Listening assignment for next week

We were originally scheduled to read an article this week, but I think I'm going to have us listen to some podcasts instead. I would like everyone to listen to episodes 3, 4, and 5 of the The Folkways Collection. This is a very cool 24 episode podcast covering the strange and wonderful history of Moses Asch's great Folkways label, which was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution upon Asch's death. The Folkways label recorded and released an enormous variety of music, poetry, and spoken word material, all of which are discussed in various ways in these podcasts.

The particular episodes I want you to listen to are about Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music [Smithsonian pages about the anthology, with info on each song][Wikipedia article][AllMusic review] that Eagan talked about when he visited our classes last week. This is a truly remarkable collection, and had a profound influence on me both musically and in how I've always thought about this course. It's a sign of its importance that they devoted a full 1/8 of their podcasts to a discussion of this one release.

Each episode is just under an hour long. I'd like everyone to listen to at least the first two by Tuesday (24 Oct), and then the third by Thursday (26 Oct). For each episode, write a blog post with a specific quote or bit of music from that episode that you found important. Indicate why you think it's important and how it connects to our course. (So I'm expecting three separate posts on each of your blogs to result from this.)

This is very cool stuff - enjoy!

Some crazy grungy modern blues

Sorry for not posting much last week. I'm knee deep in getting a bunch of stuff ready for a big deadline next Monday, and an opportunity came up at the last minute to go present science stuff at a big event in St. Paul on Saturday, and those two demands pretty much ate the week.

In and amongst all that, though, I discovered some really cool (modern) blues. I have a great collection of everything that Charley Patton ever recorded, plus an entire disc of related work by other artists, and another disc that's just interviews with other people talking about Patton's life and influence. The packaging is totally amazing, and it includes at least two or three books of information on Patton, his life and music (including transcriptions, modalities, and lyrics). Oh, yeah, I like it...

The aforementioned marvel is on Revanent Records, and I was looking at other stuff in their catalogue, and recognized several covers from Pandora. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I was buying the album Blue roots by the Bassholes (hoo-dee-hoo) from eMusic. This
is a totally noisy duo (drummer and guitar/vocals) doing a deeply grungy version of the blues. Think of those old guys from the video we watched, but young, angry, and with electricity. You listen to this stuff, and you can definitely feel (somewhere near your liver) the connections between punk and blues. "Titanic blues", for example, is yet another telling of the souls on that tragic voyage (this was a popular story in songs in the early 1900's), but with the volume knob turned up to 11 and more than a few bulls loose in the china shop. When he screams

First mate said look at this
"You see that great big iceberg?
WE AIN'T GONNA MISS!"

you know something bad is going down. And you gotta love an album with a song entitled "Bald headed woman blues"...

If you dig this sort of thing, it's absolutely great. If you don't, I'd look elsewhere :-).

Charley Patton makes an appearance at UMM's open mic night!

In and amongst all the cool performances last night (and I saw quite a few of you there, which was excellent!), there was a pair of (new?) students that did a fine guitar and bass blues jam. The fact that two college students would choose that format for a public performance is a nice testament to the power of the blues as a form. As the pedantic old-fart teacher, though, my bells all started to go off when they introduced their improvisation as being based on "Spoonful" which they said was written by Cream. (Cream was a short lived but highly influential British "super-group" in the 60's which, among other things, led to Eric Clapton becoming a major international star.) of

But wait, hadn't we just listened in class to Charley Patton doing "A spoonful blues"? A relationship, perhaps? Yes, but indirectly. It turns out that Cream never claimed to write "Spoonful"; they recorded it, and definitely gave it their own twist, but gave the writing credit to Willie Dixon. Dixon was a major figure of the Chicago blues scene in the 50's and 60's, and comes up quite a bit in Palmer's Deep blues. While an accomplished singer and bassist, he's probably best known as a song writer, having penned all manner of Chicago classics, many of which went on to be major British Invasion hits. This included "Spoonful", which Dixon clearly based on Patton's much earlier version, but made major revisions to both the lyrics and the musical structure, creating a song that was arguably much more amenable to covers and jamming. Dixon's "Spoonful" was first recorded by, and become a signature song for, Howlin' Wolf, and it was that version that was heard (and covered) by numerous rock bands, particularly in the UK.

