How are people using Pandora?

There have been a few blog posts about Pandora (esp. early in the semester) and comments in class, but I really don't have a very good sense of how people are using it and how helpful you are (or aren't) finding it. So, how are people using Pandora? What are you finding that's useful/cool/interesting (and hopefully relevant to the course :->)? What have been the pros and cons of Pandora vs. having a fixed list to listen to using iTunes in the classroom (like we did in the first week)? Would you rather we do more fixed lists so we are all listening to the same thing, or are you finding what you want/need via Pandora?

Feel free to post comments on this article, or write about it on your blog, or bring it up in class.

Thanks!

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 :-).

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!

Cajun readings/listenings for the first week

The bulk of the course will focus on blues and country, since these are arguably the forms of roots music that have had the broadest influence on music around the world. We will, however, explore other types of roots music (e.g., gospel), and our keynote FYS speaker (Governor Blanco of Louisiana) gives us a nice excuse to start with cajun and zydeco, two wonderful local Louisiana musics that reflect the complex and amazing history of the cajun and creole peoples of the region. (Make sure you mark 7pm, Tuesday, 5 Sept, for that talk, as attendance is required as part of the course. We'll talk more about that when classes start.)

The main purpose of this post is to share links to some useful resources. We'll have to get up and running really fast (the Governor's talk is the second week of the semester and we only meet twice a week), so hop to it!

History of the cajuns and overview of cajun/creole music:

• http://www.lsue.edu/acadgate/music/history.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajun

A large and wonderful collection of (mostly) very early cajun recordings:

• http://npmusic.org/artists.html

There's a ton of good stuff here, but you need to be pretty open to these scratchy old recordings. Remember that this stuff was recorded on what we would consider pretty primitive equipment, and most of these early musicians were used to performing without amplification, so they often just blow out the poor microphones. Still, there's some wonderful ballads and dance music here. Try to imagine these people sitting on a porch, or playing a party in someone's living room, then try to combine the readings and the music to create an image of who these people were.

Some names or songs to particularly check out:

• "Evangeline" by Iry LeJeune
• Amede Ardoin
• Dennis McGee
• The Falcon family
• Amedee Breaux
• Blind Uncle Gaspard

When we meet tomorrow I'll show you how you'll be able to come in and listen to lots of music, and we'll start with some (more) modern descendants of these musicians like Clifton Chenier. For the most part these aren't available for free, though. One pleasant exception is Buckwheat Zydeco (who played in Clifton Chenier's band for quite a while) who has several complete songs available on his website:

• http://www.buckwheatzydeco.com/bwzydecomusic/bwzydecomusic.html

I especially recommend "Hot tamale baby". It's worth going back and forth between Buckwheat's more contemporary songs and the early stuff and think about how things have changed and (perhaps harder, but more important) how these things are connected (what's remained much the same).