75,000 copies, and by some reports went on to sell a million copies within the year. Large numbers of records were purchased by African Americans, resulting in a sharp increase in the popularity of race records.

"Crazy Blues" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994, and, in 2005 was selected for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.

For all its accolades "Crazy Blues" is in many ways though, quite "uncharacteristically" a blues song; and it seems more accurately descriptive to call it a jazz-blues song as it features multiple brass instruments, a piano and a female singer. Released under the bands name Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, Smith was mostly a vaudeville and jazz performer rather than a blues singer and, unlike Bessie Smith who quickly followed her success, she rarely used blues forms or blues inflections. The Jazz Hounds consisted largely of brass and percussive instrumentation - reflecting the “hot jazz” sounds of New York, rather than the slower rhythmic Delta guitar blues of a the South like Charlie Patton, Skip James, or Robert Johnson. The track is likely a "first" in jazz history as well. The great Coleman Hawkins, then only a 16 year old tenor sax player was in the band and it is most likely his first recording. Hawkins was partnered with the stride style jazz pianist, Willie “The Lion” Smith, widely considered as one of the great pianists of this early jazz style. Smith (real name, William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith) was born in New York to a Jewish father and a “Spanish, Negro, Mohawk Indian blood" mother. Hardly the sort of racial lineage I'd been expecting from the first recorded "blues" artists!

Ok, so my quest is actually then a search to find a more "authentic" (there I said it) recorded performance. Smith's performance sounds a bit too staged, a product of a record label searching the edges of a potential market. After years of listening to Muddy Waters, Smith's first is always quite a let down; It's jazz hands replacing sharecropping hands. I'm looking for the first male, most likely southern, individual blues performer to be recorded; something with a bit more grit. So I went searching:

Blind Lemon Jefferson - 1925 "I Want to be Like Jesus in My Heart"
Charlie Patton - 1929 "Mississippi Boweavil Blues"
Son House - May 28, 1930, in Grafton, Wisconsin, for Paramount Records."Dry Spell Blues Part 1 and 2"

Then I came across Sylvester Weaver's "Guitar Blues" recorded in November 1923, for Okeh Records in New York. I can only find one copy of this song on-line, the first is a really, really noisy 78 record; the below version is the same copy as the first but cleaned up with some processing:

Sylvester Weaver - Guitar Blues (1923)

An Okeh advertisement described Weaver's playing like this,

Sylvester Weaver plays his guitar in a highly original manner, which consists chiefly of sliding a knife up and down the strings while he picks with the other hand. (1)

That the first recorded male blues guitarist should use a knife as a slide resonates nicely with W.C. Handy's often repeated story of his first hearing the blues in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. Handy tells the tale,

"a lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a  manner  popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who use steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly."(2)

"Guitar Blues" is a delicately picked slide guitar instrumental, most likely played with the side of a knife. The other track Weaver recorded on that day was a lovely ragtime number called, "Guitar Rag", an up tempo bass line coveted by a folk-like run:

Sylvester Weaver - Guitar Rag

 

Most of Weavers career was spent accompanying female singers - a formula that Weaver and Smith had earlier on proved commercially successful, or with guitarist Walter Beasley. In some ways his Weavers' life is without some of the rougher edges found in the lives of some of the more famous bluesmen but he is a fine musician who cut some wonderful tracks for Okeh. Jas Obrecht gives a more detailed biography of Weaver in his essay "Sylvester Weaver: The First Blues Guitarist on Record" (1)


References:

1. Sylvester Weaver: The First Blues Guitarist on Record. http://jasobrecht.com/sylvester-weaver-blues-guitarist-record/
2. "Father of the Blues" by W. C. Handy
   Published by DaCapo Press (Harper Collins Publishers) New York, NY

Appendix:

Here's an even earlier claim claim to the first blues record. By a white band!!!

Victor Military Band - The Memphis Blues (July 15, 1914)

A white female performer !?

Marie Cahill - The Dallas Blues (1917)

B-Squared Blues Playlist - 13 March 2012

The only known photograph of Luke Jordan (circa 1940's

Here's about what we played on the night:

Booker T & the MGs - Boot leg
Bob Dylan - Obviously Five Believers
Muddy Waters - Mean Ol Frisco Blues
Scrapper Blackwell - Kokomo Blues
Muddy Waters & Rolling Stones - Champaign & Reefer
Canned Heat - Reefer Blues
Luke Jordan - Cocaine Blues
The Memphis Jug Band - Cocaine Habit Blues
Charlie Patton - A Spoonful Blues
The Black Keys - Loneley Boy
The Beatles - For You Blue
Heart Attack Alley - Too Hot Blues
Cursed Arrows - Death Rattle Blues
Doug Jerebine - Blues News
DZ Deathrays - The Mess Up
Doug Jerebine - Other side of time
Amos Milburn - Chicken Shack Boogie
Junior Kimbrough - All Night Long
Junior Kimbrough - I Feel Allright
Magic Sam - I wanna boogie
Juke Joint Pimps - Juke Joint in the Sky
Blind James Campbell - I'm so blue when it rains
The Kinks - Powerman

I pulled a few blues songs about cocaine from the Mojo Bag (see post below this); and Ben pulled out some New Zealand tracks (Heart Attack Alley, Doug Jerebine).

You can listen to the show again for a week, here: http://www.waihekeradio.org.nz/bsquared