So we have an old blues from Patton being transformed into an electric blues by Dixon and Howlin' Wolf, picked up by Cream as part of the British Invasion, to be covered by a pair of UMM students at open mic night in 2006. Pretty cool, eh?

BTW, I'm definitely not trying to bash the students who played it last night. They were there to perform, not give a history lesson. They did a really nice job, and I definitely hope to hear them again.

Thanks for coming over last night

I'd like to thank the 10 or so FYS students that came over for the movie night last night. It was a nice excuse to watch O brother, where art thou? again, and you folks were wonderful guests. Thanks for making the time to join us!

John Hanson (the former FYS student that came a bit late and sat towards the back) stayed for quite a while after the movie while we listened to music and chatted. One of the things we talked about was the way they set up the two gubernatorial candidates. Pappy (the incumbent) might not be the "bad guy" at the beginning, but he's hardly the "good guy" and the reform candidate comes across pretty well (esp. if you ignore the slightly disturbing bit with the midget). Yet by the end we learn that the reform candidate is clearly major creepy bad news and that Pappy, while perhaps more opportunist than idealist, is a whole row better than his opponent. (I still remember how surprised I was when I first saw it and got to the part where we discover how awful the reform candidate truly is.)

One of the things I really love about that movie is the amazing breadth of the music they've included. There are lots of movies featuring lost of blues, or country, or gospel, etc., but the Coen brothers and T-Bone Burnett pulled together a really wonderfully broad collection of great music here. Great stuff!

It's also worth pointing out that the places they mention in the movie are real, and many of those cities/towns will pass by in our readings now and then. Tommy Johnson (the name of the African-American guitarist) was a real blues guitarist who (along with people like Robert Johnson) did claim some sort of deal with the devil. And watching Pappy dancing and then leading everyone in song at the end may have seemed far-fetched, but there were in fact more than one southern governor that had a significant music career either before or after being governor.

Songs for our initial Pandora radio playlist

Tomorrow in class we'll go over how to set up an account on Pandora and create "radio stations" based on a set of seed music. For our first such radio station, I would like everyone to create a station containing the following songs:

• "Got my mojo working" by Muddy Waters
• "Death letter blues" by Son House
• "Lord, I just can't keep from crying" by Blind Willie Johnson
  
• "Wreck of the Old 97" by Pink Anderson
• "Death cell blues" by Blind Willie McTell
• "Sitting on top of the world" by Mississippi Shieks
• "My Oklahoma blowed away" by Pete Seeger
• "Stand by me" by Sister Matthews
• "Jesus is a mighty good leader" by Skip James
• "Feather bed" by Memphis Jug Band
• "Worried man blues" by The Original Carter Family
• "Midnight special" by Leadbelly
• "Parchman Farm blues" by Bukka White
• "Jump the boogie" by Boozoo Chavis
• "Wabash cannonball" by Roy Acuff
• "A spoonful blues" by Charlie Patton
• "This land is your land" by Woody Guthrie
• "Oh happy day" by The Edwin Hawkins Singers
• "Move on up a little higher" by Mahalia Jackson
• "Cross road blues" by Robert Johnson
• "Cold, cold heart" by Hank Williams
• "Uncle Pen" by Bill Monroe
• "Wildwood flower" by The Carter Family
• "Waiting for a train" by Jimmie Rodgers
  

You should then listen to this station. I don't know for sure what will come up. If you keep listening, you'll get eventually get quite a few of these to come up, but there are no guarantees as to what will play and when. I would encourage at least two kinds of listening. First, do some background listening just to run through a lot of different songs and get a sense of the breadth and range of these many types of music. Second, do some more detailed listening where you really paying attention to all the songs, taking some notes, marking what you like, and writing some remarks on your blog about things that particular struck you (good, bad, confusing, amazing). And bring some of these things up in class!

I'm hopeful that this use of Pandora will be both cool and convenient. You'll have to let me know how it works for you. Thanks!

McTell: They got me killed for forging

I was listening to my American Roots Music Radio on Pandora and this smoldering couplet drifted by:

They got me killed for forging
and I can't even write my name
-- "Death cell blues" by by Blind Willie McTell

Man, there's an awful lot of history and commentary there in 13 words.

I had to rush right out and buy it, and used that as an excuse to try out emusic, which Chris Hamrin had been saying some nice things about.